What Goes Into A Mine Restart? (Guest Aurélien Bonneviot, Robex Resources)

Karl Woll: 00:00:00

Hello, and welcome to Rock Talk, where we explore the world of mining through casual and non-technical conversations with industry experts. I'm Karl Woll, Senior Account Executive at VRIFY Technology. And in this episode, I'm joined by Aurelien Bonneviot General Manager of Strategy and Business Development at Robex Resources. Robex is a west African gold production and development company. In this interview, Aurelien takes us through his background in the mining industry. And then we do a deep dive into the restart of the Kiniero Mine in Guinea.

For myself as someone who doesn't have a background in mining, I wasn't too sure what goes into a mine restart, but I think I had a bit of a misperception in that it should be fairly straightforward, in that a lot of the mine engineering, the mine site layout, the infrastructure and so on would already be mostly established.

But I found this to be a fascinating conversation with Aurelien because that simply just isn't the case. And he did a great job of explaining all the challenges that Robex has faced in bringing the mine back to life. And I learned a lot in this conversation with Aurelien. If you have any feedback or suggestions for the show, guests or topic ideas, there is a link in the show notes to a feedback form, or you can go to rocktalkpod.com. And that same form is on the website. And with that, let's jump into this week's conversation with Aurelien Bonneviot.

Hi, Aurelien. Thanks for joining me today. How are you?

Aurelien Bonneviot: 00:01:31

All right, good. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Karl Woll: 00:01:33

Yeah, thanks for taking the time. I'm excited to learn more about, Robex and I particularly want to dig into the Kiniero Mine and how construction is advancing. But before we jump into the company and all that good stuff, I'd like to learn a little bit more about you, Aurelien.

Would you mind starting off by giving us your quick background into the mining industry? How was it you found yourself in the mining sector? And what has your career looked like up to this point?

Aurelien Bonneviot: 00:01:58

Yeah. Thanks. It's, I'll try to try to keep it short. So I've, I have a finance background. and as I started in the finance industry, I ended up in mining almost by, the lights were around and I just stumbled across mining. I thought he was a lot more interesting to travel in exotic places than working in a bank and in an office.

So that's literally what got me started at the beginning. And they got hooked. Started working for a bank, covering the big company names. Started talking to CFOs and CEOs of the big mining companies. and then I went down the food chain, as we say, and worked with more and more junior mining companies.

Then I moved to a trading, a physical trading company in Geneva, who got acquired by the Chinese company. Then I got hooked on the whole junior mining sector. Then started investing in the sector, worked for a private equity fund who were also investing in a junior mining space. And then, which led me to where I, where I am today, working for Robex, trying to, to build a company from virtually nothing and a claim in middle of the jungle.

So, and now it's too late for me to go back. I'm hooked. It looks like forever. So been here for 15 years and I love it.

Karl Woll: 00:03:10

I had a similar start to my, career in sales and technology sales in that I thought I wanted to be in finance. And I saw when I was going through college, it was like 18, 19, 20, whatever it was. I started working at a bank as a bank teller, and it didn't take me long before I realized that wasn't the career path I actually wanted.

And I found working for smaller companies, more fast paced, a lot more challenges to be, to more exciting as well. So I got a very similar start, although result slightly end result

Aurelien Bonneviot: 00:03:39

No, no, no, it's, it's all a different path, but yeah, it brings lots of other challenges, stress, and everything else that's, you never rest on your laurels as well. So it's quite, it brings a bit more energy and small companies, obviously, and even more in mining, which is even more risky.

It's similar to tech in a way, it's a high risk, but it could be high reward sometimes.

Karl Woll: 00:04:01

Yeah, exactly. And when you look at the success rate from the number of companies and projects out there to the number that successfully end up constructing a mine, it's obviously very low, probabilities at the end of the day, very low success rate. So it's exciting to today. It's actually one thing I wanted to talk about was Robex and what goes into constructing a mine site, that's obviously very relevant for Robex these days.

So, by by way of transition into that discussion, could you give us the background on Robex Resources? Just a very high level overview on the company and where things sit today.

Aurelien Bonneviot: 00:04:35

Of course. Yeah. so Robex has been listed on TSXV for a very long time. In the nineties, done lots of different things as most mining companies have done, The last, really turning point for Robex was the acquiring of licenses in Mali. We went from, you know, going through exploration, Feasibility, Pre Feasibility, Feasibility to put it in mining construction, and actually operating it, so it starting production in 2017 and it's been running up to date about 50,000 ounces in Mali. So we went through this a bit on a much smaller scale than Kiniero. We went through the whole cycle already, and we're crazy enough to think we can do it again. And that's what we did for Guinea. We went to another country, start from scratch. and this is where we, where we are today.

We are trying to build, or building actually, building a Kiniero Project, in Guinea, in the Kouroussa Prefecture. So if you have a look at the VRIFY slide deck, we are in Guinea. So, Guinea Conakry where Rio Tinto is building the big iron-ore project. you can see here on the map.

We are in the center of the country. So it's, roughly 600 K inland, we're doing by transportation and obviously reaching to improve that with a railway going through. But we're still flying there or it's, it's quite a remote site and we, this is our property that we, we developed.

So it's a previous operating site and we've tried to restart it and expand production with an expanded resource that we've been drilling for, for four years now, since we took it from the government. So, yeah, that we've got other neighbors to trying to do the same as us. A bit earlier stage.

You've got Predictive Discovery to the north of us. You've got Hummingbird, which is in production actually, and Resolute as well, who's on the east side of our property that you see here in yellow. That's Kiniero, in a nutshell. It's about 3.2 million ounces today that we've expanded and we're bringing it to production end of next year.

Karl Woll: 00:06:26

And if the mine was previously in production, what goes into bringing it back to life? So how long ago was the site in production? And then what is that process like? Because I guess you're not starting from scratch. There must be some infrastructure, obviously, that is there. And, perhaps just need some care and maintenance and some refurbishing to bring to life.

And there's probably aspects of it that need to be completely new infrastructure that's constructed. So what does that look like for this particular project?

Aurelien Bonneviot: 00:06:53

Yeah. No, I mean, first of all, you asked me also what it takes to build a mine. I think, you know, even if you think it's similar country, you've done it once. It's never the same when you try it again. So you have to first restart from scratch and you're right like we have very fortunate to have a lot of infrastructure in place.

You look at some of the picture on the, on site, it's a site that's been mined for 10 years. You can see here, you've got some, some old pits, from the Semaphore days. You obviously have all the infrastructure that we've been renovating for quite some time now. So the camp is fully, pretty renovated. So it's, it's kind of a, that's the benefit of having a restart. It's like you don't have to sleep in a container when you start, from nothing, you've got actually a full-fledged camps. You got, you got roads. We started building. You can see on the background here, there's an airstrip, here.

We see the construction area, lay down area and the, that's the plant that we building right now. So first of all, that comes after two years of extensive work to, you know, renovate all this, it's not easy.

It was 10 years in a jungle. So as you can imagine, when you, when you arrive on the site, you've got, you know, everything grows really, really fast in West Africa. Most of it goes to waste. But there's some infrastructure that stays in the concrete slabs and some of the trucks were running.

So the mining fleet was there. There's some old spare parts. There's been an extensive, almost like a Sherlock Holmes hunt of what's on site. You know, clue by clue, you start opening a door and look what's inside. Cause there's no, they hand you the keys.

That's it. So you've got to go through like a proper inventory process. No geological data as well was sent over to us. So we have to relog all the core. We had to acquire all core. We had to fish around for information of previous owners as well, which some of them were happy to give us for free. Others will. Ask us for, you know, a service in return. So there's, there was a lot of, aggregating to make it a project. So, you know, that's first, before you even start building it, it's just making sure you've got robust data that haven't been tampered with, or haven't been, you know, modified or checked or stolen for some, some, cause it's spent 10 years in the jungle being guarded by 10 people and it's pretty, it's for, you know, 350 kilometers square.

So you can imagine that, you know, 12 security officers we're not really on top of 350 kilometers square. So lots of things were missing. And so that's, before you start building, that's what you start. You need to start doing collating all the data and making sure you get a strong enough project to make it work. And then comes the second biggest problem is finding a team to do it. and if you look at all our history, since we acquired the project, we recently did the very successful raise, but previously, the reason why we had to change the management team and the board, because not many people believed we could do it.

Despite us having done it once in Mali, but you know, the market's been different, Guinea is a different country as well. You restart from scratch. So we brought a whole construction team as well, as part of this financing to show investors and bankers that we can deliver it. And the team that's available to do that, there's only a few in West Africa.

It's a very specific skillset that's required. Because as you can see on the pictures, it's not really, an easy environment to work with. and not everybody's willing to Canadians would prefer to have roasters in Canada. Australians prefer to have roasters in Australia, which leaves Africa with, you know, it's far, it's hot, you've got snakes and spiders and all that.

Australians do have some spiders as well, but, you're, stuck on, Africa for a long time. So the rosters are very long. It's very difficult. The labor is, there's not that many, the level of skill set also is different. So all that, it's a lot of preparation work.

Even thinking, building it. So that's even before you get the money to actually do something on site. And then once you've got the team, and then once you get the money that we have now, then you have to convince banks that you can build it. And that's where the fun starts, where they try to challenge you on every step of the way from your mining, your geology, how you collated the data back then.

As you camp, they want you to have the planning. They want you to have all the permission. Yes. I have everything ready, the insurance, and then they give you the money. And then once you've done this, then you can start building the way you think it should be built. And they come to you, breathing down your neck every single month.

So you should have done this. You should have done that. You should have done this. But it's part of the game. You know, you, you lend money to, if you look at, compare this to a mortgage. You know, mortgages, the house is there, it's built, you lend money to someone that's been here for 20 years.

Here we're talking about, if we go back to the VRIFY deck, you know, we're still talking about a mine in the middle of the jungle and they 100 percent rely on us. The whole community relies on this mine. No other businesses around. The whole road, the whole market in town.

Everything relies on you. They just have nothing else. You know, it's either this or going, artisanal mining and that's it. So you've got a huge pressure and you've got to build everything yourself. It's electricity, power, bring everything on site. And you in literally in the middle of of nowhere. There's gold for sure, but not much else.

Karl Woll: 00:12:17

Yeah, that's incredible. Thanks for outlining some of the challenges of the restart. And for the layman, you maybe hear, 'Oh, we're just restarting an old mine. You think maybe you show up, turn a key, and it starts operating again'. But when you see those visuals...

Aurelien Bonneviot: 00:12:30

Yeah. You know, no, you know, we had to dismantle the old plant. That's what people were saying. It gets easy to restart a mine, but there was a full grown up tree in the middle of tank. Right. So like, you just can't, it looks great from afar, but when you walk in, It could cost you more to refurbish than building from new.

It's pretty similar to a house, right? Like there's some things that it's not even worth renovating. like We operate differently today as well.

You know, the way they operated 10 years ago, it's not the same. And what the market wants to see and what we can afford to finance is not the same as it was 10 years ago.

Karl Woll: 00:13:04

And how is technology transforming the way mines are built and operated now compared to in the past?

Aurelien Bonneviot: 00:13:11

Think like for West Africa, there's no infrastructure, nothing. The only thing they've got. The thing that they all have is a smartphone and, they all have connections. so something we've been able to do very, very basic, but during COVID where nobody could travel into Guinea, we were core logging in WhatsApp with someone in New Zealand, people in London, people in Canada, giving their own kind of a thumbs up on what they think they will see on the high resolution pictures. So we, we sent smartphones with high res cameras on site, which, you know, the top end Samsung or Apple would do. and you get, you get extremely good. I mean, it's not as good as having a full team on site, but it helped us a lot to get going.

So that's, that's just on a day to day and we get, we get. I mean, connection with sites every single time. Now that, there's a, we'll be starting very soon. You've got a high-speed connection as well. So, you know, all the tools that we have, that we using right now, or that we're using any big corporate is available even in countries where there's nothing.

So we can, I can talk to my colleagues in Guinea anytime in Mali, anytime they can see me, we can talk, that, that changed massively, the way we run things. And the, you know, Why, why traveling, to, when you've got people on the ground that you can trust, it saves a lot of time and money. So that's definitely in terms of managing country from afar. And you look at the way mining is run. It's in Africa. It's either you were based in Vancouver, where

I believe you are, or you're in Perth and you manage an asset in, in Africa, like if you had no connection, it's not possible. So that changed a lot.

Then you've got also, particularly for Africa, because the average, I said the average education is pretty average. So to bring all the skillset that you need internally and to teach them and to upskill them, there's a lot of things that are done online. That's all the training for all the specific tools, all the database, it's very quickly to roll this out, with technology, having service.

This actually, believe it or not, it's the first thing we did when we took over the site. There was nothing. And we just put servers and internet connection. We doubled it because without this, you can't have cell phones. You can't have, you know, for safety. You can't have communication. You can't see what's happening.

All our purchasing team is on site. So if they don't know what to pay, which bank to pay, who to contact, like the whole site stops. So before knowing if we had goals, we, we had servers and people were thinking we were crazy. But the first guy on site was, was actually an IT manager. I was like, we need to get this running cause once this gets running, it's okay. And then, and then I think, you know, if you look at, on the operation side, basically for geology, with technology, you can have, like, I'm thinking about your geological database and logging on an iPad. It removes all this uncertainty. And so this bias that we've got, when you log in the middle of the jungle is 40 degrees, maybe you stumble on a scorpion or a snake.

And then you just, you know, but if you have an iPad, at least you can still, while you're struggling and walking around, you can still log properly. So it, you know, it helps guiding the guys as well. And they're, they're learning, Oh, I don't see this on there. Why? And then help get some more structure where usually it's all on paper, you know?

So you imagine you there, it's the pen doesn't work. It's like half of the year, it rains like crazy, but when you're not used to it, it's just difficult and to get consistency on data to de risk your construction, you need to be on top of it.

and you can't have someone just throwing out a paper, missing a cross. And he thought he was this, but it was, it's not this. And, and then the whole logging is wrong and then you have to relog it and you have to ask the guys to take it out of the shed and you waste a whole lot of time. So, I mean, on that way, technology like speeds up things Massively. And then it kind of, people don't like when I, like, you're not removing skillset from site, but you can afford people that previously were working on site, you know, we have long rosters, like six, three rotation, six weeks on three weeks off. Having a good, you know, with the scarcity of labor force in the world for mining, you can have someone in London or in Vancouver, anywhere in the world, as long as it's got good connection, you can do mine planning.

Doesn't have to be on site, which previously he had to, because he had to talk to everyone, but now you can have skillset wherever it's required in the world. And then, and then bring it to site and immediately people on site have access to people that would never come to site.

Some of them might never come to site as well. That's another problem is, you know, the experts of somewhere in the world needs to upscale the people on site to make sure they, one day they become irrelevant. That's the whole game we're playing. So people can run the mine themselves. So, that's what's helped a lot.

Karl Woll: 00:18:08

So sounds like a lot of the technology around communications and being able to design and operate a mine remotely have impacted the ability to move things forward at a quicker pace.

Aurelien Bonneviot: 00:18:20

Definitely. We're not, we're not there yet as a, in West Africa. We're not there and we're not like Canada or Australia where you've got autonomous trucks and shovels and, and like optimizing the pit, but like, that's not there yet, but just the simple communication changed a lot. It's a leapfrogged in West Africa from back in the day.

So it's pretty amazing.

Karl Woll: 00:18:40

And so for Kiniero, I believe construction started in 2022. Correct me if I'm wrong. What is the current status and when do you plan to have finished construction?

Aurelien Bonneviot: 00:18:51

So, we planning to be in production in first pour is the end of 2025. So end of next year, we, we actually paused construction for a couple of months because we found more gold. So, which is a good problem to have at the end of next year.

last year. It's a, it's, a, it's, yeah, it's, it's very, it was awful.

Again, to go back to your point of technology, the geo from London looked at the satellite imagery, we flew LIDAR across the whole site, geochem, people were bringing up geochem, it's like, there may be something here, interesting, and we continue drilling.

And, we found this, and then we say, hang on a minute, that continues down south, and we found this at the end, we found, we, we confirmed what we thought was there, at the end of last year. And so it's actually a million ounces more, that, that we have here, which sits outside of the Feasibility Study.

So what we've decided is like, hang on, we do need to build a bigger plant. We do need to build a bigger team. We do need to bring a bigger, more money in. And we need to pause this because we don't know how big this thing can be. And we want to build the best plant that fits the deposit we think we've got.

So that's why we've, we've upgraded massively the plant. We're probably going to go for a 5.5 or 6 million ton, which is six times what was mined previously by Semaphore 10 years ago. So, because obviously gold went up, but, but we found a lot more gold. So that's, that's what, that's, what's, really exciting.

It's, it's going to be a big mine, long life and the long, long, long deposits. lots of other things you find on the property.

But we, we, we sitting next to Bankan, which is over here. So 5.5 million ounces deposits. We've got Resolute here, we'll be putting a resource out very soon.

We've got Hummingbird up north, which is a million ounces and you've got us 3.2 million ounces. We've got geochem anomaly. This is just what we've been mining and all the rest around is what's ready to be to be discovered. So, there's been extensive geophysics, extensive geochem.

And we excited to see what's further up north, and I'm sure there's going to be, there's going to be a lot more than what we, than what we've got. So, very, very excited to see what this, what this mine holds for us in the future.

Karl Woll: 00:21:01

Yeah, that's, that's really exciting. Thanks for taking us through everything today, Aurelien. I really appreciate your time. I know it's evening on a Friday for you. So I appreciate you speaking with me. So we'll leave it there for today.

ancement of construction into: 2025

Aurelien Bonneviot: 00:21:29

There's a lot, there's always more to find, but at some point you have to stop and build something and make money. So that's what we, we said, that's, that's it. That's 6 million tons. That's what we're going for. And then, you know, then in life's long, it's a long, it's a long, long asset.

So we'll have plenty of time to discover what's on our property. So, that's us. Thank you. Thank you very much for your time.

Karl Woll: 00:21:51

Yeah, thanks Aurelien, really appreciate it and I hope to catch up with you in person soon.

Aurelien Bonneviot: 00:21:54

Absolutely. Thank you very much. Have a good weekend as well.

Karl Woll: 00:21:57

You too .