Drill Targeting with Traditional Methods and Modern Tech (Guest Claudia Tornquist, Kodiak Copper)

Karl Woll: 00:00:00

Hello everyone and welcome to Rock Talk where we explore the world of mining through casual conversations with industry experts. I'm your host, Karl Woll, Senior Account Executive at VRIFY Technology. And today I'm joined by Claudia Tornquist, President and CEO of Kodiak Copper.

Kodiak is advancing the MPD project in British Columbia, just about three hours drive east here of Vancouver. And the project sits in the Quesnel Trough, a well known copper belt that runs through the southern part of the province.

laudia and I discuss Kodiak's: 2024

How do companies think about allocating resources to drilling and exploration? Without further ado, let's jump into this week's conversation with Claudia Tornquist.

Karl Woll: 00:01:23

Claudia, thanks for joining me today.

Hi, Karl. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, of course. And I guess I'm especially appreciative that you're able to join because I understand you just had an accident very recently and had a minor procedure done.

Claudia Tornquist: 00:01:38

Well, I got kicked by a horse and sadly broke my leg. And so I had an operation earlier this week, and I'm now limping around on crutches. But it's all fine. It'll heal. And it doesn't really impact my work. And so, yeah, I'll get over it.

Karl Woll: 00:01:56

Oh, that's that's horrible. I'm sorry, Claudia. Is that a long time hobby of yours then, horse riding?

Claudia Tornquist: 00:02:00

Yeah, I have been riding for many years and all my family, my children, my husband, we're all horse riders and yeah, I'll be back on the horse in the not too distant future.

Karl Woll: 00:02:12

Well, glad to hear it wasn't anything worse. And yeah, today really was looking forward to talking to you about a press release that Kodiak put out last month regarding your 2024 exploration plans. Before we dig into that, just want to continue to learn a little bit more about you if that's okay.

So transitioning, I guess, from some of your hobbies and horseback riding, would you mind giving us a quick background on your journey into into the mining industry?

Claudia Tornquist: 00:02:39

I'm by training an engineer, mechanical engineer, and I studied in Germany where I grew up and then started my professional career in the automotive industry. Then after doing an MBA and working for some time in finance, just as I was planning to go back into the automotive industry, an opportunity at Rio Tinto came my way through a headhunter. Before that, I had never considered the resources industry. I had no touch points with it. I didn't know it, but I went to the interview and yeah, the rest is history. It was a very interesting role, so I took it. And stayed for almost 10 years for Rio Tinto and then switched to the junior sector, moved to Vancouver and have now been in the junior sector for more than 10 years.

So overall, I'm now for 20, 21, 22 years in the resources industry. And haven't looked back and it's a fantastic industry. I love exploration and the excitement of it. And so yeah, just one of these things, how, how life works out.

Karl Woll: 00:03:49

Yeah, and that's that is really interesting. And what was that role with Rio Tinto? The first role you were headhunted for?

Claudia Tornquist: 00:03:55

Well, it was a sort of financial commercial type role in business evaluation, where I would do sort of evaluation, commercial evaluation of big projects. And I did other roles in business development, M&A, strategy, those type of roles for Rio Tinto. So my background is mostly the business side of things.

And yeah, not a real engineer as my original training was, but the MBA sort of drove more what I then did professionally.

Karl Woll: 00:04:27

And then what drew you to the more junior side of things, and then what made you make the leap over to Canada?

Claudia Tornquist: 00:04:34

Well, at a big company like Rio Tinto you are a very small piece in a big machinery. Even as a senior, I was at the time General Manager, your area of responsibility is still quite narrow. I look back fondly at my time at Rio Tinto and I learned a lot, but I just came to a point where I felt I wanted to work in a more entrepreneurial environment where I really can see the difference I make.

And that's what prompted me to leave Rio Tinto behind and move to Vancouver with my family. And Vancouver, of course, is the world's biggest center of junior mining activity. So I've, I made the switch to the juniors and then eventually met Chris Taylor just as he had started what is now Kodiak.

And we started working together right from the start. And that's where I'm now with Kodiak.

Karl Woll: 00:05:33

That's great and I totally can relate to that. I've worked for companies with say, 30,000 employees. And even if you really enjoy the job, at the end of the day, you kind of feel like you're just a cog in a wheel. And if you were to leave the company, it would continue to churn without you.

But when you would go to a small company see what your impact is, can be felt and can be made. So again, I can appreciate that. And that's why I've always worked for small sort of tech startup type companies here in Vancouver myself. Thanks for that background. Would you mind giving us the 1 to 2 minute general overview of Kodiak Copper for those who may not be familiar with the company?

Claudia Tornquist: 00:06:08

We are a copper exploration company, and our main project is called MPD, and is in southern British Columbia, in an existing mining district, which is a big advantage because we have all the infrastructure and everything there. And we started drilling there in 2019, and were fortunate to make a discovery in our maiden drill program, a zone which is now called the Gate Zone, nice high grade large porphyry center, and have since drilled big drill programs every year, executed big exploration programs and significantly moved forward the project and have now multiplezones of mineralization that are kilometer scale, some with nice significant high grade zones, some with mineralization right from surface, and we continue to build critical mass.

To move the project forward so that it eventually, that's our vision, can become a major mine.

Karl Woll: 00:07:15

That's great. And taking us to the current news events, as I mentioned last, I think it was last month, you put out a press release on your 2024 exploration plans for the project and correct me if my numbers are wrong, but I think there's 24 target areas identified in that plan alongside nine additional targets that were identified with VRIFY AI.

e high level overview of that: 2024

Claudia Tornquist: 00:07:54

Let me just take a step back to explain what we have at MPD. It's a multi centric project. porphyry system, large piece of ground, 226 square meters, and we have two clusters of porphyry intrusions on the property, one in the northern, one in the southern part of the property, and each of those, and that's quite typical, have multiple intrusions and multiple mineralized zones.

And the first one we discovered, where we made a high grade discovery, was the Gate Zone, and we have since drill tested several other zones on the property with the aim to add to our inventory of mineralization and prove multiple zones of mineralization. Find more high grade and just show how big the system is.

So that's the general overview. And as you said, at the moment we have 24 targets identified. Some of them are targets we have drilled already, eight of them to date. Some are targets that were built historically. Others are targets where we've done regional exploration, geophysics sampling, et cetera, and have identified new targets.

And so last year we drilled five of those targets. This year we'll do the same and we'll, yeah, approximately five. And it will be very exciting. Some of them are targets where we have already mineralization and we will just make the zone that we know already is there bigger and with the aim to prove more high grade and more near surface mineralization.

And then some of the targets we have, for example, the Blue target is a brand new target. And so it's very exciting because it has the potential for a brand new discovery. So it's a mix of sort of high confidence targets where we make an existing zone bigger, and then some that are new areas and exciting discovery potential.

Karl Woll: 00:10:03

And when you look at exploration and just like very general terms for a junior explorer, how do how is that approach typically taken? So we had a campaign in 2023. We found some new zones, we found some things we want to follow up on and continue to drill and see if we can expand those zones.

But there's, you guys have a very large land package. broadly broken out into north and south. How do you continue to explore to find new zones or areas of interest that you might want to expand into or drill test?

Claudia Tornquist: 00:10:31

Well, that's a big question.

Karl Woll: 00:10:34

Yeah, probably is right?

Claudia Tornquist: 00:10:35

And well, exploration at the end of the day is all about data and probabilities. When you start out with a greenfields project, you know very little of what's in the ground there. So typically your first step is to look at information on the surface. You might have things like geological maps, government data, and then you go out and explore and you look at things on the ground, take samples, and find areas that have anomalous concentrations of minerals, in our case copper. Then once you've identified those areas you then often do geophysics, which allows you to look into the ground and the underground and just see what's going on and where there might be anomalous areas.

And once you identify those, then you take the truth machine, i. e. the drill, and you poke a hole into it and see whether you can show mineralization in bedrock. Now, in our case, MPD is a project that was explored by many, many people before us. It had historic exploration over the span of decades, drilling almost 400 holes.

So we had already a large body of information and we had already areas that were historically drilled where we knew that there is copper and gold mineralization present. So we had very much of a head start. It wasn't a greenfield scenario at all, but it's essentially looking at all this information and then identifying those areas which have the highest probability of mineralization, where there might be copper on surface, in the soils, in the rocks, where you see a big anomaly with a geophysical survey, and now we obviously also have the AI system as another exploration tool, which gives us another way, another tool to identify prospective areas.

And so if you have a number of data points that all point to a certain target, then that's the one you're going to drill next. And hopefully find some nice high grade mineralization and lots of it.

Karl Woll: 00:12:59

So with the existing targets and or traditionally identified targets, I should say, and those AI targets, I think there's over 30, we live in a world of, unfortunately constrained by time and money. So I imagine you can't drill as much as you would like in any given season.

So we're probably not going to drill test all those targets. How do you specifically target you know, what are the next two, three or four areas that we're going to actually drill. And are there any insights you can give into what will be done this year? And when sort of news flow can be expected tocome out as a result of that.

Claudia Tornquist: 00:13:36

Well, you raise a very important point, which is you have particular with the project. like the one we have, a large porphyry system. You can't drill everything you would want to drill because it would take a long time and a lot of money. So focusing your work on the most prospective targets and making these choices wisely on where to drill and when to drill. That's really key to your exploration success. And yeah, for this year we have, as I said, a number of targets that we have prioritized where we believe we have a very high probability of finding more mineralization, finding high grades, finding near surface mineralization.

called South, Adit, Mid, and: 1516

So that's a low hanging fruit. We will certainly drill more this year, particularly there are some areas where there is already some historic drilling. Nice high grades near surface. And so it's a very high probability target. High confidence target, I would say, where we think we have a good chance of, finding high grade, finding long intercepts of copper minimization.

So that's one of the areas we focused on. And then there's some which are new as the one I mentioned before the Blue target, which is a brand new target, which we've identified in our regional exploration work, and we'll also intersperse some drilling into targets like that, because that's obviously exciting to make a whole new discovery.

That's really what the market appreciates. And so I'm looking forward to drill those targets, too.

Karl Woll: 00:15:54

And looking specifically at the AI targets. So Kodiak Copper was one of 4 companies that was joining us at VRIFY early in this initiative which we launched earlier this year at PDAC. I was curious, how has that process been? I heard Chris in a, another interview that you and Chris had done earlier describe it as, as using VRIFY AI a little bit as flying the machine while you're building it. I was curious how this additional, tool has used internally by your team of geologists and the company. What has that process been like as it is something that is sort of new to the process and what have those discussions been like? Were there surprises? I'm just sort of curious what that's been like internally for the team.

Claudia Tornquist: 00:16:40

I think Chris reference of the building the plane while you fly it, was simply to express that this is really new technology that's only really just being commercialized. And we are one of the first companies taking advantage of it for our current exploration work. And I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to use this leading edge technology. And I can honestly say that, the work over the last couple of months with the VRIFY team, as we were sort of building this, AI model, was very, insightful and really gave us new information, new ways of looking at things, new insights that we probably wouldn't have, had otherwise.

It's a very iterative process. So we first fed all our exploration data, all the sampling, geology, geophysical, all the data into the AI engine. And then the engine essentially chews all through it. And then that's very much what a human geologist does. It looks at areas where several data points sort of are anomalous and then identifies those as a target. And so we got lots of targets out of that work. And some of, some targets we had already. Others that were entirely new. And it was very much of an iterative process also. We got targets out of an AI run, looked at them, some made sense, some didn't. So we looked at the data that went into it and identified some data that was maybe missing, put that in, looked again.

So it was very much of an iterative work of like throwing lots of computer power at the data. And then our geologists, looking at the outcome, making sense of it, doing another run, adding some data, et cetera, et cetera. So, but out came, a number of target areas coincident with existing targets where we had already identified an area as a high priority exploration target, and so did the AI system.

And that's, of course, very good, because at the end of the day, exploration is all about probabilities, and just having an additional data point gives us a lot additional confidence that this is the right target that will be successful with it, that it's worth testing. So that's the one side of it. And then on the other hand, and that I find almost, more exciting or equally as exciting is that, out of this AI work came a number of new, what we call areas of interest that we hadn't previously looked at. As you can imagine with a project that's 226 square kilometers, unless you have an army of a thousand geologists to comb over it takes some time, years to really walk the entire project. Look at the ground. Look at the rocks. So it's a very sequential process.

And every year in the past, we've identified maybe two or three new areas of interest, new targets, and have then brought those to drill readiness. Now, with this AI work, we have very quickly, very efficiently, just by using all the computer power inherent in the AI system identified nine areas of interest where we will now this year go on the ground and check those out further and take some samples, look at the rocks, maybe fly them or do some geophysics and just see whether there's actually something there.

And that comes back to what we talked about before, the prioritization. And that's where I think the AI work also really, has real benefits. Had we done the work in a conventional way, it would have taken us years to identify those various areas. But by using AI, we have them now. So we can go out this season, look at all of them, and pick the best ones.

Some will probably be nothing. Others might be really interesting. And to have like all these areas of interest early on, be able to look at them all at the same time, that makes our work a whole lot more efficient because we'll be able to pick the best targets early on. So very much looking forward to checking out those new areas of interest that were generated by the AI system this year on the ground.

Karl Woll: 00:21:23

Yeah. It's really interesting to see going through the press release you put out, and I will put a link to that in the show notes of this episode for anyone who hasn't seen that yet to to find and, and click on and read through it. Just the images and the visualizations of some of the targets that are so adjacent to areas you've already been drilling, or we're already target areas is really interesting to see. And then the other areas where they're completely distant from anything else that had been previously targeted. So I'm really excited and curious to see how your campaign progresses this year and would, would love to have you on maybe later in the year to to have a revisit on this discussion if you're up for it.

Looking, looking beyond: 2024

Or how does that tie into the longer term vision and goals for Kodiak Copper?

Claudia Tornquist: 00:22:17

That's a good question. It's really about our strategy and that ties back to the type of project we are exploring, porphyry, copper, big system. And if you look around the world, porphyry mines, which are the vast majority of all copper mines, they are big mines with many hundreds of millions, many billions of capital expenditure to build them and mines that run for many, many decades.

And the companies that run them are big companies like BHP, Antofagasta, Freeport, not the juniors who discover it. So what you typically see in the industry is the juniors do the exploration work and then eventually once that's been successful, the project has been de-risked and there's visibility that there is mineralization, significant amounts of mineralization enough to make a mine that's suitable for a major, then the majors come and buy up the exploration company. So that's what you typically see. So, for a company like Kodiak, I don't think as much as I would like to, that I will ever get to build a mine, but if we keep having success, then a bigger company will come and want to acquire us and our job as Kodiak is to generate as much value as we can at the drill bit so that for our shareholders then at the end of our work there's a nice big check.

And that's really about showing the size of the company. Of the project showing that we have high grades and demonstrating, proving that the project has the potential to become a major mine in the future. So that's what our work is about.

Before we end our conversation here. Thanks again so much for your time. Just wanted to go back maybe full circle to the beginning. So your journey into the mining industry was a little bit like mine in that it was serendipitous or sort of a, maybe a random walk.

Karl Woll: 00:24:20

I don't have the 20 years of experience in the industry that you do have about 2 at this point. But was just curious as you, dug into your time with Rio Tinto and started to learn about the industry. Was there anything that you found particularly helpful to obtain knowledge just to learn more?

Is there any advice that you would give to someone like me or others watching that might be in a similar situation where they're in the industry or on the fringes of the industry and want to learn more about it?

Claudia Tornquist: 00:24:46

That's a difficult one because it's a very complex industry. What I found helped me a lot really understanding the industry is just looking at lots of different projects and industries. Like when I was at Rio Tinto, we would look at potential acquisition targets. And would look at lots of different potential companies and their projects, trying to understand them.

And I think just sort of seeing all the different projects, commodities, project types, et cetera, that are out there, that in itself was very educational and at the end of the day gives you really yeah, a well rounded background and the ability to judge when you see something new, whether it is a benefit or not.

And so, yeah. I think it's just keeping the eyes wide open and look at everything that's out there.

Karl Woll: 00:25:37

Great. Well, thanks again for your time today, Claudia. I really appreciate it. Wish you lots of success as you continue advancing the project this year. And I do hope your leg has a quick and speedy recovery as well.

Claudia Tornquist: 00:25:51

Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.