We're On 'Page One' of COPPER Bull Market – 'Demand is INCREDIBLE'
Summary
Copper Market Outlook: The podcast highlights a bullish outlook for copper, driven by factors such as electrification, AI demand, and the rise of developing economies, positioning copper as a critical commodity for future growth.
Demand Drivers: Key demand drivers for copper include the electrification of vehicles, renewable energy, and AI, with the latter adding a new layer of demand that could significantly increase copper consumption.
Supply Challenges: The supply side faces significant challenges due to disruptions in major copper mines and a lack of new mines coming online, which could lead to a supply-demand imbalance and potential price increases.
Investment in Copper Exploration: The podcast discusses the strategic importance of investing in copper exploration, particularly in regions with a history of significant discoveries, such as the high Andes region between Argentina and Chile.
Motz Metals Overview: Motz Metals is positioned next to the largest copper discovery in the last 30 years, aiming to leverage its strategic location and expert team to make new discoveries in the region.
Exploration Strategy: The company has consolidated a significant land package and plans to commence drilling, with a focus on identifying new copper deposits that could yield substantial returns.
Financial Position: Motz Metals is well-funded with $25 million CAD in the bank, planning to use $15 million for its upcoming drill program, and has no current debt obligations.
Unique Positioning: The company emphasizes its unique positioning next to a major discovery, offering a singular opportunity for investors interested in the copper sector.
Transcript
Hello everybody and welcome into commodity culture where our goal is to make you a better investor in the commodity sector. My name is Jesse Day. Before we dive in, standard disclaimer, nothing here is investment advice. Do your own due diligence. And today's guest is the CEO of Mgotees Metals, a mineral exploration company exploring for copper and gold in the prospective Vikunia district of Argentina and Chile. It's Alan Seette. Great to have you on the show. >> Thanks for having me, Jesse. Big fan. Well, thank you so much and it's an honor to have you on as well. I want to start with your overall assessment of the copper market at present. We're back above $5 a pound after we had quite a roller coaster in the aftermath of initial tariff announcements on copper by the Trump administration. Saw prices skyrocket that then got altered to include copper wire and some various copper products instead of copper ore. Um but now we're back up above five. Things look very favorable on the supply demand front as gold and silver ripped to new all-time highs. Do you think copper could be the next metal to outperform? >> Yeah, I think so. Uh I mean, frankly, if you look at what's happening with gold and silver, if I asked you, Jesse, what why is gold and silver skyrocketing? What's your answer? >> Oh boy, it would be a really long answer, but a lot to do with monetary debasement and the fact that fiat currencies are falling in value around the world. more specifically the US dollar and the western currencies are falling out of value. US dollar, Australian dollar, UK pound, the euro. Um and the reason is the printing of of money and there there isn't kind of that the real hard asset backing their backing their currencies and simultaneously the rise of the developing world you know China, Russia, India, Brazil that's known and also the upcoming countries in in in Africa and the continent of Africa which is a big big factor I think in the future. So that trend i.e. the fall of the west both in the currency form economic growth socially culturally we're seeing that and the rise of of the developing world that theme will continue through into copper because we're going to see uh a couple of I would say three major things happening in copper one is u and the the first two are well known one is the electrification of vehicles of energy renewable energy and and that whole theme I'll just call it the the electrification theme. The second one is the AI uh theme, which adds a completely new layer of demand to what we already knew was going to be off the charts demand. Then you add the AI thing on top and we're really in kind of page one of the AI book. People are only starting to realize what it will mean for energy consumption. And the main constraint was first intellectual capacity in AI then it moved to um power gen uh sorry compute how many chips can we get and so on and that led to the biggest you know gain in Nvidia and the next thing is going to be power generation. Okay so can we get enough power to power these um the these big data centers and and learning clusters and so on. So electrification, AI, but the third big wave is also the developing world is coming up. So all these three things are playing out and that's two more two more themes than you have in gold and silver. In gold and silver, you got the debasement trade. In copper, we've got that. We've also got the growth of AI. We've also got the growth of electrification. There's a lot more on the demand side pushing copper ahead than there is, I think, in gold and silver. And it's a real commodity that's used. It's not just sitting in a vault somewhere. Okay. So, we don't have any Bitcoin or altcoin or whatever to substitute copper. It is literally the best conductor outside of silver. There's nothing that that can take its place as far as we know. Unless you want to start using silver for your wiring and for your electrical cables, which you know, I don't think it's going to happen. Great summary there. I know you've prepared some slides here on the supply demand fundamentals for copper. Why don't you walk us through those and just how much copper is going to be required moving forward and some info on the supply side as well and why it's going to be tough to meet that demand. >> Look, uh I'm happy to show you. I just slap these things together. I I'm really a fan of this slide that presented by uh Robert Freeland at the uh at one of the conferences that that I've seen him at. Uh and what it shows here, you're looking at copper mined throughout history. Okay, so 4,000 BC all the way until 2020, 700 million metric tonses were mined and that you know that was used for the industrial revolution and and all of our growth, World War I, World War II, etc. And if you take that steady state growth and kind of project it out in the next 22 years, we're already 5 years into that, we're going to need the same amount of copper uh that we've mined in the entire history until recently in just 20 years. So the whole of history's worth of copper in 20 years. That's an incredible amount of consumption of refined copper that's additional to what we already have. So that is a that is a slide on its own. That's a story on its own that tells you that the demand story for copper is incredible. This does not take into account the electrification theme that I mentioned and it's definitely does not take into account the AI theme which has just emerged as I said in the last couple of years and this is a forecast from 2020. So but it's a very nice page. It explains that. Here's something I just again whipped this together five minutes while we were on the call preparing. But look at this. This is the per capita consumption of power around the world in kilowatt hours per year. Check that out. USA 13,000 kilwatt hours per person per year. Okay. Uh Australia, France, Germany, these are these are good numbers. China and Turkey and India, Pakistan, they're all going to go up. So USA 13,000. Now let's look Africa 150 kilowatt hours per year per capita. Okay, that's uh USA is 90 times that number. Why is that significant? So, how many people are there in Africa, Jesse? >> A whole lot. >> Okay, exactly. Over a billion. And and I'll show you a nice little map here. This is the world. And uh I would I would ask you to guess, but I'll just tell you what you're looking at here is the fertility rate around the world by country. Okay? under two means you're having less than two kids per couple or per per whatever and you're you're getting uh below the replacement rate which means that your population is declining. Guess who's declining? It's the west. It's USA, it's Canada, it's Australia, it's even China is now in decline. India has passed the replacement rate. So all of these places the population is declining. Economic growth is driven by populations declining. Where is growing? Africa. Africa is the only place on this map that you're going to see a boom. Okay, there's some Asian enclaves in here. But broadly speaking, we're talking about Africa, big population already. It's going to get even bigger and the per capita electricity consumption is only one way to go, which is up. Okay. And it's starting on a low base. So I think this is going to be a big driver of um power demand but also power supply because we have big big big sources of renewable energy in Africa. We've got the best uh wind resource globally in Kenya. We've got the best hydro resource probably globally in the DRC. Uh and I can go on and on. The best solar is in the Northern African Sahara. uh and so I think we're going to see a lot of power generation, a lot of power consumption, but most importantly a lot of copper coming uh demand and supply coming out of Africa. This is another way of looking at the same data and it breaks down the population by world region. Okay, so we're sitting somewhere here 2020. Okay, see a lot of Asia in there. That's mostly China and India as you know and you got South America, North America and Europe. Now look what happens to these ones. Uh but if you go out 100 years and and look where all the additional population is look here we're at 2020 all of the incremental population out 100 years more or less is coming out of Africa okay so this is a big big trend raw population growth plus per capita consumption increases in electricity I think it's huge so that's that theme that I mentioned the second thing is the AI theme again we're on page one. So everything you see here consider it preliminary and subject to multiple like I would say three four 5x in the next few years. Okay. So power demand from AI this is from Bloomberg again just chucked it out of the internet but global data center demand power uh power demand outlook by market. Okay. So here we are sitting in 2025 and look we're going to 4x power demand in the next 10 years. I think this is underbaked significantly significantly. Um here's another one. Open AAI planning to 125x their energy capacity in 8 years. This would mean using more than India's energy capacity today. Okay, pull this off Twitter. You can get the source here. Peter Gostev uh look here 2025 they want to have 23 gawatts of power capacity. Okay, 230 megawws and they want by 2033 to have India's worth of power gen and that's just one AI company. So, and that's just today. Have we seen compute go down? Have we seen power use go down? They never go down. They only go up. That's the rules of silicon. That's the rules of um you know computers and software and processing and power and that's how it always works. Okay. So, these are big big trends. Um some some are projecting here this guy H he's the CEO of uh I believe it's the chip the chip manufacturer um not Intel the other one ARM ARM by the end of the decade AI data centers could consume as much as 20 to 25% of US power requirements okay so uh this is huge and apparently a chat GBT search requires the amount that takes to turn on a light bulb for 3 minutes. Okay, so that's not stopping me from using it, but I'm just saying look, this is a big thing. This is the supply side. We'll get into that in a bit, but basically I see demand, demand, demand, demand, demand from all angles for copper. And then the obvious question is where is the supply and can it be substituted? >> Yeah, that's a great uh presentation there. And I do want to talk about the supply side for a moment because mining obviously a very hard business. We've seen a bevy of problems hit the copper mining sector this year so far. I'm going to read a quote from ABC News. It says, "Earlier this year, flooding at Ivanho Mines's Camoa Kalúa mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an accident at Cadelo's Elentiente mine in Chile, and protests at Hudbay's Constansia mine in Peru were among major disruptions to global copper production. More recently, seven workers died after an 800,000 ton mudslide at the Grasberg block mine in West Papa, Indonesia, jointly owned by the Indonesian government and Freeport Mack Ban. On top of this human tragedy, it's estimated the mudslide will remove 591,000 tons of copper production from the mine. So, in addition to these problems, there's simply not enough new copper mines coming online as well. So, taking all of this into consideration, where is all the needed copper going to come from? >> Um, those disasters, by the way, it it it doesn't sound like they're few and far between, right? These are some of the biggest copper operations you you just named. El Teniente Kamokula which is Robert Freedelland's um very very successful mine Grassburg one of the biggest copper gold mines in the entire world when you say you know a few people died it's it's tragic anyway but the the thing they don't mention is that's one of the biggest copper mines in the world and when you've got an open pit and then you've got a mine underneath it which is what I believe they're doing I'm not a mining expert but underneath there they're block caving so they've got you know they've got lots of tunnels and shafts under there and they're blasting and mining from under this open pit and a huge amount of rock and mud slides into the open pit. You're shut and it's going to take a very long time thinking about moving all of that again. When you're mining and you move dirt or you move rock, you're making money from moving it, right? In proportion to the ore that you're moving when it's all just waste and crap in there, you can't move it out at it's extremely expensive. Okay. So, multiple um minds go offline and they're not quick to put back online. Okay. They're very very expensive and take time to take uh off to turn back online if at all. And they might find that uh because of technical reasons and safety reasons, they they have to actually shut that entire segment of the mind regardless of which which one we're talking about because it's actually not really possible. you know, you've got like, let's say, a mud buildup, you try and remove some and it unleashes another wave and it's actually extremely difficult problem to solve. So supply can go off any time and not just because of disaster but because of what you said you see in Hud Bay that was a social issue and so what you're seeing also is jurisdictionally people protest they want more money. Uh we had that sad story of um there was a West African country that took a couple of gold um mining employees hostage. Um, and they're still, I think, captive. So, where is the copper coming from? It's coming from either brownfield expansions, existing mines like Grassburg, where they look and they say, "Look, we've already mined all of this. Let's go a bit deeper. Let's go a bit this way, that way." And they pull together more supply. Okay, that is happening. It will happen more. Um, but it's not a guarantee. And it's getting harder and harder. It's getting deeper. It's getting more dangerous. and uh it's not it's not necessarily going to be the source of all the supply. Then you've got recycling obviously and that's where you got all those guys ripping out your power lines and um selling them back to the the copper companies and that's always going to be I think a small portion of the overall supply. Then you're going to need new green field copper discoveries to make up the balance. Okay? and they're going to have to fit so many different criteria that it's going to be quite difficult. Um, so first of all, they have to be substantial in size. They have to have good grade and they have to generally be in a place in the world where you can mine without the company's people being killed or natural disaster striking. That narrows down the field considerably. And so in the last 30 years of copper exploration globally, um, all of the millions and billions of dollars that have been spent, the best copper discovery has been in a place that you wouldn't even imagine that people are looking for copper, which is in the high Andes, uh, at 5,000 m elevation. Right? That's the kind of place that most people would train, you know, for three months to six months. I'm going to be going I'm going to go to the top of this mountain. I'm training every week. This is where they found this discovery. 5,000 mters elevation in the Andes. It's called Filo del Soul. So, uh, and so 30 years worth of work and that's the best discovery. It's very large, large scale copper and gold. It's in Argentina and Chile. These are two very good jurisdictions for mining. And so it starts to fit the criteria. Large scale, good grades, good jurisdiction, and there's many, many, many others. But then once you found it, then there's still a very long road to bringing it into production. And for those of you who are not familiar, the reason that is is because contrary to popular understanding, the mining practice is actually very rigorous on environmental studies, on technical studies, safety, suppliers, and good standards. And that all takes time and they're heavily heavily regulated. And to pass through all those hoops, finance, and build a mine can take decades. So it takes decades to find. This discovery was the best in 30 years. and it takes decades to build. So, we're not rushing out and supply is just not coming on board that quickly. But I showed you charts that show demand is coming on very very quickly. So, when those two things collide, what you generally see is a price increase, short-term, midterm, and long-term. And so, that's what I think we're going to see. Having said that, I'm not an expert. And do your own analysis. >> I thought that was a great breakdown and and a perfect segue to now discussing Motz Metals. So why don't you start by giving us an overview of the company? >> I mentioned to you that the biggest copper discovery of the last 30 years was in the high Andes at 5,000 m and it was substantial. Here it is on this map in the red is circle that discovery. It's called Filo del Soul and that was bought by the biggest uh couple of the biggest mining companies in the world uh for 4.5 billion Canadian dollars earlier this year. And that's because you don't find these things. So once they get found there's a lot of competition among the big mining companies to buy such discoveries. Okay. So that's right here uh on this high Andes mark between Argentina and Chile and our project the company that I run Motes Metals that is located directly next to this Filo del Soul discovery. So we're we're next to it and uh we're part of that same trend. And the reason that's important is in these type of copper deposits they tend to occur in clusters not alone. Okay. So as as proof of that you can look anywhere in a portfree they're called districts. So there's one, there's sometimes another many, sometimes there's many. Uh, and in this case, further a field from from Fil Soul, just a bit further north, you've got another one called Lunowasi that today is on the on the stock exchange, if you were to buy that stock, uh, the overall market cap of it is about 5.4 billion Canadian dollars. So it's worth even more than the biggest discovery of the last 30 years. So we're in a we're in a district. The district has yielded multiple multi-billion dollar discoveries and we're looking to try and make another discovery uh right next door which is exactly where you'd want to be looking. >> Could you walk us through the team behind Makotes Metals, how you plan to leverage their expertise and maybe start with yourself and and your own background and how you became CEO of the company? >> Sure. Yeah. Uh my look my background is a bit is a bit uh varied. I uh spent a lot of time doing different things. my path before I came to mining. I grew up in Africa and spent a lot of time in Africa. You can see that informs some of the thinking I have on on on how the future is going to unfold. But then I spent my you know 20s working in tech in Australia and uh helped a number of startups there including the biggest e-commerce startup in Australia as a consultant and uh started a few smaller startups. That wasn't for me. I I moved into McKenzie and company. It's a very large strategy consulting firm that uh helps the biggest companies in the world. Uh in that capacity I was consulting with the biggest bank in Australia, the biggest telco in Australia, the biggest oil companies in Australia. Um some of the biggest mining companies of Australia and uh you you know you kind of understand and get a get a view of their biggest problems and how their top team uh and executives work and operate because you're generally contracted at that level to to that kind of uh client. Uh so I was there for a couple of years and I saw that this thematic was unfolding where uh materials generally like natural resources generally are um going to be required in abundance and discovery of them are is basically is underinvested or not well invested. So there was a lot of scope in my in my view at that time to get involved in the resource industry and and get involved in discovery. So I initiated with a with a couple of others a company focused on mineral exploration. That was about 10 years ago now. And so we started looking all around the world uh in Africa, in Australia and everywhere and started smallcale exploration uh projects um and in that and while you're doing that you meet very good geologists, geoysicists, technical professionals and you build a network. So that's what we did u three years ago. Um just over 3 years ago when Flo del Soul made this big discovery we were able to leverage some of the people professionals that were working with our team to do analysis uh from satellite imagery of the broader district. So you know we took imagery from commercial satellite providers that included this whole area and we're able to use computer programs that classify the types of uh rock based on shortwave infrared imagery that's that's available to purchase. Then you create mineral assemblage maps and we could see that there's extensive alteration continuing on trend from Filo del Soul, our neighbor, all the way down to the south. And so because we saw that that was the first step, we were able to then start making moves to acquire and do deals to build together this land package of exploration licenses and put the company together in its very early days. And as part of that, we brought in some of the really uh some of the really accomplished technical people in the geological world that have worked on uh these kind of deposits in South America and have worked in discoveries all around the world and we put a board and a team together that that was purpose-built for this and raise capital and last year we went public and and now we're about to go and drill some of the targets we've developed over three years of work here. And that is some exciting news coming out of the company that you put out last week, an announcement that you will be commencing drilling of key priority targets at Floss SU. Can you walk us through the details of that and what you hope to accomplish? >> Yeah, sure. Uh I I'll keep it brief. Um but essentially we we spent three years here. I'm just going to run through some of these. Uh to to give some context, that was 3 years ago when we put the company together. What we inherited was a as a project was like fragmented landholding. So we put the land holding together. That's why we have the full strike projection of this trend. When we initially started this this land package was not together. It was probably in maybe 10 different hands. 10 different entities had all of this land package. Now we've consolidated it. That was step one consolidation. Okay. Then we went in and this is this is again for context. Our project right next to the biggest copper find of the last 30 years. We went in and did extensive sampling uh at the surface, thousands of rock chips and soil samples and mapping and identified new areas that had never been drilled of of mineralization of of anomalous copper and gold. Those targets are marked in the black on this page. Okay. So, uh what you'd see first glance here is that a number of these have never been drilled and that means that there's an opportunity there to make a discovery. Second thing you'll see is there is some drill holes. But what I'll tell you is that those drill holes were were on average the majority of them were less than 600 meters. Okay? So pretty shallow where there was drilling and and a lot of new stuff has come out of our work. So we've spent about 20 million Canadian dollars in the last 3 years doing this surface sampling work doing the consolidation extensive rock chip sampling as well and geoysics. Geoysics is is where we use electrical signals uh and magnetic signals or basically punching power into the ground and getting the responses and modeling in 3D which parts of the of the rock are conductive or resistive. And at Felo, the neighbor, the big discovery, it was a big tool. It was a tool that helped guide their discovery. And so we're treasure hunters. We're looking to do the same. And we've got geohysical uh data sets that are telling us look there's multiple new targets here that have yet to see a single drill hole. So uh so three years of work went into this. We've got and the reason is if you look at the terrain it's aggressive. Like we're in the mountains. We have to put in 60 kilometers of new tracks. We had to put in field camp. I'll show you our field camp. It's pretty hardcore. There's our field camp. Um you know containers. It's winter. uh it's you know it's it's cold it's high up and the culmination of all that work is new exciting drill targets and the drill targets are being drilled in the next couple of weeks. So I don't know if that answers your I can't even remember what your question was but we're >> just details on the drill program what you hope to accomplish. we hope to make a big discovery and we hope that one or more of the targets we've developed could become something like the neighbor or even whatever uh it could be more it could be less could be multiple um and so that's the thing it's it's unknown in in exploration until you drill uh and indeed you may need to do multiple rounds of drilling it's not necessarily going to be just one uh but if we are successful we could get a 20 or 10 or five it could be 100 times our value depending on what we find if we make a discover discovery and so our goal here is to make a discovery. We've done everything we can in terms of analysis to do that. I won't bore your viewers with too many technical figures on that, but I would say that we've done our homework here. We've spent a lot of time and engaged the best technical minds in the business and we happen to be situated in a place where we know there's the potential to make multi-billion dollar discoveries. And we're today valued at around hund00 million. So you do the math, there's plenty of upside there if we find something of note. Let's talk about the company's current cash position and any debt obligations, if any. I'd also like to know how much of the treasury is being used for this upcoming drill program and how you plan to potentially raise capital moving forward as needed. >> Sure. A lot of questions. We've got about 25 million Canadian dollars in the bank. Okay. The U that's for for this business wellunded. Uh and so in the in the coming exploration campaign, we expect to use about $15 million, leaving us with, you know, significant funding still in the bank after. So this is a first phase. If we're seeing encouraging results in the drilling, if we're making a discovery, expect uh commensurate response on on our share price or our cost of capital is essentially our share price. And we would we would be able to attract more capital to do more should there be a discovery. So that's how we're thinking about it in a phased approach. So we start out with a first phase here. It's about 5,000 mters of drilling and we'll go from there. Uh to date we've been able to attract some very uh competent exploration focused funds and investors and so a number of them are on our corporate presentation. You can take a look and we've been able to also attract a very important family office to come uh on board which is uh one of the better known business families in Argentina. And they've come in for about a 13% stake in the company and they put $9 million in to get that stake. And so we hope to enjoy ongoing support from them and the funds that support us. And together those two pieces make up about 40% of the company. So when we need to raise capital, we we do have some numbers that we can call um you know to to help. >> And does the company have any debt at present? >> No, not maybe you know like you get an invoice on Monday and you pay it on Friday, but that's that's like a trade payable. Yeah. >> Well, let's end by opening the floor to you. Is there anything that we haven't yet touched on or anything you think it's important to emphasize that potential shareholders of Motest Metals should be aware of? >> I've made I made clear my views on the supply demand dynamics of copper. U what's interesting to me is that although you know there's the earth is big and there's plenty of opportunity for discovery elsewhere, it really is that there's a few places that have yielded u high quality copper discoveries. In fact, I think I have a little page on that somewhere here. Yeah. Major discoveries in the recent decades are few and far between. And what's important here for me is to understand that the big discoveries there isn't multiple places that they are. There's really in the last 30 years there's one place where the big discovery was one place. That place is next to us. Okay? So we are singular in our location. We are unique. We are exploring next to the biggest copper discovery of the last 30 years. There is no other company uh that's situated like us on trend to such a monster discovery. They may be in a good place. They may be exploring but it's it's it's it's really there's only one seat next to this location and we're in it. And so I think it's it's one that you should pay attention to. Whether we make a discovery or not, that's up to the gods and to nature, but we're doing whatever we can to make it happen. Well, I will put a link in the description below to Motus Metals website as well as social media so people can follow along with the company. Alan, this has been a fantastic conversation. Really appreciate you coming on the show. >> Thanks, Jesse. >> Commodity Culture is a series on commodities and natural resources. If you would like to see more, be sure to subscribe and hit the bell notification so you're always up to date with the latest episodes.
We're On 'Page One' of COPPER Bull Market – 'Demand is INCREDIBLE'
Summary
Transcript
Hello everybody and welcome into commodity culture where our goal is to make you a better investor in the commodity sector. My name is Jesse Day. Before we dive in, standard disclaimer, nothing here is investment advice. Do your own due diligence. And today's guest is the CEO of Mgotees Metals, a mineral exploration company exploring for copper and gold in the prospective Vikunia district of Argentina and Chile. It's Alan Seette. Great to have you on the show. >> Thanks for having me, Jesse. Big fan. Well, thank you so much and it's an honor to have you on as well. I want to start with your overall assessment of the copper market at present. We're back above $5 a pound after we had quite a roller coaster in the aftermath of initial tariff announcements on copper by the Trump administration. Saw prices skyrocket that then got altered to include copper wire and some various copper products instead of copper ore. Um but now we're back up above five. Things look very favorable on the supply demand front as gold and silver ripped to new all-time highs. Do you think copper could be the next metal to outperform? >> Yeah, I think so. Uh I mean, frankly, if you look at what's happening with gold and silver, if I asked you, Jesse, what why is gold and silver skyrocketing? What's your answer? >> Oh boy, it would be a really long answer, but a lot to do with monetary debasement and the fact that fiat currencies are falling in value around the world. more specifically the US dollar and the western currencies are falling out of value. US dollar, Australian dollar, UK pound, the euro. Um and the reason is the printing of of money and there there isn't kind of that the real hard asset backing their backing their currencies and simultaneously the rise of the developing world you know China, Russia, India, Brazil that's known and also the upcoming countries in in in Africa and the continent of Africa which is a big big factor I think in the future. So that trend i.e. the fall of the west both in the currency form economic growth socially culturally we're seeing that and the rise of of the developing world that theme will continue through into copper because we're going to see uh a couple of I would say three major things happening in copper one is u and the the first two are well known one is the electrification of vehicles of energy renewable energy and and that whole theme I'll just call it the the electrification theme. The second one is the AI uh theme, which adds a completely new layer of demand to what we already knew was going to be off the charts demand. Then you add the AI thing on top and we're really in kind of page one of the AI book. People are only starting to realize what it will mean for energy consumption. And the main constraint was first intellectual capacity in AI then it moved to um power gen uh sorry compute how many chips can we get and so on and that led to the biggest you know gain in Nvidia and the next thing is going to be power generation. Okay so can we get enough power to power these um the these big data centers and and learning clusters and so on. So electrification, AI, but the third big wave is also the developing world is coming up. So all these three things are playing out and that's two more two more themes than you have in gold and silver. In gold and silver, you got the debasement trade. In copper, we've got that. We've also got the growth of AI. We've also got the growth of electrification. There's a lot more on the demand side pushing copper ahead than there is, I think, in gold and silver. And it's a real commodity that's used. It's not just sitting in a vault somewhere. Okay. So, we don't have any Bitcoin or altcoin or whatever to substitute copper. It is literally the best conductor outside of silver. There's nothing that that can take its place as far as we know. Unless you want to start using silver for your wiring and for your electrical cables, which you know, I don't think it's going to happen. Great summary there. I know you've prepared some slides here on the supply demand fundamentals for copper. Why don't you walk us through those and just how much copper is going to be required moving forward and some info on the supply side as well and why it's going to be tough to meet that demand. >> Look, uh I'm happy to show you. I just slap these things together. I I'm really a fan of this slide that presented by uh Robert Freeland at the uh at one of the conferences that that I've seen him at. Uh and what it shows here, you're looking at copper mined throughout history. Okay, so 4,000 BC all the way until 2020, 700 million metric tonses were mined and that you know that was used for the industrial revolution and and all of our growth, World War I, World War II, etc. And if you take that steady state growth and kind of project it out in the next 22 years, we're already 5 years into that, we're going to need the same amount of copper uh that we've mined in the entire history until recently in just 20 years. So the whole of history's worth of copper in 20 years. That's an incredible amount of consumption of refined copper that's additional to what we already have. So that is a that is a slide on its own. That's a story on its own that tells you that the demand story for copper is incredible. This does not take into account the electrification theme that I mentioned and it's definitely does not take into account the AI theme which has just emerged as I said in the last couple of years and this is a forecast from 2020. So but it's a very nice page. It explains that. Here's something I just again whipped this together five minutes while we were on the call preparing. But look at this. This is the per capita consumption of power around the world in kilowatt hours per year. Check that out. USA 13,000 kilwatt hours per person per year. Okay. Uh Australia, France, Germany, these are these are good numbers. China and Turkey and India, Pakistan, they're all going to go up. So USA 13,000. Now let's look Africa 150 kilowatt hours per year per capita. Okay, that's uh USA is 90 times that number. Why is that significant? So, how many people are there in Africa, Jesse? >> A whole lot. >> Okay, exactly. Over a billion. And and I'll show you a nice little map here. This is the world. And uh I would I would ask you to guess, but I'll just tell you what you're looking at here is the fertility rate around the world by country. Okay? under two means you're having less than two kids per couple or per per whatever and you're you're getting uh below the replacement rate which means that your population is declining. Guess who's declining? It's the west. It's USA, it's Canada, it's Australia, it's even China is now in decline. India has passed the replacement rate. So all of these places the population is declining. Economic growth is driven by populations declining. Where is growing? Africa. Africa is the only place on this map that you're going to see a boom. Okay, there's some Asian enclaves in here. But broadly speaking, we're talking about Africa, big population already. It's going to get even bigger and the per capita electricity consumption is only one way to go, which is up. Okay. And it's starting on a low base. So I think this is going to be a big driver of um power demand but also power supply because we have big big big sources of renewable energy in Africa. We've got the best uh wind resource globally in Kenya. We've got the best hydro resource probably globally in the DRC. Uh and I can go on and on. The best solar is in the Northern African Sahara. uh and so I think we're going to see a lot of power generation, a lot of power consumption, but most importantly a lot of copper coming uh demand and supply coming out of Africa. This is another way of looking at the same data and it breaks down the population by world region. Okay, so we're sitting somewhere here 2020. Okay, see a lot of Asia in there. That's mostly China and India as you know and you got South America, North America and Europe. Now look what happens to these ones. Uh but if you go out 100 years and and look where all the additional population is look here we're at 2020 all of the incremental population out 100 years more or less is coming out of Africa okay so this is a big big trend raw population growth plus per capita consumption increases in electricity I think it's huge so that's that theme that I mentioned the second thing is the AI theme again we're on page one. So everything you see here consider it preliminary and subject to multiple like I would say three four 5x in the next few years. Okay. So power demand from AI this is from Bloomberg again just chucked it out of the internet but global data center demand power uh power demand outlook by market. Okay. So here we are sitting in 2025 and look we're going to 4x power demand in the next 10 years. I think this is underbaked significantly significantly. Um here's another one. Open AAI planning to 125x their energy capacity in 8 years. This would mean using more than India's energy capacity today. Okay, pull this off Twitter. You can get the source here. Peter Gostev uh look here 2025 they want to have 23 gawatts of power capacity. Okay, 230 megawws and they want by 2033 to have India's worth of power gen and that's just one AI company. So, and that's just today. Have we seen compute go down? Have we seen power use go down? They never go down. They only go up. That's the rules of silicon. That's the rules of um you know computers and software and processing and power and that's how it always works. Okay. So, these are big big trends. Um some some are projecting here this guy H he's the CEO of uh I believe it's the chip the chip manufacturer um not Intel the other one ARM ARM by the end of the decade AI data centers could consume as much as 20 to 25% of US power requirements okay so uh this is huge and apparently a chat GBT search requires the amount that takes to turn on a light bulb for 3 minutes. Okay, so that's not stopping me from using it, but I'm just saying look, this is a big thing. This is the supply side. We'll get into that in a bit, but basically I see demand, demand, demand, demand, demand from all angles for copper. And then the obvious question is where is the supply and can it be substituted? >> Yeah, that's a great uh presentation there. And I do want to talk about the supply side for a moment because mining obviously a very hard business. We've seen a bevy of problems hit the copper mining sector this year so far. I'm going to read a quote from ABC News. It says, "Earlier this year, flooding at Ivanho Mines's Camoa Kalúa mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an accident at Cadelo's Elentiente mine in Chile, and protests at Hudbay's Constansia mine in Peru were among major disruptions to global copper production. More recently, seven workers died after an 800,000 ton mudslide at the Grasberg block mine in West Papa, Indonesia, jointly owned by the Indonesian government and Freeport Mack Ban. On top of this human tragedy, it's estimated the mudslide will remove 591,000 tons of copper production from the mine. So, in addition to these problems, there's simply not enough new copper mines coming online as well. So, taking all of this into consideration, where is all the needed copper going to come from? >> Um, those disasters, by the way, it it it doesn't sound like they're few and far between, right? These are some of the biggest copper operations you you just named. El Teniente Kamokula which is Robert Freedelland's um very very successful mine Grassburg one of the biggest copper gold mines in the entire world when you say you know a few people died it's it's tragic anyway but the the thing they don't mention is that's one of the biggest copper mines in the world and when you've got an open pit and then you've got a mine underneath it which is what I believe they're doing I'm not a mining expert but underneath there they're block caving so they've got you know they've got lots of tunnels and shafts under there and they're blasting and mining from under this open pit and a huge amount of rock and mud slides into the open pit. You're shut and it's going to take a very long time thinking about moving all of that again. When you're mining and you move dirt or you move rock, you're making money from moving it, right? In proportion to the ore that you're moving when it's all just waste and crap in there, you can't move it out at it's extremely expensive. Okay. So, multiple um minds go offline and they're not quick to put back online. Okay. They're very very expensive and take time to take uh off to turn back online if at all. And they might find that uh because of technical reasons and safety reasons, they they have to actually shut that entire segment of the mind regardless of which which one we're talking about because it's actually not really possible. you know, you've got like, let's say, a mud buildup, you try and remove some and it unleashes another wave and it's actually extremely difficult problem to solve. So supply can go off any time and not just because of disaster but because of what you said you see in Hud Bay that was a social issue and so what you're seeing also is jurisdictionally people protest they want more money. Uh we had that sad story of um there was a West African country that took a couple of gold um mining employees hostage. Um, and they're still, I think, captive. So, where is the copper coming from? It's coming from either brownfield expansions, existing mines like Grassburg, where they look and they say, "Look, we've already mined all of this. Let's go a bit deeper. Let's go a bit this way, that way." And they pull together more supply. Okay, that is happening. It will happen more. Um, but it's not a guarantee. And it's getting harder and harder. It's getting deeper. It's getting more dangerous. and uh it's not it's not necessarily going to be the source of all the supply. Then you've got recycling obviously and that's where you got all those guys ripping out your power lines and um selling them back to the the copper companies and that's always going to be I think a small portion of the overall supply. Then you're going to need new green field copper discoveries to make up the balance. Okay? and they're going to have to fit so many different criteria that it's going to be quite difficult. Um, so first of all, they have to be substantial in size. They have to have good grade and they have to generally be in a place in the world where you can mine without the company's people being killed or natural disaster striking. That narrows down the field considerably. And so in the last 30 years of copper exploration globally, um, all of the millions and billions of dollars that have been spent, the best copper discovery has been in a place that you wouldn't even imagine that people are looking for copper, which is in the high Andes, uh, at 5,000 m elevation. Right? That's the kind of place that most people would train, you know, for three months to six months. I'm going to be going I'm going to go to the top of this mountain. I'm training every week. This is where they found this discovery. 5,000 mters elevation in the Andes. It's called Filo del Soul. So, uh, and so 30 years worth of work and that's the best discovery. It's very large, large scale copper and gold. It's in Argentina and Chile. These are two very good jurisdictions for mining. And so it starts to fit the criteria. Large scale, good grades, good jurisdiction, and there's many, many, many others. But then once you found it, then there's still a very long road to bringing it into production. And for those of you who are not familiar, the reason that is is because contrary to popular understanding, the mining practice is actually very rigorous on environmental studies, on technical studies, safety, suppliers, and good standards. And that all takes time and they're heavily heavily regulated. And to pass through all those hoops, finance, and build a mine can take decades. So it takes decades to find. This discovery was the best in 30 years. and it takes decades to build. So, we're not rushing out and supply is just not coming on board that quickly. But I showed you charts that show demand is coming on very very quickly. So, when those two things collide, what you generally see is a price increase, short-term, midterm, and long-term. And so, that's what I think we're going to see. Having said that, I'm not an expert. And do your own analysis. >> I thought that was a great breakdown and and a perfect segue to now discussing Motz Metals. So why don't you start by giving us an overview of the company? >> I mentioned to you that the biggest copper discovery of the last 30 years was in the high Andes at 5,000 m and it was substantial. Here it is on this map in the red is circle that discovery. It's called Filo del Soul and that was bought by the biggest uh couple of the biggest mining companies in the world uh for 4.5 billion Canadian dollars earlier this year. And that's because you don't find these things. So once they get found there's a lot of competition among the big mining companies to buy such discoveries. Okay. So that's right here uh on this high Andes mark between Argentina and Chile and our project the company that I run Motes Metals that is located directly next to this Filo del Soul discovery. So we're we're next to it and uh we're part of that same trend. And the reason that's important is in these type of copper deposits they tend to occur in clusters not alone. Okay. So as as proof of that you can look anywhere in a portfree they're called districts. So there's one, there's sometimes another many, sometimes there's many. Uh, and in this case, further a field from from Fil Soul, just a bit further north, you've got another one called Lunowasi that today is on the on the stock exchange, if you were to buy that stock, uh, the overall market cap of it is about 5.4 billion Canadian dollars. So it's worth even more than the biggest discovery of the last 30 years. So we're in a we're in a district. The district has yielded multiple multi-billion dollar discoveries and we're looking to try and make another discovery uh right next door which is exactly where you'd want to be looking. >> Could you walk us through the team behind Makotes Metals, how you plan to leverage their expertise and maybe start with yourself and and your own background and how you became CEO of the company? >> Sure. Yeah. Uh my look my background is a bit is a bit uh varied. I uh spent a lot of time doing different things. my path before I came to mining. I grew up in Africa and spent a lot of time in Africa. You can see that informs some of the thinking I have on on on how the future is going to unfold. But then I spent my you know 20s working in tech in Australia and uh helped a number of startups there including the biggest e-commerce startup in Australia as a consultant and uh started a few smaller startups. That wasn't for me. I I moved into McKenzie and company. It's a very large strategy consulting firm that uh helps the biggest companies in the world. Uh in that capacity I was consulting with the biggest bank in Australia, the biggest telco in Australia, the biggest oil companies in Australia. Um some of the biggest mining companies of Australia and uh you you know you kind of understand and get a get a view of their biggest problems and how their top team uh and executives work and operate because you're generally contracted at that level to to that kind of uh client. Uh so I was there for a couple of years and I saw that this thematic was unfolding where uh materials generally like natural resources generally are um going to be required in abundance and discovery of them are is basically is underinvested or not well invested. So there was a lot of scope in my in my view at that time to get involved in the resource industry and and get involved in discovery. So I initiated with a with a couple of others a company focused on mineral exploration. That was about 10 years ago now. And so we started looking all around the world uh in Africa, in Australia and everywhere and started smallcale exploration uh projects um and in that and while you're doing that you meet very good geologists, geoysicists, technical professionals and you build a network. So that's what we did u three years ago. Um just over 3 years ago when Flo del Soul made this big discovery we were able to leverage some of the people professionals that were working with our team to do analysis uh from satellite imagery of the broader district. So you know we took imagery from commercial satellite providers that included this whole area and we're able to use computer programs that classify the types of uh rock based on shortwave infrared imagery that's that's available to purchase. Then you create mineral assemblage maps and we could see that there's extensive alteration continuing on trend from Filo del Soul, our neighbor, all the way down to the south. And so because we saw that that was the first step, we were able to then start making moves to acquire and do deals to build together this land package of exploration licenses and put the company together in its very early days. And as part of that, we brought in some of the really uh some of the really accomplished technical people in the geological world that have worked on uh these kind of deposits in South America and have worked in discoveries all around the world and we put a board and a team together that that was purpose-built for this and raise capital and last year we went public and and now we're about to go and drill some of the targets we've developed over three years of work here. And that is some exciting news coming out of the company that you put out last week, an announcement that you will be commencing drilling of key priority targets at Floss SU. Can you walk us through the details of that and what you hope to accomplish? >> Yeah, sure. Uh I I'll keep it brief. Um but essentially we we spent three years here. I'm just going to run through some of these. Uh to to give some context, that was 3 years ago when we put the company together. What we inherited was a as a project was like fragmented landholding. So we put the land holding together. That's why we have the full strike projection of this trend. When we initially started this this land package was not together. It was probably in maybe 10 different hands. 10 different entities had all of this land package. Now we've consolidated it. That was step one consolidation. Okay. Then we went in and this is this is again for context. Our project right next to the biggest copper find of the last 30 years. We went in and did extensive sampling uh at the surface, thousands of rock chips and soil samples and mapping and identified new areas that had never been drilled of of mineralization of of anomalous copper and gold. Those targets are marked in the black on this page. Okay. So, uh what you'd see first glance here is that a number of these have never been drilled and that means that there's an opportunity there to make a discovery. Second thing you'll see is there is some drill holes. But what I'll tell you is that those drill holes were were on average the majority of them were less than 600 meters. Okay? So pretty shallow where there was drilling and and a lot of new stuff has come out of our work. So we've spent about 20 million Canadian dollars in the last 3 years doing this surface sampling work doing the consolidation extensive rock chip sampling as well and geoysics. Geoysics is is where we use electrical signals uh and magnetic signals or basically punching power into the ground and getting the responses and modeling in 3D which parts of the of the rock are conductive or resistive. And at Felo, the neighbor, the big discovery, it was a big tool. It was a tool that helped guide their discovery. And so we're treasure hunters. We're looking to do the same. And we've got geohysical uh data sets that are telling us look there's multiple new targets here that have yet to see a single drill hole. So uh so three years of work went into this. We've got and the reason is if you look at the terrain it's aggressive. Like we're in the mountains. We have to put in 60 kilometers of new tracks. We had to put in field camp. I'll show you our field camp. It's pretty hardcore. There's our field camp. Um you know containers. It's winter. uh it's you know it's it's cold it's high up and the culmination of all that work is new exciting drill targets and the drill targets are being drilled in the next couple of weeks. So I don't know if that answers your I can't even remember what your question was but we're >> just details on the drill program what you hope to accomplish. we hope to make a big discovery and we hope that one or more of the targets we've developed could become something like the neighbor or even whatever uh it could be more it could be less could be multiple um and so that's the thing it's it's unknown in in exploration until you drill uh and indeed you may need to do multiple rounds of drilling it's not necessarily going to be just one uh but if we are successful we could get a 20 or 10 or five it could be 100 times our value depending on what we find if we make a discover discovery and so our goal here is to make a discovery. We've done everything we can in terms of analysis to do that. I won't bore your viewers with too many technical figures on that, but I would say that we've done our homework here. We've spent a lot of time and engaged the best technical minds in the business and we happen to be situated in a place where we know there's the potential to make multi-billion dollar discoveries. And we're today valued at around hund00 million. So you do the math, there's plenty of upside there if we find something of note. Let's talk about the company's current cash position and any debt obligations, if any. I'd also like to know how much of the treasury is being used for this upcoming drill program and how you plan to potentially raise capital moving forward as needed. >> Sure. A lot of questions. We've got about 25 million Canadian dollars in the bank. Okay. The U that's for for this business wellunded. Uh and so in the in the coming exploration campaign, we expect to use about $15 million, leaving us with, you know, significant funding still in the bank after. So this is a first phase. If we're seeing encouraging results in the drilling, if we're making a discovery, expect uh commensurate response on on our share price or our cost of capital is essentially our share price. And we would we would be able to attract more capital to do more should there be a discovery. So that's how we're thinking about it in a phased approach. So we start out with a first phase here. It's about 5,000 mters of drilling and we'll go from there. Uh to date we've been able to attract some very uh competent exploration focused funds and investors and so a number of them are on our corporate presentation. You can take a look and we've been able to also attract a very important family office to come uh on board which is uh one of the better known business families in Argentina. And they've come in for about a 13% stake in the company and they put $9 million in to get that stake. And so we hope to enjoy ongoing support from them and the funds that support us. And together those two pieces make up about 40% of the company. So when we need to raise capital, we we do have some numbers that we can call um you know to to help. >> And does the company have any debt at present? >> No, not maybe you know like you get an invoice on Monday and you pay it on Friday, but that's that's like a trade payable. Yeah. >> Well, let's end by opening the floor to you. Is there anything that we haven't yet touched on or anything you think it's important to emphasize that potential shareholders of Motest Metals should be aware of? >> I've made I made clear my views on the supply demand dynamics of copper. U what's interesting to me is that although you know there's the earth is big and there's plenty of opportunity for discovery elsewhere, it really is that there's a few places that have yielded u high quality copper discoveries. In fact, I think I have a little page on that somewhere here. Yeah. Major discoveries in the recent decades are few and far between. And what's important here for me is to understand that the big discoveries there isn't multiple places that they are. There's really in the last 30 years there's one place where the big discovery was one place. That place is next to us. Okay? So we are singular in our location. We are unique. We are exploring next to the biggest copper discovery of the last 30 years. There is no other company uh that's situated like us on trend to such a monster discovery. They may be in a good place. They may be exploring but it's it's it's it's really there's only one seat next to this location and we're in it. And so I think it's it's one that you should pay attention to. Whether we make a discovery or not, that's up to the gods and to nature, but we're doing whatever we can to make it happen. Well, I will put a link in the description below to Motus Metals website as well as social media so people can follow along with the company. Alan, this has been a fantastic conversation. Really appreciate you coming on the show. >> Thanks, Jesse. >> Commodity Culture is a series on commodities and natural resources. If you would like to see more, be sure to subscribe and hit the bell notification so you're always up to date with the latest episodes.