Chesapeake Gold reinvents Metates Deposit with new technology

At the HTC markets, both on my PDAQ, 2026, I'm at the Jean Paul Soats, who's the CEO,

Chesapeake Gold, or Jean Paul, it's great to have you here with us today.

Yeah, thank you for so much for having me here.

Yes, yes.

And look, we've spoken before.

We've spoken with the last PDAQ.

First of all, what kind of buzzer are you getting from the show floor right now?

Yeah, so there's definitely a really high peak.

Yeah, there's a lot more people here.

You can definitely see it.

You know, the one joke is last year, you know, we bring a whole bunch of

advertisements and materials, you know, our cover presentation.

Well, last year we had a lot to take home with us.

We're already completely sold out.

All of our cover presentations are already gone.

Yeah, yeah.

It gives you an idea of how excited people are looking for opportunities,

both in the gold space and for us, the silver space too.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, look, there's been a lot of changes at Chesapeake over the last year.

So changes not so much, but I want to zero in on the Tattas,

which is the key project that you guys are advancing right now.

Now, you kind of, you've called it a reinvented story.

So, first of all, give us an overview of Tattas and then tell us

why it's reinvented.

Yeah, so Tattas is just a little background.

It was discovered in 1980.

Uh-huh.

It's a refractory gold deposit.

That means that it's very challenging to actually get the gold and silver

out of the minerals that have.

And so it's been around for, you know, 40 plus years,

and a lot of major companies actually held it.

But because of that challenging nature of actually extracting the metal,

it's, it's been basically sitting in the rail waiting.

Chesapeake, when we picked it up, we actually went down to similar kind of pathways,

those larger companies.

So a box auto-clive pathway.

And in 2016, we did put a PS on that.

But unfortunately, that sort of pathway requires, you know, a lot of water,

a desalination kind of specific,

piping water up into the Sierra Madre,

and large equipment, which requires, you know, a power plant at site.

So all in all, once you get all those factors put in,

you know, it was going to be a $3.6 billion cloud project.

Now, what's reinvented about the story is,

in 2020, we merged with the technology company.

And then in 2024, we actually went back.

We had a license privacy, but we wanted to acquire that license

and also the fine portfolio.

We brought it all internally within Chesapeake.

And so now we have the technology that we can net advance.

And just to put it in perspective, you know,

production wise, we're going to produce about 150,000 ounce gold equivalent.

That's about 10% gold, 30% silver.

I'll say costs around 750,

according to our PA-21, which is first quartile.

And the key point here, now the project capital,

went from 3.6, down to 360 million,

just because the technology removes the requirement for that

desalination pipeline, the ocean, there's refluxation,

there's no tailings facility now,

there's no power plant required.

We actually started with a smaller project,

15,000 tons per day, which can then be later expanded.

So it gives a lot more optionality and an opportunity.

And it's also a bit actually financial and executable at that lower level.

And it's still 30 year in my life.

So it's still a really meaningful project for the community,

the municipality, the state, and even the, you know,

the better the market is in the right way for all people.

Yeah, tell us a little bit more about the technology,

Jean-Paul, because that's a pretty significant figure to be able to bring

that those economics down to a much more manageable level.

Yeah, so what makes our technology different

is a lot of the other companies that are trying to basically recover

refractory minerals, it requires one flocation.

In our case, we're just crushing the material.

And then we put it on the pad.

And on that pad, we use our proprietary chemistry

to cause it to oxidize.

It's very similar to, you know, you leave your car out here in Toronto or New York.

And over a certain period of time, you start seeing it rusting around the edges.

Well, we're basically doing that when nature does to cars,

when nature does to normal sulfide deposits, crazy oxide deposits,

or we're speeding up the time line.

So we're not going to wait a hundred million years

for our deposit to turn to an oxide deposit.

We can do that within months.

And it's actually what's interesting about the technology is

it's not only, you know, a technology from a tap his.

We're actually engaged in with other third party counties

that also have a similar either it's a sulfide deposit

or they've mined out all their oxide and now they're going into sulfide.

And rather than shutting down the operation,

having to pay the closure costs, reclamation costs,

and a hundred years of water treatment costs.

If the technology works on it, we could keep that operation going

and create their own oxide that they can then treat on the ecosystem environment.

And there, I mean, that's my question right there is why,

why add this to your portfolio?

Obviously, it could be a potentially monetized technology

and an omit self, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And there are several examples on the copper side.

Now, obviously, we were focusing on pressure

and metals, there's not competition.

But there's several examples where either, you know,

companies are going to have a licensing pathway,

which is basically royalties.

Yeah.

Or the equivalent and value would be a minority state ownership

in the asset.

Yeah.

And when it comes to that decision on which pathway we will take,

and it's to be a decision between us and that third party,

but also we would take into consideration

whether it's in the mining friendly jurisdiction

with a good roll of law.

And those sort of situations where they also have social license,

I'd probably want to be a hard owner of that asset

and add value that way.

But in the other cases where they don't have those,

you know, licensing pathway would still give us exposure

and it continued flow of revenue towards our company

to give us that commercialization off, you know,

the monetization of the technology we're looking for.

Yeah, absolutely.

So before we wrap up, John, Paul, just get this idea of what we can expect

in terms of these flow out of, I don't know,

the taxes and from the company.

Yeah.

So right now, the tax is in that next phase of test work.

We have large dams of columns at our lab and Tucson.

We'll have results out probably the next month or two,

giving a highlight of where the oxidation process is coming

and how we possibly improved on the recoveries

is we achieved about 74% last time

where we're looking to, you know, push that bar up even further.

And also decrease the time at which it takes

to oxidize material.

The second thing is the third party test work.

We're expecting to have results probably

about mid-year, highlighting those three other companies

where we've been testing the technology

and show the market basically what they would get

in a normal heap of each environment with their sulfites

versus what they would get with our technology.

We expect to have some exciting updates for everyone.

Yeah, well, we'll have to keep an eye out for those.

John, Paul, slowly to speak with you again.

Yeah, thank you so much, Angela.

For proactive, I'm Angela Hernandez.