Collective's Apollo Starts at 5.4Moz—and Ari Sussman Says It Will Get Bigger

Trevor Hall (0:16)

All right, everybody, welcome back in to Mining Stock Daily, kicking off this Thursday's corporate updates with a big one. Much anticipated made and resource estimate for the Apollo deposit from Collective Mining did hit the tape yesterday. And so we're going to get a corporate update here from Executive Chairman Mr. Ari Sussman. Ari, it's always nice to do, actually, I appreciate doing these updates after big news release, big numbers, 24 hours after the fact. Gets everybody kind of a day to digest everything, see what the initial market reaction was.

But needless to say, 5.4 million ounces gold equivalent. Let's take that 30,000 foot view of this resource with your comments first, and then we'll kind of dive into the niche.

Ari Sussman (1:05)

Well, look, so separately, because I'm obliged to follow 43.101 rules, we announced 2.5 million gold equivalent ounces in the indicated category at 2.17 grams per ton overall, and 2.83 million ounces gold equivalent at 1.83 grams per ton in the inferred category.

The takeaways of what was, in our view, amazing about this estimate is a couple fold.

One is there is a far more robust open pit than we ever envisioned ourselves. So there were 2.2 million ounces of gold in the open pit in all categories. Of that, one and a half million ounces approximately in the indicated category at 2.06 grams per ton. And then the balance of that 700-ish thousand ounces in the inferred category at a lower grade.

We're talking the pit. Okay, so the big surprise, besides how good the grade is, well, I guess the high grade of the pit isn't a surprise, and this was done at a 0.3 grams per ton gold equivalent cutoff, is the strip ratio. Okay, very low, came in 3.4 to 1 And I will iterate a key point, okay, we announced in the press release something called the shallow halo zone. So this is the zone of rock surrounding the Bracha, shallow, okay? And I can tell you that that strip ratio, although low, if we keep the open pit dimensions the same in future resource updates, that will be the highest strip ratio we will ever report. Okay, because we have hit in drilling holes subsequent to the resource that had been announced in that outer halo of the pit that have grade. And we showed image with a whole series of visuals that we're expecting assays for in that outer halo that appear visually to have enough grade that I suspect all of those visual intercepts will be above a 0.3 cutoff. So the pit is going to grow and its strip is going to reduce. And the key metric for people to look at in open pits, what seems to be a forgotten order in our industry, is the residual grade, which is you take the grade of a pit, divide it by the stripping ratio, and that remaining grade is what the actual grade is of your pit.

This seems to be forgotten because remember, you need to mine all of that pit, right? You don't just mine the areas with gold or with whatever metal you have. So we look really good on a residual grade basis, and it's going to get better, okay? And that's good for your audience to remember, look at the strip ratio and divide the grade by the strip to get the actual residual grade. Okay, that's section one. Section two is we're moving down vertically with this resource, is the area that is below the pit, so underground mining, but above ramp, so doesn't include the high grade ramp zone. And that also came in nicely. You know, it's kind of our lower grade section of the deposit, but we still announced and indicated 2.1 grams per ton for 700,000 ounces, and in inferred, 2.06 grams per ton gold equivalent for just under a million additional ounces. You might say, well, that's just over 2 grams, is that low for underground? Right? And the answer is depends on how you plan on mining this, okay? So in a resource, you put a mine plan on it, with what they call RPEEE, Reasonable Prospect for Economic Extraction, okay? That's a rule under 43.101. And we designed for sub-level open stoping. So that is a bulk underground mining method.

Lots of those types of mines out there. Most recently in the news was El Dorado announced they started producing at Scurius in Greece, right? Just as a comp. The cutoff grade for sub-level open stoping underground in Greece for them is 0.7 grams per ton. So at over 2 grams grade, you have a very wide margin. And then the next, well, the big surprise outside of the pit, I would say was ramp, okay? So I'm going to be honest, when we went through this exercise, I didn't know how much ramp we would get into this resource because of the lack of drilling. Like ramp is a relatively new discovery, as you know, and your listeners know. And we announced mainly in inferred, obviously it's deeper, right? To access it from surface with drilling, but we announced over a million ounces, just over a million ounces in inferred at 5.37 grams per ton and a couple hundred thousand ounces in indicated 4.74 grams per ton. So, that is a really, really good start, okay? So, in total, as you mentioned, I won't say the number, but there was north of 5 million ounces of metal in the estimate. And as we were talking before the call started, I will iterate this point. Show me another company with a structurally controlled system that announced a maiden resource at north of 5 million ounces gold equivalent or gold. I don't think you can find one. This is a really big start. And as I'm sure we'll talk about the upside in a minute.