Louw Smith
Analyst · National Bank
Thanks, Paul, and good morning. Starting on Slide 8 at our Skouries Copper Gold Project. While tier 1 was primarily focused on earthworks, Q2 saw construction work commenced in multiple areas. Going forward in Q3 and Q4, underground mining, mechanical piping and instrumentation in the main plant will continue to ramp up in addition to the construction of the filter plant building. Overall progress is 76% when including the first phase of the construction, and we remain on track for first production in Q3 2025, with commercial production expected at the end of 2025. Detailed engineering has advanced and is now at 72% complete, and procurement is substantially completed. Work rigorously continues to ramp up on the construction of major effort structures, including the haul roads, water management ponds, low-grade stockpile, primary crusher, process facilities, filter plant facility and the integrated extractive waste management facility, the IEWMF. Productivity improvement initiatives by the earthworks contractor, including adding a partial second shift has yielded significant improvements, including optimizing cycle times for the fleet as well as improved sequencing of material placement and quality control activities. On the critical path is the filter plant facility, which continues to advance. We expect to abort the filter plant construction contract in the next few weeks. The filter press plates continue to be preassembled with 225 now completed out of a total of 588, and during Q2, the fabricated frames for those plates arrived on site. Work in the mill/flotation building is progressing well. Commissioning of all overhead claims were completed during the second quarter. Construction, lighting, scaffolding steel and concrete work are all on track. In addition, off-site pipe spooling fabrication and contractor mobilization continues on plan. Work is also progressing on the underground development to support test stope mining in 2025. We awarded the second contract in Q2 which includes the test stope work as well as additional development and services work to support the development of the underground mine. The contractor mobilized to site and the first blast occurred on June 17. We have also completed the earthworks to allow access to the coffer dam site during the second quarter, and construction has now commenced. In addition, the low-grade ore stockpile full placement has also started. Moving on to Slide 9. During the second quarter, capital investment at Skouries was $92 million, almost double the first quarter spend. This brings our year-to-date spend at Skouries to $144 million which is in line with our expectations as the spend is expected to ramp up significantly as mobilization and the site labor increases over the second half of the year. We remain on track to meet our guidance for investment in Skouries in 2024 of between $375 million and $425 million. At the end of Q2 2024, we had 841 personnel on site and are still on track to ramp up to 1,300 by the end of the year. The next few slides will slow the advancement of the work underway. Turning to Slide 10. On the left-hand side is the primary crusher. As planned, the upward obtaining walls are now completed, and it is expected that the first part for the concrete slab for the base of the crusher building will be built in August. On the right-hand side is the filter plant area where you can see two drills are actively working, with the third one having recently arrived in July. The contract productivity has increased significantly and 270 piles are now completed, effectively finishing the piles required for the filter plant building. There are a total of 871 piles with the remainder to be completed for the ancillary buildings. In July 2024, preparation work for the concrete foundations on the filter plant have commenced with assembly of the building structure to commence in Q3 2024, following the award of the filter plant construction contract. The inside photo shows a closer up view of what will become the floor of the filter plant building once the concrete slab is poured. On the next two slides, you will see workers commenced on support infrastructure, including the process control room building, process plant substation, water pump station, lime plant, air blowers building and flotation reagents plant areas. On Slide 11, these pictures are all on the west side of the main process plant building. On the left-hand side, you can see the secondary substation. On the picture on the right-hand side at the top is the pump house and the bottom is the process plant control room which, when completed, will be four levels high. On Slide 12, the photo shows the east side of the main process plant building. You can see where the reagents mixing building, compressors, air blowers and lime building will be. We will continue to provide progress updates as we advance towards the first production in the third quarter of 2025. Moving to Olympias on Slide 13. Second quarter gold production was 13,541 ounces and total cash costs were $1,231 per ounce sold. Production was impacted by 17 days of labor initiated work stoppages, primarily in June as we negotiated the new CBA agreement. Total cash costs were positively impacted by the productivity efficiencies from the region transformation initiatives as well as slightly lower unit cost of certain consumables, including electricity. We also benefited from lower transport costs as a result of improved shipment logistics. For 2024, production guidance at Olympias is between 75,000 to 85,000 ounces of gold. Production in the second half of the year is expected to increase over the first half of the year as a result of expected increase in ore mined and process. As George mentioned, at the beginning of the call, we are in the final stages of the CBA negotiations. I'll stop there and hand over to Simon to discuss the Turkish and Canadian operations.