Koryx Copper in Final Stages of its Haib PFS

Trevor Hall (0:17)

One of the benefits of coming to these conferences and doing as much coverage as we can is we get to connect with old friends. That's what we're going to do in this episode. Heye Daun, now CEO of Koryx Copper. We don't get to do this very often, Heye. I hope we get to do it more often next year because there's an important piece of information, technical report, preliminary feasibility study imminent for your Heib project. So congratulations.

You run fast when you do these projects. Give us a rundown of the last year and how you got to this PFS so quickly.

Heye Daun (0:52)

Yeah, thanks. I appreciate it. Great to be back. Wait with congratulations because we're only going to publish in a week's time. And but yeah, I think you'll be impressed with what you see.

I absolutely believe that we will shoot the lights out with the numbers of the PFS. Can't give you, can't tell you what they are, of course, but generally speaking, it's going to be a high production, good economics, excellent economics in fact.

But it's really based on three or four major improvements that we achieved over this last year. Reminding your listeners, we published a PEA at the end of last year, and the results of that PEA demonstrated technical and economic feasibility of this project with the Concentrator Floatation Layout. So that was the first win. But it was still based on the old mineral resource with lots of optimization potential. So since then, we have drilled constantly with 15 rigs. So we've made the resource significantly bigger. We approved the grade. We brought in gold and moly as a by-product, and in fact, we have silver too now, although it's not 43.101 yet, but there is silver.

Trevor Hall (2:04)

That's great.

Heye Daun (2:05)

That's good fresh news.

We also did flow sheet optimization by increasing the throughput substantially, and also by bringing in sorting step called CPF, Coarse Particle Floatation, which increases the grade by about 25 percent. If you put all of that together, that gives us much higher production and these excellent economics that we're going to publish.

Trevor Hall (2:27)

Okay, very good.

One of the things from the optimization that you've been talking about too, is moving from a 92,000 ton per annum, and you were talking more over to a 100 Is that correct? Is that still kind of in line with what you-

Heye Daun (2:42)

Yeah, we're going to be substantially over 100

Trevor Hall (2:43)

You're substantially over 100 Okay.

And so talk about the role of the drilling of this last year. Obviously, you talked about expanding the resource. Is there some conversion in there? Is there going to be improving confidence in the ounces as well?

Heye Daun (2:57)

Yes. So, one of the key things to understand is that, in order to call a study a PFS, you have to have indicated resources. So, we had to do a lot of infill drilling in order to convert infer to indicated. Yes. And that's a good thing because indicated, obviously, you have a much higher confidence level.

But we also, through this drilling, we managed to convert a lot of waste, that was material that was previously classified as waste. We managed to convert into low-grade but payable material. So, therefore, if you look at the resource that will come out, on a global basis, the grade actually went down marginally, but the size increased substantially. It's because of the introduction of very substantial lower-grade resources.

The effect of that is that the stripping ratio has been reduced substantially. That's obviously highly economic. So, all of these are really very positive benefits that come into the project. And then the byproducts, the gold, the molly, the silver, they will get the copper equivalent grade up of the portion that gets processed. So, really positive numbers that we're going to put out.

Trevor Hall (3:59)

You've dropped the oxide heap leach from the base case?

Heye Daun (4:01)

Yes, we have.

The reason being, it was always questionable. You know, sulfide, well, put it this way, heap leaching and oxides, no problem. Heap leaching and sulfides is a problem. In our case, we had a significant oxide, I don't want to call it a cap, it was a transitional zone, it was a weathering zone at the top of the deposit, which was of a size that would be justified to have a heap leach add on to the project. But obviously, that adds complexity. So with all this infill drilling that we've done, we've been able to reduce that weathering zone substantially. We've got a much better weathering surface. So now we have far less oxide material, plus an oxide heap leach is just unnecessary complexity. That's why we've dropped it all together. That oxide material will go on stockpile. It's a future opportunity, and we have substantially increased the sulfide throughput through the conventional concentrated plant.