Contango Silver & Gold Inc. Status update
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Even faster than usual, I will say good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where in the world you are coming in from. As always, for Contango events, it is a very international audience, so folks coming in from Switzerland, from APAC, from Alaska. I appreciate everybody joining us. I have got with me today Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse, the CEO of Contango Silver & Gold, who was kind enough to put out a major corporate update right after Labor Day to keep us in the loop. Rick, how are you? Good.
Good to see you, Romeo.
Yeah, good to see you. Here is how today is going to work for the folks in the room. For those of you who are regulars, you can just stop listening for the next 30 seconds. You have heard this a million times. There is a chat button at the bottom of the screen. I really encourage you to ask questions at any point during today's event. It is probably going to be a shorter one. We are looking at about a half hour, but as usual, I have got a bunch of questions, based on the release. I do want to hear from you guys as well. Some questions were submitted in advance over email, so we will make sure we get to those. Then any questions that come in from the live audience, we will pick those up as well. Two other pieces of housekeeping.
This is being recorded, will be available for replay, probably midday Eastern Time, certainly today. It will get right into your inbox. It will also be on 6ix's YouTube channel. There is also a Request Meeting button at the bottom of the screen. You can press that to have an opportunity to meet with the Contango Silver & Gold team. I will be passing that along with your registration information, as soon as the event ends. You can press that at any point during today's event, including after it ends. That is the boring stuff. Rick, I want to get into the press release, because yesterday's release reads like a checklist where it is one of those, every box gets ticked. You have three core assets, two jurisdictions, drilling, road-building, underground developments, all on time, on budget in a single field season.
Most companies your size and bigger and smaller struggle to pull off one of those programs. I would love if you could give us a sense of what it takes behind the scenes to run a wild season like this with so much going on.
Well, I think I said earlier this year that this year would be about execution and just getting things done. That is pretty much what we did, and it really starts with putting the whole team together. Remember, we merged two companies, Contango Ore and Dolly Varden Silver. That was really the first thing to do, was to get the teams together and integrate the two teams. I think we have demonstrated that we have done that flawlessly. We have had a very successful year, very busy year. I think we are over close to 70,000 meters of drilling, in total between the two main projects. That is exploration drilling, infill, expansion. We have also done geotechnical work and things like that, at Johnson Tract. Yes, it has been a very busy year, and all projects have executed exactly what we had planned to do.
At Lucky Shot, the underground development, the exploration drilling, announcing results. We are on track to release an MRE on that early next year, first half of next year. Johnson Tract road building, we actually got more accomplished there than planned. We got the laydown area completely done, which we had actually expected to do next year, but we got that done this year. So now the road is connected between the camp and the proposed portal site. Permitting, on the portal site is, I will say, substantially complete. You never quite complete permitting. You are always permitting something.
That is it. Or renewing it, or there is always the permits.
Correct. It's an ongoing process.
Sure. We are substantially permitted there to build the tunnel.
Next year will be about building the tunnel, then it will be about doing the infill drilling there. Of course, Kitsault, I think that's the one that really demonstrates how the teams have worked together very well. We had planned for a 40,000-meter drill program. We are going to be over 50,000 meters. That's just because of the efficiencies and just the team working together. That's a difficult place to drill. It's a remote project, helicopter support, it's steep terrain. I really have to thank all of our contractors.
Sure. The helicopter contractors, the pad builders, the tree fellers, the drillers, the geologists.
It's been a very busy year. I think the thing to emphasize, it's been a very safe year. We've done all this work, the 70,000 meters of drilling, the road building, the bridge building, underground drilling, underground tunneling, and it's been 100% safe. No LTIs, and that's how we want to work, and that's how we want to execute our programs.
Awesome. One thing I noticed in the PR is a pretty big Manh Choh story in the release that I think might be getting less attention, or I've certainly seen less attention than it should be getting. The mill modifications for recovering the higher grade sulfide ore from the south pit are done and working according to plan. That was one of the real technical question marks coming into the year, as far as I understood it. What does it mean now that that's proven out, that's behind you?
Yeah, the first half of this year for Manh Choh was always going to be the struggle. Two quarters, the first half of the year was about transitioning from north pit to south pit. Lots of pre-stripping. So, you've got a lot of equipment moving waste material to get at the ore in the south pit or the main pit. And of course, that ore is more sulfide rich. It's higher grade and it's more sulfide rich, which means you need the oxygen plant installed to make the recovery sufficient. And so that was done. It was completed the last quarter, and it's now operating. And so we should see our recoveries in the 80s to low 90s, depending on the sulfide. It's the amount of sulfur that really dictates how efficient the oxygen plant works.
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