Dakota Gold Corp. Mining Forum Americas 2026

Unity to get exposure to gold while minimizing that geopolitical risk that you see in the industry right now. We have right now, from a macro.

Perspective, one of the best times to be building a gold asset with gold and silver at all-time highs, with financing available. We're excited to be advancing our project in that environment. We have a leadership team with a track record of success. Bob Quartermain, our co-founder, has built 6 mines successfully over his career. We have Jack Henrys, our CEO, who has been the MGM of the Carlin operation and Krippel Creek, and I'm excited to be part of that team as we move this project forward through the development stage into construction and production over the next few years. Our primary asset is the Richmond Hill Gold Project. It's a simple heap leach project where we put out a resource and an IA with cash flow last year. We're looking forward to a pre-feasibility study and having reserves in the fourth quarter of this year, followed by a feasibility study next year, permits in '28, and construction, and gold production in 2029. So near-term gold production in the United States. On top of that, because we were first movers in the district, we secured over 50,000 mineral acres. So we have a high-grade opportunity less than 2 kilometers away from Richmond Hill, which allows us to take our cash flow from our first asset and reinvest it in our second, third, and even fourth opportunity in this very prolific district.

Importantly, our two main projects are on private land. That is why I can talk to you about a timetable like that, which gets us to production in 2029. Advancing responsibly, but quickly through the permitting process to be able to build a mine. And lastly, we raise capital earlier this year. So as of June, we had $99 million in the bank. And what that allowed us to do is de-risk, start building a team, secure long lead time items, and put us in the driver's seat as it comes to how we choose to finance this project as we move forward.

Oops. There we go. So here you can see a map of where our project is located in the United States.

In the home state district. And as a reminder, the home state district contains the home state mine that produced over 40 million ounces of gold and 125 years. On top of that, you have the Wharf Mine, which has been in production for over 40 years. So within about 5 square miles, you've got over 130 years of production and almost 45 million ounces of gold. A district as prolific as Timmins or any of these other gold mining camps, but very condensed. So when we came into the district, we were able to secure the crown jewels of this district, from the barrack ck reclamation portfolio. If you can remember, you've seen K-92, Skina. Well, we were the third deal to come out of that reclamation group. And in addition to the Maitland and Richmond Hill project, we staked all available ground, bringing our total land package to 50,000 mineral acres. So important, we have our single asset in Richmond Hill that we intend to bring forward to production, but we have our second, third, and fourth opportunity in the district as we look to revitalize the area.

So the Maitland Gold Project that I'll talk briefly about here is the high-grade underground opportunity. This is a long strike, the home state mine, in the same mineralization adjacent to that project. We've had 47 intercepts where we've put out 11 grams over 4 meters and very excited that we have that quality of a project to follow up after Richmond Hill. Richmond Hill, when we acquired the project, had over 900 historic drill holes, almost entirely showing mineralization. We were able to secure that project and spend the last 5 years to bring it to where it is today. So last year, we put out a mineral resource, and you can see there 3.6 million ounces of measured and indicated, 2.6 million ounces of inferred gold. So a very sizable potentially heap leachable resource. We followed up last year with an IA with cash flow at a conservative 2350 gold price. And using that gold price, we still had a 1.6 billion dollar NPV and a 55% IRR. We were also because of how simple the project is and where it's located, achieve a very low capex number of $384, very manageable for a company with our size and scale to be able to execute on.

But I'm also excited to talk about how the work over the last year towards our pre-feasibility in the fourth quarter has been able to take some of those metrics and opportunities and move it forward into a pre-feasibility study. So a meaningful production number of 153,000 ounces a year, while maintaining a low ASIC of less than 1,100 dollars an ounce. On this slide, you can see more of the detailed key metrics related to our IA with cash flow that we published last year. So a reminder, at a conservative 2350 gold price, you had a long mine life producing a meaningful amount of production at 153,000 ounces a year. The grade just above half a gram but that strip ratio of between 0.6 and 0.4, depending on the case, meant very simple at-surface deposits where you could have the opportunity and we'll talk about that to really target your higher-grade early in the mine plan. It came together with a sub-1,100 dollar ASIC, and one of the benefits of being only 2 kilometers away from the Wharf Mine is each stage of the project, each component, whether it's mining, whether it's processing, we can benchmark to an operation that has 40 years of history in the district.

And so Wharf has been operating at that 11,1200 dollar ASIC, and we believe we can move forward along those same lines with a simple 3-stage heap leach crush, similar to what they have. The initial capex sub-400 million with a 50 million dollar contingency. And leading to that 1.6 billion dollar NPV. But in the bottom, what we show you is that we can obviously flex the gold price, and at a recovery of anything above 70%, this is a 4 billion dollar opportunity where we can move forward and execute on. That study had this production profile, and the one area I'd like to draw your attention to here is just that in the first 3 to 5 years of our IA with cash flow, we envisioned mining at below the life of mine average grade. So what I'll take you through is some of the drilling that we've done subsequent to that IA with cash flow, and how we believe we can optimize that to get at or better than life of mine average grades in the first 5 years. Those first few years really drive the economics, like IRR and NPV, and is a great opportunity for a deposit that's right at surface with no strip.

This is a site layout of the project, and I'll hit again on that term simple. It is a 3-stage crush heap leach. We don't have a tailings dam. We don't have bridges to build. You can see here the size and scale of the facilities is quite small. The footprint. We did issue a press release on Monday, which further simplified it, and instead of the approach of having 3 heap leaches, we will have 1 consolidated heap leach in the southeast of the property. Again, further simplifying it from a permitting operating and execution standpoint. This slide is showing a number of things, but the first point I'll highlight is that our cutoff for the drill database for that IA with cash flow and our existing resource was late 2024. Since that time, we have put 350 drill holes into it, which will add 30% more drilling obviously a much higher level of confidence as we come out with the pre-feasibility study later this year. In addition, in our press release 2 weeks ago, we released all of the metallurgy that will form part of that pre-feasibility study. And while we're excited that the results were better than what you would see in most conventional heap leaches, we had one area called the Breccia lithology that strongly outperformed that average and actually returned over 90% in potential heap leach material, which if you're familiar with a heap leach, that is a very, very high number.

So while we had initially envisioned starting mining in the north, and that's why our infill and expansion drilling was focused on that area, you can see in this map where the yellow is, and we put limited additional drill holes into that Breccia material. So now, when we look forward to the pre-feasibility study, we will have a mine plan associated with that, and we will have a reserve associated with that, but we currently have 2 drills and will grow to 3 so that between the pre-feasibility study and the feasibility study next year, you'll see a significant amount of infill in that really high recovery material, which allows us to already know of what the opportunity is to improve upon the PFS as we move forward into FS. On this slide, this is a close-up of where we've done some of that expansion drilling. We focused on this area because it was very clear the deposit extended to the northeast, and we envisioned mining first in that area. At the time, we were focused on grade and a sequence which will allow us to backfill the pits. Now, as I mentioned in the previous slide, we can focus on recovery.

But just to highlight here, one, there's a clear expansion to the north. We deliberately drilled that at a drill density that would allow us to convert that material. And two, we had many intercepts that were well above the average grade of the deposit. Now, the deposit is a large mineral resource that we published, and so it will be difficult with the 900 drill holes for us to meaningfully impact the overall grade of the deposit. But being at surface, the opportunity is to try to optimize and subphase that and target some of these higher-grade pockets early in the mine life. Again, impacting the first couple years of production and really impacting those NPV and IRR metrics. So going from the IA with cash flow and explaining the plan that we put out to, again, the important trade-off studies for us as we look forward to the PFS in the fourth quarter of this year, we have a number that we had to work through. But the 2 that we're really going to move the needle for us is the first one and stacking rates. When you look at a conventional heap leach project, it's an unconstrained processing facility.

You really have the ability to continue to increase that, providing your mining can match that. Now, we envisioned in our IA with cash flow 30,000 tons a day because when we came out with that project, our company was at 250 million dollar market cap, and we wanted to show that our project could work at a smaller scale. Because I think there's a lot of projects out there that you need to have that size and scale to make it work, and can't be reduced. What we've looked at with that large mineral endowment and with the successful conversion is can we go from 30,000 to a higher number of throughput and still have a strong mine plan and economics associated with it. And so we're looking at between 30 and 60 thousand tons a day. The key change there is going from a jaw crusher on the front end to a gyratory crusher. There is a capex increase associated with that, but it gives you a lot of mine flexibility, and it gives you the opportunity if you convert further material, like we are intending on doing with our drill program in the Breccias, to continue to increase the size and scale of the operation.

And then the mine sequencing where I showed you those high-grade intercepts near surface, the opportunity is to subphase those and target high-grade pockets of mineralization, meaningfully impacting the grade in that first 3 to 5 years. In addition, we were very happy to put out some of the met work where we really were checking the boxes on what you need to be able to do to show that this material has the ability to convert from a resource to a reserve along with that pre-feasibility study. So here we like to remind people that this is where you want to build a mine. We are 20 minutes from town. We have a public access road coming to site. We have a power line coming to site. We have 200,000 people that live within an hour of our operation. This operation will have 300, 320 employees. So very simple. To build it, we don't have any bridges to build. We don't have massive power lines. We don't have to build a camp. All of that makes it cheaper, but it also makes it less risky when you're building that project. We also benefit from the fact this is not a greenfield operation.

We have the Wharf Mine, so it's a district that has been in constant production for 140 years, with the local population and regulators all being very comfortable with mining in this area. You can also see that it's less than 2 kilometers from our Richmond Hill private property to the Unionville zone and the JB Gold zone. Those high-grade opportunities that I told you about the intercepts, where we have a possibility for a second mine 2 kilometers away from Richmond Hill. So wrapping that up into the timeline to production, in 2026, we will put out our pre-feasibility study in the fourth quarter. The feasibility study in mid-2027. We started our permitting process from the moment we put out the IA with cash flow because we were able to sit down with regulators where we benefit from the state and county permitting, show them the project, and agree on the baseline data collection. Just as an example, the water monitoring is going to be one of the most important aspects of the permitting process. So when we came up with our IA with cash flow, we're able to meet with the regulators; we showed them a map of the project.