Minesplaining and Effective Stakeholder Engagement (Guest Chris Stevens, Coda Minerals)

Karl: 00:00:00

Hello, and welcome to Rock Talk, where we explore the world of mining through casual conversations with industry experts. I'm Karl Woll, Senior Account Executive at VRIFY Technology. And in this episode, I'm joined by Chris Stevens, CEO at CODA Minerals trading on the ASX under ticker COD. This conversation was originally recorded as a video interview on May 23rd, published on YouTube. As there are some visuals that were shared on screen during the interview, I do recommend you watch over on our YouTube channel, if you can.

And I'll put a link to that in the show notes. That said, I've made some edits to the audio only version of this episode. So you'll be able to follow along just fine.

In a few parts where I've chopped out a significant section of discussion, you'll hear this fancy sound effect. In this interview, Chris talks about his background in mining and some of his very impressive personal skills and hobbies. Chris then walks us through his thoughts on how junior miners can better communicate with investors and some things they can do to stand out in a busy marketplace. Chris also takes us through a high level overview of the Elizabeth Creek project.

And does some mine-splaining on the characteristics of IOCG and sediment hosted copper deposits. As this is a new podcast. I'd love any feedback you have. If you have suggestions for improvements to the show or guests that would be great to have on or mining 101 topics you'd like to see covered, there's a link to a feedback form in the show notes, 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 Chris Stevens of Coda Minerals.

Karl: 00:01:43

Chris, thanks for joining.

Chris: 00:01:44

G'day Karl, thank you for having me on the podcast.

Karl: 00:01:47

Yeah, of course, it's a pleasure. I'm excited to talk to you and get to know you a little bit, better. And yeah, just to start things off, I want to talk about some of the updates to the Elizabeth Creek Project and some of theinitiatives have underway, but before we dig into that, just want you to learn a little bit about you, Chris, and your background and specifically how you got into the mining industry and your career up and up until this point.

Chris: 00:02:09

Yeah, look I have an unusual background, probably quite different to a lot of the CEOs and MDs you'll speak to in these kinds of sessions. I grew up in the UK. Probably I was talking to our analysts who grew up between the UK and Malaysia the other day. And, you know, it was saying until we came to western Australia, I don't think either of us had ever really fully considered where the products that make our world come from. You know, grew up in, in that cool Britannia, 1990s, everything was knowledge economy.

well. I moved to Australia in: 2007

Karl: 00:03:07

And what were those early days when you after the School of Mines and your time in Australia? What was the early part of your career with once you got into the mining industry?

Chris: 00:03:15

So the early part of my career was primarily in management consulting. I worked in market entry for a lot of companies when I, when I was in China. Some of those included sort of back in the early 2000s, companies involved quite heavily with the mining sector. So that was my first touch point into the industry.

I negotiated, or helped negotiate iron off takes. So I speak fluent, almost native level Chinese, read and write as well, but also had some numbers background from the economics, which meant that, you know, I started to really get into that side of things. When I moved to Australia I continued working in management consultancy and private equity and ended up running business development departments.

se at the time, so from about: 2008

Karl: 00:04:20

Yeah, I think that's so valuable. And living in Vancouver when I was in university, I took 100 level and 200 level Mandarin at university just just for fun. And I spent a few weeks uh, actually a month in Beijing at on a foreign exchange type of program. I had the opportunity. So I think in my, my heyday, I could passibly get by with very, very basic conversation and could write about 500 characters.

But I've forgotten it 100 percent of it. So I won't even try to talk to you and in in Mandarin.

Chris: 00:04:49

Well, my wife is a professor of oh, I'm sorry, not professor. She's a senior academic in both Chinese studies, migration, sociology, but she speaks pretty fluent Mandarin as well. And for a while, we, we only ever used it to speak to each other in front of the kids when we wanted to say something they, we didn't want them to understand but my, my daughter is actually learning Mandarin and getting quite good. So that that's gone now, unfortunately.

Karl: 00:05:12

Yeah, it's it's one level above pig Latin, I guess, once they get old enough.

Chris: 00:05:16

Exactly. She learned the word for ice cream very quickly. It was like, should we turn for ice cream? She just knew. So yes.

Karl: 00:05:25

And I also heard from a mutual friend of ours, Lou at Investor Hub that you have an impressive background in martial arts. Could you elaborate on this?

Chris: 00:05:35

With that, obviously background in other martial arts really helped. I'm a third Dan Blackbelt now in ITF and world silver medalist at the Kazakhstan World Championships last year. Been selected for Australia for Italy next year and just come back from the national championships where is the national champion patterns and the silver medalist inspiring as well.

So it's been a real passion. My daughter's the double national champion and my son is gold and silver like me. So at about 140 competitors. So it's been a real family thing and it was never really expected to be that way. It's just something we fell in love with really deeply and have all done. Then also do jujitsu as well for that sort of ground game.

But it, to me, it's just the easiest way to stay fit as you get older without having to think about it too much.

Karl: 00:06:40

Wow, that's, that's really impressive. So speak fluent Chinese, martial arts master. And I also know a little bit from our conversation before we hit record you do quite a bit with music and audio engineering. And I've seen on our previous conversations, a number of guitars in your background. So you're a musician as well.

Is that correct?

Chris: 00:06:59

Uh, It's probably stretching it. I'm definitely an amateur, but I play guitar and bass, primarily bass. I, at the moment I'm playing with a jazz band that does sort of the Sunday morning sets at little festivals around Perth and I'm just getting into a Metallica tribute act with another mining CEO, Don Smith from Tempest Minerals, who, is both a guitarist and martial artist.

So we have a lot in common. Met at one of these conferences. So that's been, that's a bit of fun as well.

Karl: 00:07:28

That's the trifecta. There can't be too many CEO or, or mining executives in, in Perth who are also martial artists and, and musicians. So

Chris: 00:07:36

The funny thing is, I mean, well, I know of two for an absolute fact. And I know the corporate counsel of one of the companies around the corner is I think a black belt in jujitsu and pianist as well. As there's a few, I think exploration is a really tough game, right? I think there's a mental fortitude there that you need.

If you're going to be any good at it. It's extremely hard. You fail far, far more often than you succeed. You keep going and you know, as I say, it needs a lot of tenacity. And of course, music and martial arts are exactly the same mentality, which is just constant forward progress, hard work and repetition, and the ability to frankly deal with discomfort. And I actually think they're perfect analogs for each other. I did joke a while ago that getting kicked in the head is a perfect um, qualification for being CEO of a mining company or exploration company. And certainly being able to take challenges and really focus is hugely important now. So it's, it probably isn't as rare as you think.

Karl: 00:08:33

Okay. Well, I guess, especially the last few years, that's a good training analog. So anyways, you're painting the picture that between all these skillsets, you're not the kind of guy who's spending a lot of evenings on the couch watching too much Netflix. So thanks for all the, the background, Chris, that's really interesting stuff.

And then I'm moving into a Coda Minerals in the Elizabeth Creek project. Timer on the clock. 1 to 2 minutes. Can you give us a quick sort of background on the project and where things currently sit?

Chris: 00:08:58

Absolutely. The old one, one to two minute elevator pitch is always challenging with these companies because there's so much going on. But the simple the simple description of Coda Minerals is located in South Australia six hours north of Adelaide. We're right bang on the Stuart Shelf.

We're next to Carapatina, one of the world's largest copper projects, just down the road from Olympic Dam and next door to Oak Dam West, all of which are now owned by BHP. Of course, it's not just near-ology. We have over a million tons of contained copper equivalent in JORC, primarily JORC indicated resources.

So that's the sort of one up level of confidence, a high middle level of confidence in the resource. That's enough to obviously be able to finalize a mine plan and to publish an NPV under the JORC and ASX rules. We have put out a scoping study for our three deposits. There's two open pits. The underground deposit alone is the 11th largest primary copper deposit in Australia, so it's very large.

We are advancing into a PFS. At the same time, we have significant amounts of exploration on the ground. We took the relatively unusual decision to publish a scoping study. That's equivalent to a PEA for North American viewers. And we did that before we'd sort of completed exploration. And the reason is that there had been some question around the mining and processing of what is in somewhere like the DRC or parts of central Europe are very normal deposits. But in Australia, it was quite unusual. So we wanted to prove that and show that we have processing and mining pathways to extraction. And we've done that. Next stage is more exploration and also the, in the basement, which I guess the hugely exciting. bit of exploration. We have a separate deposit completely, which is unusual to say the least.

The best summary for this thing is it's 700 square kilometers of tenure, and there is an enormous amount of copper on this tenure.

Karl: 00:10:51

Yeah, I guess I'd love to dig into those sort of the completely different type of deposit that you have, or the two types of deposits. But one thing I want to ask you, Chris, was looking at the mining sector at large the TSX. is a major hub for miners as is the, the ASX and each has, I don't know, depending on who you ask and how many are active versus maybe a little bit dormant.

There, there's a lot of them out there. What are some things that you're doing or that you think junior miners just broadly speaking can do to stand out with the general investor base and to better communicate the the prospects of our projects and what we're excited about and what we're doing?

Chris: 00:11:33

Yeah, it's really tough. I mean, there is no doubt this is very crowded sector in terms of companies. And one of the things I find interesting, you know, WA School of Mines, trained mineral economist. I've got significant experience leading feasibility studies, which are literally the way that you value a pre development mine and have worked as an independent expert valuing mineral projects.

And yet I go to a conference, there's 150 companies there. And you know, I probably only have some level of expertise in analyzing a small percentage of them. A lot goes over my head. And you look at retail shareholders and even relatively sophisticated funds and professional shareholders. And how, how do you tell what makes a good company?

And what I'll say is, you know, my own personal investments, I have a self managed super fund. I have a significant amount of that in CODA. I have a lot of skin in the game and that's because I understand this company, what's, what we have and what's going on, and therefore I feel that that is relatively safe investment for me, even for my retirement future.

Where do I put the other money? Well, generally, it's where I understand that the team and it's obviously not just about the CEO or Managing Director, they're the most visible person. And I usually worry a little bit when they're the only visible person as well. It can suggest a very large ego or a very small team behind them.

But you know, how do you rise above? Well, the first is the team I, in some ways I would rather lose money in exploration, knowing that this is a risky game with a team that is absolutely given it their best then, you know, take risks on projects where I don't feel the team is doing the right thing. So how do you understand the team?

Well, social media is a huge part of that these days. I was talking to someone this morning, he was talking about social media and mining, and the reality is no amount of social media is going to change what the rocks are in the ground. But if it changes your understanding of how the team is approaching those rocks and approaching exploration, that's huge to me, absolutely enormous.

And so at Coda, we, we do a lot of social media. We've started a podcast called the Codcast and our ASX ticker is COD. And that's really about making sure everyone gets to know the team and there's only five of us. So you're limited how, how much exposure everyone gets, but really getting a little bit of the behind the scenes.

What are we thinking? What are we doing? Why have we put this announcement out? What does it mean to us? What do we hope to do next? And that's the level of insight, which I have never seen before in a small explorer. Most of my investments where I know the MD or the exploration manager personally, and therefore have some kind of insight into the kind of human beings they are and the way that they approach problem solving.

And so I'm trying to give everyone, anyone that wants to spend 15 minutes on YouTube or Apple podcasts or Spotify, that insight into who we are as people. And I think that is important. So that's one side of things. It's about access. It's about visibility. It's about understanding how people are going to work within the very real constraints of capital, the very real constraints of market and so much that you can't control and the real constraints of never really knowing what a drill hole is going to give you.

municating and we hit in June: 2021

But IOCGs, especially very famous in South Australia. When they're large, they tend to be enormous. And so Carapatina is about 4 million tons contained. I'm not sure what Olympic Dam is, but it's significantly more than that. So these are huge world class deposits. Now we hit something that looked like very much like that.

The board was frankly on my back. And so, so with shareholders to say, how do you explain this? Right. So let's say you've got these social media, right. You're, you know, you, you CEO, the face of the company speaks well at conferences, hopefully, and you have a good ethical, hardworking, trustworthy team.

How do you then explain what you have and what you might have in the future? Because that's again, fraught with all sorts of challenges. You're dealing with things in, in case of 400 meters below the ground, 800 meters below the ground. Distances, three dimensions. You're also dealing with JORC communication rules.

You can only say certain things based on what you've already found. And we, I stumbled across, I mean, I get 10, 15, 20 cold emails and calls a week from various IR firms. They're bane of my life half the time, because most of them just want to do a five minute video interview with you for three and a half thousand dollars.

And the answer is absolutely not. But VRIFY came along and we, you know, I nearly didn't take the meeting and I'm so glad I did.

So I'm just going to flick over to the VRIFY. Which I believe is recording right now. And you can see here, you know, we have our standard slides. We have the introduction that's just comes out of PowerPoint. Then what we've been able to do. So all the normal PowerPoint stuff, a company does where it is your maps, your directors and bios and things like that are there. But what we've been able to do with VRIFY is use things like 3D information so we can zoom in. So here's your tenement location. You can annotate it.

You can show where things are. So one of the beautiful things about this is the ability to go underground and show people the drilling. So you can see here at Windabout, we've got all our drilling loaded in. You've got the resource base. You've got the ability to move that in three dimensions.

So just the ability to show that. Can you imagine what we did before was effectively just a static picture. There's one that we used so much, I think it still haunts my dreams. So the ability to actually look at this. You can see all the drill holes in here. And then just one last thing, which is really interesting.

Kind of exciting. Three years ago, we hit this IOCG in the basement. So the yellow and orange is at about 400 meters below the ground. That's pretty easy mining in underground mining terms. You got your lateral forces being spread very nicely by the sandstones above it. When you get down to 800, your life starts to get a bit harder.

It's you, you're dealing with bigger pressures, different geotechnical challenges, heat, and obviously the time to get down there. So if you can do something down at 800, it's gotta be pretty special. And what we found is pretty special. I mean, some of these grays, three, four percent copper over decent meterages.

What we haven't found is this all linking up. So again, these little blue things are not necessarily where the mineralization is exactly. They're shells put on around it by the software. So what do you then do is overlay the geophysics.

So in VRIFY what I can say, and I can annotate this very easily as well as I can say, well, we know there's one of Australia's largest copper deposits up here. We know that there's some incredible grades, albeit patchy down here. And then you can see these contacts along the gravity in the sediments over a huge area.

That remains completely undrilled. And, you know, it would be, I think, foolish to say that the likelihood that there's no more copper when you've got such incredible grades down there is, is, is very unlikely indeed. We would either be the luckiest or most unlucky group in the world for that to only be, the intercepts of where the one original hole we drilled and then followed up on. So you asked me a question, which is how do you communicate this stuff? In my opinion, this is how you do it. This is the gold standard. There is no better way to do it. And this mimics very much the professional software that geologists use when they're actually interpreting this.

This is obviously at a more basic level. But isn't it wonderful?

Karl: 00:19:34

Yeah, thanks for taking us through that, Chris. That's super interesting. And then at the deposit at the top, that's been you showed us the phases of the underground mining. It seems like it's quite flat. Is that normal for this style of deposit?

Chris: 00:19:49

Yes, it is extremely normal for sedimentary copper cobalt deposits. So what has happened here geologically, and I'll resist the temptation to do what we call minesplaining which is where you groan on for, for an hour, or about boring geological concepts. But very simply, it looks to us what we understand, this is is the earth is effectively sort of split apart and tilted creating a basin. Now that's almost certainly part of the event that created the deeper mineralization. And that's almost certainly part of what's known as the Olympic event, which happened 1.59 billion years ago. And roughly a billion years later, all of this stuff is filled up with organics, a little bit like an oil and gas deposit. Copper is subsequently flowed up, probably unrelated, it's probably another mineralizing event. And the fluids have come up, they've hit this

organic matter. That's created a redox reaction and the copper and cobalt just dropped out and as it's come through, it's dropped out obviously where the organics are richer and where you've got the potential for that to happen. And so you've got a structural thing that dropped down, created a basin, stuff's filled up, copper's gone through, that stuff is conducive to dropping copper out, but obviously it's happened in a relatively flat dimension because of the way that that basin is and the way that mineralizing environment has formed in that's fundamentally different to, you know, a lot of copper deposits or a lot of gold deposits, various other commodities, all of which have different depositional forms.

But the interesting thing about this is really common. Like Kamoa-Kakula, one of the world's coolest copper deposits owned by Ivanhoe in the DRC. It's just a massive version of Emmy Bluff in many ways. You know, I should say full disclaimers. There are also many differences. But from a geometry, from a from a, you know, these are very common. The other one that's really common and really interesting is the Kufa Schaefer, which means copper shale. I've got this wrong on the podcast the other day, thinking it means copper blanket. But it's often called the copper blanket. It's so big, it crosses geological, it crosses international boundaries.

And again, is this huge flat blanket of copper that's formed in shales that goes all the way from Poland into the North Sea, where they use it as markers for oil drilling. So I feel like I'm getting into the realms of minesplaining there, but it's actually really interesting, like how these things form.

So you asked me a simple question. Is it common they're flat? In Australia, no, really not. Overseas. Yes, extremely common. That probably holds us back a bit because Aussies are familiar with Aussie stuff.

Karl: 00:22:23

Interesting. Well thanks for mine- splaining that a little bit. That, that is super interesting. And you know, I got to admit it was a bit of a leading question when I asked you, what are the things you can do to stand out in in a busy marketplace? Because I've seen some of the work you've done and I saw the, the, the CodCast, by the way, I do like the cod, the the fish cod is just now your mascot.

I appreciate that.

Chris: 00:22:45

Our exploration manager is a lovely guy and just, just such an art. We've worked together for five years, but he is like me, an enormous nerd. And so he's, his workstation has got dinosaurs on it, but Matt being very precise, this is how precise Matt is. He has humans for scale so that you know how big the dinosaur would have been.

Karl: 00:23:04

Gotcha.

Chris: 00:23:06

This is the kind of exploration manager you want in a company, someone with that attention to detail. But the cod was on him. It just turned up in the room and I hadn't even noticed it.

Karl: 00:23:16

I can only assume they're 3d printed as well.

Chris: 00:23:18

Yeah, it's a special place to work at times. Fine.

Karl: 00:23:25

Well, thanks for taking us through that. I did just want to say, I think you guys are doing a great job of communicating through through the podcast through the tools like Investor Hub and other things that you're doing. The social media content that you're putting out. And I think you do a great job in your presentations as well.

So it's a pleasure sitting down today and thank you for taking us through the Elizabeth Creek project and educating us, I picked up most of what you took us through. I'll probably have to watch it again and pick up a few more tidbits, but it was really helpful and I appreciate you taking us through that today, Chris.

Before we, yeah, absolutely, before we end our conversation today, is there anything else you wanted to put out there or just for, for people to, to follow you on certain channels, anything like that?

Chris: 00:24:08

Yeah. Look again, as I said, we really try and make ourselves accessible. So info at Coda Minerals comes codaminerals.com, I should say, it comes through to me. We have X, LinkedIn, our YouTube channel. The podcast is available on Apple and Spotify as well. YouTube is probably the best place because it's a video like this one.

Yeah, I mean, I, I just I suppose, you know, I was interested in asking yourself as well. You're obviously hosting this podcast. What are you, what are you looking to get out of this? What are you doing with this? What are you noticing in terms of the people you talk to?

Karl: 00:24:40

Yeah, it's a bit of an experiment. So I think this is episode five. And what I'm trying to get out of it is, is two things. One is I'm trying to learn as much as I can about this industry. I'm about two years deep into my career at VRIFY. And it's my first foray into the mining sector. So, yeah it's like this bottomless wormhole of just interesting, never ending, complex concepts that I'm just trying to wrap my head around. And the best way to do that is to just have conversations. So it's an excuse for me to leverage the relationships I get to build in my day to day job with people such as yourself and just pick their brain a little bit.

The other thing I want to do is provide content that is educational. So not just for my own education, but educational to a broader audience. So people that are maybe like me, they work on the fringes of mining industry or are in the mining industry, but don't have a technical background or a background in geology. Or maybe you're looking at investing in the industry and just sort of don't know where to get started other than, you know, buying the major sort of producers kind of thing.

So having content that's relatively jargon free. We can sort of learn a few things in each episode, keep the content concise and and then I also want to learn about the people. So at the start of the conversation, like we did today, I find it interesting to go back and not just jump right into a pitch of the company, but learn about the people behind the company.

And you said it in this conversation and almost one of the things I always hear when I'm either I'm talking to people, or when I'm listening to podcasts whether it's, it's Rick Rule or whoever has been in the industry and has a ton of knowledge and the thing they always go back to is mining is always about the people. Follow the people who have been there, done that, that have track records and that you, you trust and like, and if you don't know anything else about mining, just follow good people, find those people and follow them. So I'm just trying to learn about the people in the industry and you know, get those stories out there. There's always an interesting background to everyone's foray into the industry and a bit about their personal lives as well. So I just sort of want that to come out. So trying to encapsulate all that in a 15 to 20 minute conversation and put it out there and see what happens.

Chris: 00:26:49

I think that, yeah, there's, there's a couple of things you've, you've raised, which are really smart. I mean, people is everything. And, you know, Tim Goyder, right. He's a bit of a legend in the industry now, but he was 20 years older than I am when he had his first big win. And I remember seeing an interview with him in the AFR and he's saying, look, this is a tough game.

You're going to fail far more times than you're going to succeed. And it's about coming back. I think he used the phrase buying as many tickets in the exploration lottery as possible. And again, you know, to my mind, the true success is doing things safely. Doing things ethically, doing things on time, doing things on budget, delivering what you're going to tell the market you're going to do.

And if it fails, I actually think the market shouldn't punish you as hard as it does. And I think people should say, look, wow, that was a really well run program. We're looking forward to seeing you have a, your next. And there are a lot of investors who have that view. It's, it's about backing the right people.

And you know, I could talk for hours on some of the negative sides of the industry and the way that people don't always do the right thing. But that one's really interesting to me. The second one You're talking about is that knowledge, right? You've got a knowledge bias. That was a phrase from Nova, who obviously works with you yourself.

And I sometimes say to our geologists, you know, you go, you go to the doctor and you've got a headache and the doctor says, okay, well, I've got this thing. It's, you know, it will inhibit the COX 2 enzyme in the body which has an analgesic effect, but it can also potentiate other analgesic drugs. So if you take, are you looking at the doctor and saying, What are you on?

What are you doing? I just asked you a headache. Give me a tablet. And I, I think geologists are terrible for this. Absolutely terrible. You know, partly because it's interesting, right? I find how Emmy Bluff and Emmy Deeps and all of these things got together terribly interesting and I think if you've watched this far in a podcast you probably do too.

But we are terrible at that knowledge bias. I don't care. Just tell me what you're trying to do. Tell me what that's going to achieve and tell me how much it's going to cost. And you know, we'd do a lot better if we got better at that communication piece as well. So I like these podcasts cause I think it certainly helps people formulate those ideas and get that education as well.

Karl: 00:28:55

Yeah. I appreciate that. I think that's always a fine line to tow is, is. trying to recognize who the person on the other end of the conversation is and what their level of background is as a starting point for that conversation. There's certainly people that you can fully nerd out on the geology with and go way into the technicals.

And there's some people that it's just gonna they're just not there yet, such as myself. So I appreciate it when I can always dial things back and come at it and approach it from a more fundamental level.

Chris: 00:29:27

Thing I'll say is the best sales people are not necessarily the best or most ethical explorers. And so, you know, there are some great communicators who are also great explorers, but there are some, there are, there are more great explorers who are terrible communicators. And I think that's an interesting one as well, you know.

I think if boards were smart, they'd often replace the CEO with just like an absolute trained actor. And well, I think that would be a terrible thing to do, but you know what I mean, from a promotion point of view, what you want is someone with their finger on the pulse of what's really working, but can also explain it.

One day I hope to learn how to do the explanation side of things. Well, but it's you know, it's an interesting observation anyway.

Karl: 00:30:10

Yeah. Well, no, I think you're doing a great job. Well, we'll leave it there for today, Chris. I really appreciate your time and yeah, I hope to connect again soon and maybe I'll, I'll find my way over to Australia sometime this year in the not too distant future and we can, we can catch up in person.

Chris: 00:30:24

Brilliant. We'll get you on the, we'll get you in the codcast room if you come to these shores, be careful

Karl: 00:30:27

All right. Absolutely.

Chris: 00:30:29

Thanks

Monica: 00:30:31

The information presented should not be considered investment advice and is provided for educational purposes only. Please consult a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions.