Orezone Gold Is No Longer Just a Burkina Faso Story

Trevor Hall (0:18)

All right, final update of the day. An old friend that's been a long time since we've had Mr. Patty Downey of Orezone Gold Corp onto the podcast. But there's been a lot of news since the last time Patty and I last spoke. They do trade on the TSX and on the ASX now with ORE. That's a new one since the last time we spoke. They also trade on the OTCQX with ORZCF. Patty, good to see you, man.

What a year.

Patrick Downey (0:48)

Yeah, Trevor, has been a great year. Very busy, very happy.

Yeah, lots of changes since we last spoke. Yeah, that's definitely for sure.

Trevor Hall (0:55)

Yeah, let's okay. Maybe let's talk big picture here. It's no longer just about Burkina.

Patrick Downey (1:02)

Yeah.

Trevor Hall (1:04)

You've expanded operations, new jurisdictions, maybe takes a little risk profile off of the table. It's good to see.

Kind of walk us through this entire decision of what needed to happen with the company and getting in the right step forward.

Patrick Downey (1:20)

Well, we'd always been looking. I mean, from the point of view of being an operating mining company, one mine is never a business plan and then one jurisdiction is never a business plan. Although we've done very well there and continue to do well in terms of production and cash flow, et cetera, this opportunity came along actually at this conference last year. And when we looked at it, we really thought this fits us perfectly. This is an asset that the previous company really weren't caring about. It wasn't really a focus of their portfolio. We saw a huge amount of upside.

We spent five days on site with eight people doing due diligence really to see the team. Trevor is very important, not just the asset. If somebody is selling something, are the team convinced that this is a good asset to buy?

We saw that right away and finally closed the deal in March of this year. What that does for us is obviously diversifying the company, diversifying production, pushes it to this year 230,000, 240,000 ounces a year. Next year, it will be 260,000, 270,000 and we see a clear path to 350,000 simply from the growth at both assets and the fact that we bought a third asset as part of that purchase, which was a bit of a pleasant surprise for us.

Trevor Hall (2:43)

Yeah. Why such a surprise?

Patrick Downey (2:44)

Well, you know, it sort of got thrown in at the end. And, you know, we bought Casa, it was an operating mine, you know, our all-in cost based on the study, procurement cost about 340 million US. Obviously, we come out with a 1 billion NAV on it, but the current baseline of production. And we bought three other assets we thought were early stage exploration. We didn't really know about them, just come in at the very end for roughly 6 million Orezone shares.

And one of them is a project called Heva-Hosco. The previous owners, Orazón, had done a detailed feasibility study in 2012 It was going to be their next project. It's on the Cadillac Larder break, the most famous mining jurisdiction in the world. Our neighbors are Iamgold, Agnico, Agnico, El Dorado, West Om, Iamgold. So, a pretty good address. That showed a project going during about 105,000 to 110,000 ounces a year for 14 years. Done at $1350 gold.

So, we're going to bring a new study out. It will be out in October. And we'll go straight into Feasibility Study and it will be our next development project.

Trevor Hall (4:07)

Is that study just going to be based on putting new numbers in there, not any additional technical work?

Patrick Downey (4:12)

Yes, we've done additional metallurgical work. But all the work we did, a detailed review of the work that was done. It was done all to high quality feasibility level. All the baseline permitting data was all done to current Quebec permitting requirements. So, all that work has been done. 400,000 meters of drilling.

What we are very excited about is, they just started to drill into the deeper structures.

The Abitibi, the Larder Lake break, they're as famous for these high-grade structures. And they're hitting some very interesting numbers. So we'll also follow up on that. So next year, we'll be doing some infill drilling to expand the resource in terms of feasibility size. And we will also be doing some drilling following these high-grade structures that we're seeing. Like results that were like 53 grams over eight meters type stuff down, just below the pit, so still quite shallow. Yeah. So we've got a lot on our plate, and we'll end up being sort of 60 Canadian, 40 Burkina type of portfolio in the next coming years.