1911 Gold (TSXV:AUMB) - Manitoba's True North Gold Project Restart Targets 2027 Production Decision

Shaun Heinrichs (0:00)

Great to see you today, Matt. I look forward to talk to you about the story.

I'm Shaun Heinrichs, president and CEO, 1911 Gold. 1911 Gold, as some people may know, but others probably do not. As an advanced-age development story, with four permitted operating underground mines, a mill, full-cap infrastructure, located just in the province of Manitoba, about three hours north of Winnipeg, 100 kilometers to the west of the Red Lake Camp, which more people are familiar with. It's a prolific, long-time producer, started up in the mid-1930s. We're bringing it back online, looking to be in production before the end of the year.

Matt (0:37)

Shaun, good to see you. Right, we've actually had the company on a few years back and kind of caught up with the then-CEO, but it's all changed at the helm. So it might be worth introducing yourself and then talking to some of your team as well in terms of what's changed on the board.

Shaun Heinrichs (0:55)

Sounds good. Yeah, no, definitely. The last time 1911 would have been in front of you was with Ron Clayton, and we would have had a bit of a different focus at the stage. We were more regional exploration focused, which is something we're still doing, to be honest. There is still a regional exploration component of what we were focused on, but really what this has now become is more about a restart, which is more or less coinciding with when I took over. I took over in the middle of 2022

I'm a financial person by background, so I think for me, when I have assets that have significant value and an ability to unlock that value, my focus tends to be more on that initially. I do see obviously the long-term value of adding more resource and more production to what we've got. But I think sitting on a million ounces of gold resource in the ground and sitting on permits, is just not doing the shareholders any favor. So I began to change the team and the dynamics all the way back then. A lot of that kicked off with bringing first Gary O'Connor on as an advisor to me and to the geology on the property and to see first whether or not this looks like something that stands up. We put together a whole new geology team led by Michele Della Libera, who's still with us today. Michele comes prior to that from New Gold, where he spent over 30 years drilling out several of their operating mines, bringing them right into production. So Blackwater, New Afton, Rainy River towards the end of his career there. And under Michele is a very significant and growing, as you can imagine, geology team supported by many people who are experienced in operating mines, building resources. And then from there, we really just started to add to what we needed. We needed technical expertise. We needed engineers. We brought Eric Vignette on initially, similar to Gary, initially as an advisor.

Eric had spent a lot of time in several mines around the world. Sigma Lamac being a big one, Julian Bulu in South Africa being another big one. Relevant to what we're doing today when you're dealing with these narrow vein underground deposits. You need to let the drill guide you. You need to be careful on the mining methods you're using. And Eric has all that kind of expertise and background. I know we've just steadily added to the team since then. That's our core technical talent there. And then at site, I would just point to the fact that we've got a very significant on-site operating team. All the senior site personnel are now in place. Our engineering team has grown from June Kim, who joined us about a year and a couple months ago, to now four engineers and continuing to grow.

And that's just going to scale up as we get closer to and closer to production at the end of the year. We'll continue to bring in high quality talent and we'll start to bring in those key people that actually get all the work done and make sure that we deliver on our plan to produce.

Matt (3:37)

Well, let's talk about that because obviously, it's had a sort of difficult, the company's had a sort of difficult operating history in the past, but you changed the team up, you got a technical knowledge on board, but you're targeting this production, but you'll have had to have made some decisions technically and commercially that you thought you could solve for. What specifically were those?

Shaun Heinrichs (4:05)

Yeah, and that's why it took, and a lot of people, if you go back to 2022 or 2020, when Gold had its first run, I received a lot of imbalances saying, why don't you just start it up?