I guess give us an update of where we are in the process.
Sure, so since we talked last November, there's been a couple things that Greenlight has accomplished in late November.
There was another round of fundraising, capital raising, through the TSX, which brought in additional funds into the company.
And that's important because that's what we fund the exploration activities off of.
In addition to that, we recently, in about the last two weeks, obtained drill permits from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources for our next drill program.
That's going to occur on the same parcel of land that was drilled last summer.
And we are permitted to drill up to about 20 holes on that parcel through this package of permits.
We'll probably complete only about 10 to 12 of those bore holes, but it provides us flexibility to go out there and collect additional drill core.
That program, we hope to kick off in about hopefully this week or next week.
We're just waiting for one piece of authorization, and that's from the US Forest Service, which Greenlight hopes to be getting that authorization any day now.
That's going to allow us to set up the drill rigs and go on to the exploration drilling.
I know you've done some outreach, you've got more planned, but what's been the reaction from the people around here when they hear that there's exploratory drilling?
Generally, there's a level of excitement, I would say.
So Greenlight has, for about the past years, conducted various meetings with town boards, county boards, number of open houses where the public has been invited in.
And that offers Greenlight an opportunity to share information with local community about the drill plans, people are interested in that.
And then also to talk about, is there going to be a mine here or not?
Everybody thinks there's going to be a mine here in a year, which is not the case, because the companies got to do a lot of drilling before they can get to the point of actually looking at permitting a mine project.
And that's a whole different regulatory process that the project would have to go through separate from exploration drilling.
And what we tell the community is that day when we would actually start to permit a mine is about three to four years away.
And between now and then it's a lot of drilling, a lot of engineering evaluations.
The public, I would say, is about 70% enthusiastic about the potential.
And then there's another group of people who obviously have concerns about what it means for the environment.
And so in these town hall meetings and meetings with county boards and town boards, it offers the company an opportunity to listen to what some of those concerns might be,
and to start engaging with local public on those issues that are of importance to them.
So there are a lot of public examples of tragic, hist mining accidents and pollution.
What has changed in that time's better?
How are things different that you can give people confidence like that's not what we have here?
Sure.
Yeah, that's a question that the industry is often faced with.
And I think there's, when we talk to the public about that, and I've been doing this for about 35 years,
I think it's important to draw a distinction between the way mining projects were developed 50, 60 years ago,
where yes, if you look at those projects, you will see harm to the environment
and the way a project would be developed today.
And that's both at the regulatory level and the financing level.
So historically projects did not have to go through a regulatory review process.
They did not have to get environmental permits.
Same thing is true for municipal water waste water treatment systems.
Same thing is true for other industries like the paper industry.
And if you look historically at any industry 50, 60 years ago, all of them had some type of impact on the environment.
And that's why as a society, we developed environmental laws at both federal level and the state level,
things like the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act,
which regulates all these industrial activities, even mining.
On top of that, Wisconsin in the early 80s developed what was probably the most comprehensive mining statute
that regulates how these projects are developed.
And they were one of the first states to do that in the country.
And other states have followed Wisconsin's model.
Certainly Michigan did when they developed their mining law.
They looked to Wisconsin, same thing with Minnesota.
And if we just go across the border up in Michigan, we see that projects that have been developed under modern regulation
at state level, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act.
Those projects are very clean. They've got very good track records.
And that's a public policy success, you know, because what we're doing is we're passing responsible legislation
to govern these industrial activities because we need the metals.
It's a hot topic in, you know, our politics today.
And we need to be able to develop them so that we have access to those critical metals.
And we need to be able to protect the environment.
And that's what these modern environmental regulations allow us to do.
You mentioned Wisconsin's law from the 80s, some called it a moratoriums, some call it a prudent first.
It was rolled back, or at least parts of that.
Tom Tiffany was one of the lead authors at that time.
So what has changed from that law to where we are today in that realm?
Sure.
So the moratorium provision that was in Wisconsin's mining law, that was put in place in the mid to late 1980s.
And that was basically, it wasn't a hard moratorium.
It was a kind of prove it first type of law, which said, show us evidence where a project has operated for ten years
and didn't cause harm to the environment.
And show us an example of a project that has been closed for ten years and didn't cause harm to the environment.
Well, when the moratorium was rescinded, the state had the benefit of the history of the flambo mine project,
which was constructed and closed in about a ten year time frame under Wisconsin's mining law and had been closed for ten years.
And no harm to the environment.
It's got a stellar environmental track record.
Don't take my word for that.
Go to the DNR's website.
And it will say on that website where they're still monitoring that project that the project was and is in compliance with all the environmental laws at the state.
So, again, another example of a public policy success.
And that's evidence that we can do these projects safely if we engineer them properly.
And we look at all facets of the project, the construction, the operation, and the closure.
And we design that closure plan so that we have long term, not just five years or ten years, but generations after the project's closed.
That we have protection of those important resources around the project.
And the demonstration is there.
And it's right here in Wisconsin.
So if that law was still in place, you feel comfortable that you have the evidence in place that you can improve first.
There's multiple examples of projects in this region and elsewhere in the country where they've gone into operation.
And they've been closed and they've got very successful environmental protection records.
So it all comes down to proper planning and engineering, applying engineering to a project.
If we can design a satellite, a telescope to put into deep orbit around the planet to look out into the farthest reaches of space, we can do that via engineering.
And we can use the same type of engineering skills to design a mine project safely.
So let's back up a little bit. What exactly is underground here? What are we looking at and what do you hope to get out of it?
So the areas that are being explored in Wisconsin, the northern part of Wisconsin, the Precambrian bedrock, which is about a billion plus years old, is an old volcanic belt.
It's referred to as the panoke and volcanic belt.
And in these volcanic systems, about a billion years ago, you had materials being expressed at the surface of the ocean floor, if you will.
And that material was rich in various types of metals like copper and zinc and precious metals and other things that we're finding now, such as tellurium, which is needed for solar panels.
And that stuff all settled out on the ocean floor.
And then over time, more sediments built up on top of it. It turned into rock.
Some of this stuff was uplifted.
And that's what we're drilling, is those types of systems where they have concentrated mineralization of things like copper, zinc, precious metals, and other rare earth type elements that are really important for our economy today.
So one of the old arguments was jobs, jobs, jobs. But you're talking alluded to it before, there's new arguments of why it's necessary to go out for this.
Yeah, it's definitely jobs. There's great economic development that can occur around these types of projects.
But we also see in kind of our national politics today, more emphasis being placed on the country needing to be able to secure domestic sources of critical metals.
And that's on both sides of the aisle. There were executive orders that came out in the Biden administration emphasizing the need for secure domestic sources for these critical metals.
So that's part of it, secure supply chains, economic development. But then the other leg of that is we have to be able to protect the environment.
We look at all those things as we're doing our work.
So how much is actually down there? This has been looked at for a long time, not the first group to find this, but it's been considered unviable before. Why is it now possibly viable?
Well, the particular site that we're drilling at now was never completely drilled, so we don't know how much was down there.
Historically, the estimates were that there was about 4 billion tons of or 4 million tons of or copper grade ore that was about 1 to 2% copper with good grades of gold.
And now we're finding tellurium in there. What we're hoping to do is to expand the tonnage of that by drilling other areas around this deposit.
The other thing that makes the project like this more viable is just the forecast for metal prices.
So there's a lot more demand in the system because of things like AI, electric vehicles building out the electric grid.
It's going to take a lot of copper, and so the copper prices are much higher than they were.
And it's a combination of things like that that make these projects more viable.
So let's talk about the economics, because your company is on the Canadian stock exchange, is that correct?
That's correct.
So who gets the money? Like if this happens and this goes through, I mean, so there's local truckers and road builders and like the local economy benefits from this.
You pay some taxes to the state, and then the investors make money. How does it get spread around?
So people who invest in these projects, they'll invest in them and then sell the stock, and so they're coming and going all the time.
Ultimately, when the project goes into production, the company will make its money on the sell of the concentrate that comes from the mine.
So the ore goes into a mill, it's concentrated down, and then that's sold to a refinery.
That sale is where the company makes its money, and then it has to pay royalties to people who own the minerals, so we lease it.
Some of it is private minerals, some of it is federal minerals, so the federal government will get some royalties off of that.
And then we also negotiate a local agreement with the townships and the counties that we're doing work in,
and that's an opportunity for the counties to get cash benefits and other things that are important to the local community
to resolve this part of that agreement. In addition to that, there's a whole lot of services that are going to be needed for any operation,
and those have to come from the local workforce, the local contractors, and there's a lot of benefits that get generated that way,
just from the contracts for the services for the operation, which then adds to the tax base, so there's kind of a multiplying effect there.
How long in theory could this be opened, like how long would it do? Is it flamboyant only a few years, right?
Yeah, so we don't know what the mine life would be yet. One of the first things that we'll do after we've determined that we have a viable resource
is to start doing preliminary engineering evaluations on the project.
And when we do this, this is before permitting, and so we can start to identify ultimately what the plan would be that we would look to get permitted.
So as we do those engineering evaluations, we'll start to look at how the project would be developed, what the mining rate would be,
how long it would last, where we would process the ore. All those are issues that we need to evaluate as we go through this multi-year process.
Would you ever just have a mine here, or is this only viable if it's multiple devices you're looking at all companies?
Well, it's possible that we could have a standalone mine in mill operation. We don't know that yet today.
Our theory of how to develop this region is to identify multiple deposits and then have those processed at a centralized mill,
and that's got benefits on a number of different levels.
One, if we do that, we can be a little more selective where we put the mill, and if you have a mill, you're going to have to have a tailings facility.
And we can locate that preferably along some type of a rail corridor, some land that's already been maybe used and developed before,
we're reusing previous land, we're not developing mill infrastructure out in the middle of a national forest or a green field site.
And that allows us to then capitalize, create economies of scale where we can have a pipeline of projects that over a generation or multiple generations are feeding into that operation.
And so we create an economy of scale that has very long life for the operation, and that creates sustained then economic benefits throughout the area.
And that's ultimately where we would like to go, but we're in the early stages and we still have a lot of work to see if that's viable.
So from my understanding, the flambo material all got shipped back to the processed in Canada, is that accurate?
That's correct, the ore was put on a train and then hauled up to Canada and that's where it was processed.
And that was because it was a smaller scale, and this scale would be larger, so it would make sense to build a facility here,
because presumably we have a longer time frame as well.
Sure, the other thing that made that type of an approach viable for flambo was they didn't mind the whole deposit.
They mined the upper, say, third or half of the deposit, which was very rich, so it was very concentrated in metals.
And that allows to then pay for the transportation cost up to Canada.
We're not looking to do that here.
We want to mine at one site and then have a centralized processing facility somewhere in the northern part of the state.
And we're in the early days of looking at that, so we don't know where that would be yet.
So the big scary thing that comes with this kind of mining is the sulfides in the minerals surrounding the deposit you actually want.
What has changed in terms of how you make it safe to process it and then to store that so you don't get pollution back into the ground water?
Yeah, that's a very good question.
And one of the areas that gets a lot of attention because of that concern is the tailings material.
So you crush the ore up, you separate out the metal particles, that's your concentrate that goes to the refinery.
And then that leftover material is the tailings, which will have some level of sulfur mineralization in it.
And if that stuff isn't managed properly, and this is what historically happened, it was just kind of spewed out into a tailings dam and water moved through it and caused water pollution and things like that.
That's an area that has gone through tremendous changes in terms of how the tailings facilities are managed.
So, and this is reflected in the state statute and the state rules.
So the way we would manage the tailings for a project like this is analogous to what you would do for a landfill or an industrial waste facility.
So first and foremost, any facility is going to have to be developed with an engineered liner below the waste material, just like you would do for any waste facility here in the state.
It's going to have to have a leachate drainage layer on top of that.
So the water that percolates through the tailings material, if you will, hits that drainage layer, runs into a collection, something has pumped up, so it doesn't get to ground water.
That water is then reused in the mill, so we reuse that water.
In addition to that, there's a lot of different engineering practices that have come into play where instead of putting that tailings into that repository as a slurry material, which contains a lot of water, you run that tailings slurry through a filter press in the mill, and you squeeze out all that water.
And so you have what's called a filtered tails, and it literally is like a damp, silty sand type material that you truck out there, compact it in the repository, and that does a couple things.
One, it greatly reduces the footprint of the tailings facility.
It's got very little water in it, so there's going to be very little water that actually drains to the leachate collection system.
The water that does come into it from precipitation is collected and pumped out and reused, and that's got huge benefits in terms of reducing the potential for any kind of leakage on top of already having a liner system under there.
And then at the end of the mine life, it's capped, so it's very analogous to what you would see for a municipal wasteland fill.
And that type of technology is starting to come into play much more often in the industry, and it's kind of tailor made for the scale of these projects, so we can't commit today that that is how the facility would be engineered, but we're very hopeful
that that's the strategy that we would employ for these types of projects.
It's very safe.
Talking with the Sierra Club, we described mining companies as waste material contractors.
The majority of their job is just handling the waste as opposed to extracting the minerals in the first place.
Is that accurate, or is that kind of misleading?
Well, I think it's a little misleading because we're not just generating waste, we're generating these critical metals that are vitally needed for the economy, so take a look at the things that we use metals for.
We use it for our computers, we use it for our iPhones, our cars, our infrastructure, our healthcare system.
It wouldn't have a healthcare system if you weren't producing copper and nickel and all these critical metals that are needed just for building surgical instruments.
The vaccines that we use, think of the COVID vaccine that was generated, you won't be able to make that vaccine if we didn't have access to these critical metals.
I think it's misleading to say we're just a waste management company because we're a company, any mining company is a company that produces critical metals that are required for electric vehicles, AI data centers, national security, etc.
We have to mine these deposits and we have to engineer them and manage them and operate them safely. That's what mining company is about.
Is there any way to put into perspective how many cell phones or how many solar panels are down?
I think the scale gets lost for a lot of people. When you start talking about billions of tons, you can't wrap your head around it, but is it like a million solar panels or thousands of solar panels?
Haven't done that math, but it would be interesting to do it, but I personally have not done that math to say, okay, how many iPhones or how many solar panels are in that deposit?
Because that's another argument that Dave Bloom brings up is he says, oh, there's really not that much down there.
Again, the scale of things, it's not worth the danger and the threat to the watershed to go down and get what's that little amount in there.
Well, I would say that can be misleading too because one of the things we hear is, well, these deposits are small, okay?
And they are small when you compare them to other projects where they're 10, 20, 30 times bigger, purely in terms of tonnage.
But what's different about these deposits is they tend to be more concentrated in the metals.
So we're talking about deposits here that are probably close to being 10 times higher in metal content than many larger deposits.
And so what that means is we're producing the same amount of metals by mining 10 times less material than larger operations.
What would it look like? Because I think there's two images people have on the mine.
One's like this giant open pit and the other one's like the old mine cart.
Sure.
The tracks going down in it, but what would it look like from the surface?
From the surface, so if we look at bend and bend is most likely going to be an underground deposit.
What you would see there is there might be maybe 100 acres that are disturbed at the mine site.
And at that site you would see probably a box cut or a vertical shaft to actually go underground.
You would see a number of buildings and line basins.
So you would have some line basins to contain the water that's pumped out of the mine.
That water would then go through an advanced water treatment system before it's discharged back into the environment.
You would most likely see some buildings that would contain the raw ore that comes out of the mine.
And if we've got a regional mill somewhere, then you'd see vehicles coming in there picking that ore up and then transporting it out to a railhead.
And then from the railhead to the mill.
Those trucks would most likely have sealed covers on the top of it so you don't have particulate emission as those vehicles are traveling down the road.
You would see some other office type buildings at the surface and things like that.
You might see a truck wash at the surface.
So vehicles coming out of the mine area, they would get washed so they're not tracking mine residuals out into, you know, outside of the operational area.
All of the water, rain water, snow melt from the operational area would be drained into these centralized water retention basins.
Again, that are lined so that we have no, quote, contaminated water going off site.
It all goes through the water treatment system.
So it's a relatively small footprint.
And then underground, you would see vehicles driving around in like a tunnel system.
See a lot of ventilation going through the system.
You'd see a ventilation rays coming out of the surface because you'd have to have air going in and then you got to have air going out to exhaust it.
So it's a, I think it's quite different from the mental picture that people have by looking in historic textbooks of what mining operations looked like 75 or 100 years ago.
It's a highly advanced operation.
Would most of the water be blasted out?
How is it actually like made sure it can be extracted?
Yeah, so the whole blasting process is an engineering endeavor.
So if you're looking at like a block of ore, what they're doing is they're drilling holes into that block.
Okay.
And it's an engineer that's directing that and they put in a blasting agent and it's just enough blasting agent to fracture the ore so that it loosens up.
And it drops to the bottom of the mine area and trucks can come in and scoop that up and haul it out.
So there is a little bit of blasting there, but it's very controlled because you only want to put enough in there to blast the ore that you want out.
So when you look at the big picture, there's people that, you know, maybe neutral on most of this, but they're like, well, it's the National Forest.
They're like going for hikes or it's the Yellow River canoeing or it goes right down to my favorite fishing spot.
What do you tell them about what the impact will be on them being able to use or still enjoy the landscape around there?
I think that's central to the permitting process because what we have to, as part of the state's permitting process, we have to be able to demonstrate to the state that we're not going to infringe on any of those important adjacent uses to the mine site.
So certainly if there's a river flowing by the proposed mine site, we have to demonstrate that we can actually protect the water quality in that river.
We have to demonstrate that we can protect the groundwater quality around the mine area.
That's all fundamental to the permitting process and that's a decision that the DNR makes have we provided adequate demonstration to that.
And that demonstration looks at the construction period, the operations period, and then 200 plus years after the mine is closed.
We're the only industry in the state that has to look at that kind of planning horizon.
Paper mills don't have to do that, municipal landfills don't have to do that, private landfills don't have to do that, mining companies do it.
It's a rigorous standard. It's one that we have no doubt that we can meet, but we got to go through the process and all we're asking for is to be allowed to go through that process.
So recently there were some mines for oil and brought through Wisconsin and there was controversy over, I think it was Dane County.
There were some counties that said we want you to put an additional insurance on top of this.
But there's a leak someone pays for.
There was a lawsuit involved whether that was a colony could require that.
And I am asking this kind of in the prelude to there's an election coming up.
There will be some changes at the Capitol.
Do you have concerns that there could be new mining regulations that come in that maybe put an extra layer of burden?
Now you have to put up an additional waiver or insurance fee on top of those 200 years of planning.
So there's always the potential that new legislation could be developed.
One of the things that Greenlight is working on is actually reaching out to the legislative community in the state already to start talking to them about who Greenlight is, how Greenlight wants to operate in the state.
One of the things we want to do is have open transparent communications with legislative leaders on both sides of the political aisle because we think it's an important topic.
And we think it's one that both sides need to work constructively on.
So if there's new legislation that someone thinks is needed from whatever side of the aisle, we're there to talk to them about it.
And whether it makes sense or not, we will give them our opinion.
Ultimately, it'll be up to them to decide that.
With regards to the financial assurance because you briefly alluded to that in your question on the pipeline.
I think that's another area that people don't recognize the levels of financial assurance that are required for the mining industry here in Wisconsin.
So there are four different financial assurance instruments that any operator would have to post to the DNR before they could start constructing a project.
And that covers site reclamation at the end, so there's financial assurance bond for that.
Once the site is closed, there is a mandatory 40-year monitoring program that has to be put in place at the mine site after it's closed.
That has to be financially assured.
There is a contingency fund for unanticipated remediation if, say, you had a bulk fuel tank at the mine site and it leaked and you didn't realize it until you closed the site.
You got to financially assure for those types of potential occurrences. I call that contingency fund.
And then we were talking about the tailings facility before and ultimately we'll have to put a cap on that, just like a landfill.
We have to post a cash instrument to the state that would allow for the state to go back in 200, 300, 500 years down the road.
If that cap ever needed to be repaired, that fund, that cash fund is sitting in an account accumulating interest.
The beneficiary is the state and they can tap into that to replace the cap.
So it's a belts and suspenders type approach to the financial assurance of these projects.
And I think anybody would be hard pressed to say, is there another industry in the state that has that type of requirement?
As long as the state can't tap into that investment vehicle, whatever they want to, because you remember the tobacco settlement money.
Sure, yeah.
But the other end of that political question is, obviously, Tom Tiffany is going to be a Republican nominee for governor.
I did ask all the Democratic candidates when I sat down with them in December about mining.
And for a few of them, you'd kind of see the question go right over their head.
That was not something that was on their radar.
For a few of them, they were aware of it, but they didn't really have that much to say.
So when you are dealing with Democrats who opposed the mining changes that Tom Tiffany introduced and maybe just have, you know, lean more towards the environmental side that would say,
well, we're not really happy with mining and we don't like that sound scary.
Is there a concern or is there an outreach to them as candidates?
Or is there ever a point where you would weigh in on the gubernatorial election?
Well, we're not going to weigh in on the gubernatorial election.
I think the position that the company wants to take is we want to be transparent at the local level with local units of government, local environmental groups.
And we want to be transparent and have open lines of communication with leaders on both sides of the aisle.
We think it's an important topic.
Unfortunately, it's hard to get both parties to work together today.
This is an important issue from a national security standpoint, national economy standpoint.
I think it's got great benefits for the northern part of the state.
But we want to try to be a catalyst to bring both sides together to talk constructively about this issue.
We have started talking to some of the candidates on both sides of the aisle.
Obviously, Congressman Tiffany is a supporter and we understand the position of the gubernatorial candidates that are on the Democratic side.
What we would like to do is to actually get information to them.
So we've invited people from both sides of the aisle to come up to our drill sites to go to the closed flambo mine and take a look at what reclaimed mine looks like that was permitted under Wisconsin's law to talk to the DNR and get the facts.
There's opportunities to go up to Michigan where they have an operating copper nickel mine that sits right beneath the river.
And there was a lot of concerns expressed about that project before it was permitted.
But ultimately, it did go into production.
It was permitted.
And the mining law that regulates that site was actually sponsored and put it into law under the Grand Home Administration.
So that was a Democratic governor in Michigan.
So one of the things that we think the legislators and the gubernatorial candidates need to do is actually talk to some of the political leaders saying like Michigan.
Because there we don't see that kind of political divide that we see here in Wisconsin.
I'm not sure why that is.
But we can look at that operation up in Michigan, the Eagle Mine.
It's got a stellar environmental track record.
And it's the only operating nickel mine in the U.S.
When you look at the political situation in Wisconsin, is it the case of if you could extract the knee jerk partisanship that there are facts over here that you feel confident both sides would agree on?
But it's just extracting it from that initial reaction of just partisan lanes.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
What we're attempting to do is get factual information into political leaders' hands.
And I think when people look at facts, hopefully they can look at things objectively then.
So Greenlight, I'm learning about this, technically a junior mining company.
Is that correct?
That's correct.
So explain to me what that means.
So junior mining companies are where most exploration work takes place today in North America.
There was a time when the larger operating mining companies did a lot of greenfield exploration work, which is what Greenlight is doing today.
That model's kind of faded away.
And now most greenfield exploration, which is what is taking place here in Wisconsin today.
That's done by junior mining companies, which get listed on the financial exchange up in Canada, which is the premier exchange for junior mining companies to raise capital to actually go out and do the exploration.
Those junior mining companies typically do the exploration and the initial project evaluations.
And then the larger companies will come in and joint venture with them or potentially buy the company out.
So that's the direction that this is going.
Okay.
And that's obviously a good thing if that happens.
That's correct.
But that brings you back to what you said at the beginning of it.
You recently had another round of investment.
So clearly someone who leaves that you're on the right track here?
Sure. So the company completed its first drill campaign in August of last year.
And those results were released to the financial exchange, which is required.
And from that, those results were very positive and it allowed the company to go and raise another round of financing to finance this next rounds and rounds of drilling that we're going to be engaged in.
That we're going to be engaged in this next year.
And so obviously if that hadn't happened, is there a chance that if you hadn't found stuff that interested them enough, then?
Yeah, it's possible. That does happen.
Yeah.
So I guess what I've been told telling people about this story that I'm working on.
The first question I'm sure is what you get locally is like, well, is there going to be a mine? Is it going to happen?
And, you know, how do you, like, do you put percent odds on it?
Or is it just, is it impossible to say, like, well, it looks like it could be.
Or is it, how do you describe that?
Well, can't put percent odds on it. That's tough to do.
But what I can say is that there's been a ton of historic drilling in Wisconsin.
And there are economically viable resources in this state.
And if you look at these types of belts across the world, this is one of the larger undeveloped belts of its type in the world.
So from that perspective, I think very confident that there will be mining again in Wisconsin.
And we're very confident that we're going to be able to find those resources, create a package of resources, regional mill operation, identify a location that looks very attractive to develop.
And can be done responsibly from the standpoint of protecting the environment.
So if you would give me a few of the facts and figures that have been deposited, because there's a lot of overburden, and there's bedrock, and then we get to the actual.
So what are some of the, how deep is it, and how big and wide.
Yeah, so there's probably about 50 to 100 feet of glacial overburden sitting on the Precambrian bedrock.
And then the ore zone, or the mineralized zone, which is where we see the higher concentrations of copper and gold and things like that.
That tends to sit in a sliver of the rock that's near vertical.
So originally, think of a sandwich, a baloney sandwich.
Piece of baloney was in the sandwich and it was flat on the ocean floor and then the whole thing tilted up.
So the surface of the mineralized zone is right below the overburden.
And then that mineralized zone goes down maybe 1500, 2000 feet.
So that's possible to get to.
That's possible to get through via underground mining methods.
Yes.
Okay.
But is that considered deep in the mining world or is that average?
Well, it's not shallow.
I wouldn't necessarily say it's deep.
There's certainly underground mines that go much deeper than that.
Yes.
I mean, in terms of excitement, like when you start doing these, then you get the results.
Like, what's that feeling for you and your crew when you're like, we think it's there and you're getting evidence back?
It's pretty exciting.
It's just neat to drill a hole.
You know, 1500 feet deep, pull the rock out and see that mineralization that you think is there.
You can see it in the rock.
And then to get the confirmatory test data back, it's pretty exciting.
So, I mean, for you, what will it mean to like push this through?
You're part of what the green lights are trying to do is that it's more Wisconsin-based people.
It's not just people parachuting in from out of state or another country.
So what does it mean to you personally to see something like this succeed here?
Yes.
So me personally, I've lived most of my life in Wisconsin.
I was born in Minnesota.
When I was about midway through high school, my parents moved to Wisconsin, finished high school in the state here, and then went to the University of Wisconsin system, UW-Madison for my undergraduate and graduate degrees.
I grew up in an area where, because I was born in Duluth, and so I always saw the ore boats going out of the harbor there.
Mining has always been a part of the industrial fabric and social and cultural fabric of the upper Midwest.
Unfortunately, the industry has kind of been scared out of the country over the last 25, 40 years.
Now we're in a predicament.
The country is because we don't have access to the critical metals that we need, and I don't care what side of the political spectrum you're on, we're all using them.
If you drive an electric vehicle, that copper in there came from a mine.
So if we're going to address things like data centers, if we're going to address things like electric vehicles, we have to be able to develop mines.
We have to do it responsibly.
We have to bring that industry back here to Wisconsin.
We have a little flag, state flag sitting behind us, and on that state flag is a minor.
So that's been part of the state's history for a very long time.
The challenge for us is to not separate into camps and just make accusations against each other.
That's not going to solve any problems.
We need to work collaboratively with local units of government, other interested organizations, state government, and do what's responsible and recognize that we have public policy success here in the state already with our mining law.
We know it works.
So let's put it to work and let's put that minor back to work on the state flag.
I want to check my notes real quick.
Sure.
Let's see.
Yeah.
I guess the only other.
Oh, go ahead.
That's fine.
Yeah.
So I think we kind of address this, but the other thing that one of the arguments, why it's not necessary for this to happen is that.
98% waste and 2% copper that the vast majority of percentages are off compared to what can be found elsewhere.
And that just, even if it's economically viable, the company investing, then it's not worth it.
Yeah.
I think it's math is off there, you know, because these VMS type deposits that we're looking at, they tend to be much more concentrated in copper.
What we're seeing is about 2 to 3% copper in the ore.
Or what we would call ore.
If you look at the average deposit that's being mined in the world, it's maybe half a percent.
So these are more concentrated mineral occurrences, which makes them valuable because it ultimately shrinks the footprint of the project.
I think that makes it more viable from both an economic standpoint and an environmental footprint standpoint.
It's a better type of deposit to mine.
And then one last question.
Explain the tellurium.
Tellurium.
So that's a new one for a lot of people.
What is it and how is it used?
So tellurium, when green lights, the geologists started looking a couple years ago at some of the historic data.
They came across some USGS publications that said these types of deposits in Wisconsin could potentially contain economic grades of tellurium.
And tellurium is a rare earth type element and it's critical in the manufacture of solar panels.
So a lot of people think we need to be constructing more solar panels.
It is the metal that in essence is converting solar energy into electricity.
So can't have a solar panel without tellurium.
Most of the solar panels that we're using in the US today are coming from China.
Again, it's that strategic issue that we keep coming up against that the US, if we don't want to be dependent on adversaries for these critical metals, we're going to have to do it here domestically.
In the drill program that was completed this past summer, the assay data indicated about 340, 350 grams of tellurium
per tonne in the material.
And that's pretty high grade tellurium.
It's higher than what you see in most minds that are producing tellurium as one of their products.
So we're in the early days on that.
There's more work to be done because you have to identify if it's there and then how do you get it out from a processing standpoint.
But that certainly adds to the excitement of what we're seeing here and the potential of what these deposits could mean for the local economy, the state economy and the national economy.
So you said 340 or 50 grams per tonne is the ratio.
Yeah.
And I'm assuming I'll find tellurium on the periodic table of elements.
The capital T small e.
Yes.
I mean, how much when you talk to the public, I mean, people know it gold, silver.
I mean, they've heard of all those things like in tellurium.
Like, is that exciting to me?
Hey, there's a new thing that you probably never heard of unless you're really into geology.
Yeah. So when we've talked to the public about this, I'll bring up tellurium and I'll say how many people have heard of tellurium, put your hands up, and nobody puts their hands up.
And then I say, okay, tellurium, what's it used for solar panels, et cetera.
And then people go, oh, they start thinking about it and you can see the wheels going around in their head.
I do think with the public, because I've been in this industry for 35 years and I've been going to local meetings and things like that and have seen kind of what the temperature can be in some of these local meetings.
And I would say 30 years ago, the temperature was a little higher than what we're seeing today.
I think people are recognizing the situation that the country is in with regards to access to critical metals.
And so they're listening about what the proposal is with a different mindset.
And they're realizing we can't just kind of retreat to a corner and say, not in my backyard.
Because if we keep doing that, we're going to find that we're completely dependent on China in 20 years and nobody wants to go there.
Anything else you want to add?
I think that's probably good.
Can you say the same spell your name and give your title?
Sure.
Name is Steve Donahue, spelled D-O-N-O-H-U-E.
And I am on the board of directors of Greenlight Metals.
And I also work at both infrastructure and environment in DePere, Wisconsin, where I've been working in the mining industry on these types of projects for 35 years.
So is it possible that Nina Foundry is making stuff that's going to go into the project?
It could be.
It could be.
That's kind of that full cycle thing.
Yeah.
I think we're good here.
Thank you.
I find it fascinating.