Coda Minerals (ASX:COD) - Q1 2027 PFS Underway with High Copper-Silver Recoveries

Matt (0:00)

Good day, Matt.

Chris Stevens (0:00)

Chris Stevens here. I'm the CEO and Executive Director of Coda Minerals. We have the Elizabeth Creek Copper-Silver Project, located about seven hours north of Adelaide, 40 ks to the west of BHP's Carapatina Project.

Over 700,000 tons of copper, 28 million ounces of silver, and 35,000 tons of cobalt in relatively shallow open pit and underground resources across the tenure, moving hard on a PFS. We're just over halfway through right now.

Matt (0:28)

Chris, good to see you. I'm fantastic to actually catch up about copper at the moment, what the market is going a little bit crazy. Nice to see. PFS is obviously what we're working towards, so timing Q1 next year.

Your September presentation puts Koda at about 3% of your NPV. Market cap is what it is. What was the market not pricing in? What is it pricing in?

Chris Stevens (0:55)

I think it's fairly simple, which is this is a well-trodden path. I've seen many companies at our stage trading between that 2% and 5% of NPV level. As they go through a PFS, the Lausanne curve is very real. We've talked about it before on these interviews, and we're right halfway, just over halfway through a PFS. The market wants to see a couple of things, really. A final flow sheet selection, the full suite of mine planning across the two open pits, and the underground deposit. And ultimately, final engineering in a PFS, with a number on it that is reasonable, defensible, and a reasonable multiple of the CAPEX.

We are not Robinson Crusoe. This is a very normal process to be in. It feels like a long time. In reality, we're moving faster than pretty much any of our peers.

Matt (1:44)

Okay, but obviously, the PFS is, people are looking for you to kind of close that valuation gap. You're saying, okay, you think you know what they want, but technically, what have you got left to solve for?

Come Q1.

Chris Stevens (2:00)

Right, let's look at the flow sheet. We've had two flow sheets over sort of my time with this project. The first is a flotation-based flow sheet. It's low risk, it's relatively understood. It's a straight, fairly standard flotation into then either an Albion or a pressure ox to final product. Great thing about final product, They are royalties, you're less reliant on smelters.

As always, you sell your first saleable product, Elizabeth Creek. That concentrate with the very high cobalt levels is valuable as a critical minerals product, but you do need to go down to final product. The newer flow sheet, so the current base case, is a chloride-based leach process. The recoveries are sensational, and we'll talk about the most recent results. But against the flotation recoveries, which are not bad, but not great, this is it's sort- of low 80%.

The chloride leaching-based flow sheet is getting about 94% to 95% of the copper and about 96% of the silver. In one recent sample, we had 99.8% of the silver recovered. The really cool thing as well is that we weren't expecting to get the cobalt in this. We've made a few changes. We're now getting an average of 40% of the cobalt. We're not stopping there, but in none of our previous economics was that priced in.

There's some really good progress on the chloride leach-based flow sheet. We've done pre-variability. We're doing final variability samples now. We're into Metsim modeling, which just really makes sure we understand things like reagent recycling and all of the chemistry right through that process. Then we'll move through to lock cycle testing, which really, in my opinion, is the very clear this works in an integrated testing cycle, and this is our flow sheet going forward. It's a bit of work to do. I think that's what the market wants to see. It's what I want to see. It's certainly what groups like streamers and major investors also want to see, and we're working through it, and those last results speak for themselves.

Matt (3:58)

Okay. So that's the process. In terms of the actual testing itself, these are lab tests so far and you're going to work your way through. Are these representative? These are from Emmie Bluff, is that representative of what you're planning to mine?

Chris Stevens (4:16)

Oh, yeah. So I will say our first results, and the last time we results, we released any material number of results on the chloride leaching, was at the scoping study level. It was last August, August 2025, and those results were pretty basic. They were from three, if I remember rightly, composites. They weren't from a big representative sample across the ore body. They weren't cherry picked either, but they certainly weren't highly representative. They weren't done in site water, they were done in Perth tap water, and they weren't from any of the open pits. What we've done over about 130 tests since then is test the daylights out of this. The most recent example and results that we announced were from a much larger range across the ore body. They were also from Windabout as well, which has historically been the most challenging of our open pits to process.