Omai Advances 10Moz Project as Gold Strengthens | Elaine Ellingham

0:00Kitco Mining's on-site coverage of PDAC is presented by Gold Mining, US Gold Mining, Uranium Energy Corp and Uranium Royalty Corp. Hello and welcome to Kitco Mining with me, Paul Harris here at the 2026 Perspectors and Developers Association Conference in Canada. Today we're talking about gold exploration in Guyana and I have great pleasure to be joined by Elaine Ellingham, Executive Chair and CEO of Omai Gold Mines and Kitco Mining's CEO of the Inominee in the Exploration category. Elaine, welcome to Kitco. Thank you so much. I remember speaking with you many years ago just after you took over the company and this was in the midst of the heights or all the depths of the bear market and I asked you why on earth would you do this to yourself. Now Omai is on fire, your share price is up over 800% in the last two years. I guess you've got a good answer to that question now. Well I think I probably mentioned to you at the time Omai is a great project.

1:00As a past producer I always say the brilliance I've come up with has all my years in the businesses where there's gold, there's more gold. Omai was a project you know it produced when the gold price was very low or shut down when the gold price was low and you know I took a look and it looked like it was going to be fairly easy. Markets weren't so easy. Well the project you're talking about the Omai Gold project in Guyana specifically we're talking about the Verno Gold Deposit where you've got you and part of the Guyana Shield the Greenstone Bell which has several plus 10 million ounce gold deposits and you're very much on track for that as well. Right, absolutely. Actually between what was produced historically from the mines 3.8 million ounces and our resource which indicated and inferred together about 6.5 million so it's already over 10 million ounce gold endowment so and we think much bigger. Now that resource was from August 2025 so we're coming on a year since then and you've been drilling, you've been drilling very, you've been doing a lot of drilling, you've

2:02been hitting some broad high grade intercepts. When you next come to calculate the resource you know what could that potentially look like? Yeah so when we were drilling last year we started to hit these very wide high grade zones like some of them were like 45 to 60 meters wide, sort of 3, 4 grams plus. So we knew that kind of changed the game and that resulted in the very big increase in the resources last August. Since then we've done about 30 holes, 18,000 meters and that's with the QP now they're looking at doing the next resource. We haven't seen the results yet, we just got the rest of the assays about a week ago but we're on track to release that probably in the next month or so. We haven't seen the results but I would expect we're not going to add as much as we added last time. A lot of this was really to prepare us for the PEA so you know we're going to be expanding it but in reality with the ounces we have now it's clearly a project that's developable

3:07so maybe some incremental ounces but this was more about preparing for the PEA. The last resource, the August 2025 one you've got to let's say 50% bump in your ounces more or less, we're in a very high gold price environment, what impact does that have on the potential scale of the deposit and how you're looking to measure or draw the lines around the deposit? Right, yeah that's an interesting question because basically the project that it is, the average grade is over 2 grams so for the open pit deposits it's somewhere probably going to come out about 1.6, 1.7 grams per tonne which for an open pit mine is very robust. It probably works at an $1,800 gold price so I mean at the current gold price it's going to be ridiculously economic so it's kind of move it forward. I think in this environment really what you need to do is get projects forward to production as fast as possible. Absolutely, the drilling results you've had drilling results at Gilt Creek as well.

4:08How does that fit into the picture with Werner? Right, there's actually two separate origenic gold deposits, they're only about 450 meters apart and there are similar projects, there's a Eldorado has a signal and a Mac mine and Quebec, again those were in production for I think 50 years and then they've been rejuvenated yet again and oh my sort of like that, it probably is going to be a super long life mine but there's two deposits side by side so the intrusion hosted one is going to be underground, it's not all that deep, it starts at 275 meters and so you try to develop the open pit first and then once you've got your cash flow and you've got your manpower all stabilized then you would start developing the underground so it would probably come into production probably three years after the open pit. Okay, now you put a PEA, a preliminary economic assessment out in 2024, that was for about 142,000 ounces a year of production, capex there of $375 million, but that was a couple

5:09of years ago, obviously we're in a very different price environment now, imagine that perhaps changes your scale of your ambitions, you said you're working towards a new PEA, what will that potentially look like? Yeah, so the first PEA that we did in 2024, I think you made reference to the fact that the market was definitely not there, it was sort of a couple of things, one was kind of to wake up the markets to already see this is a viable project and it did that very effectively and then the other point was it got us on the path to permitting and again you know there's two things to get a money to production quickly, you got to move on the permitting so that allowed us to do that, so the next PEA is more like the real deal and so we again we're in a very preliminary stages of that but what we're expecting it to be somewhere between 250, 300,000 ounces a year, for somewhere between we believe over 18 years maybe even as much as 20 years and so that's that when I started this project that was my target, to

6:11look for a project that was a 20 year mine life, 250, 300,000 ounces a year and I thought that project had the potential to be that, I think we're on track. Well that's double what you talked about last time in the previous PEA, right, the previous one was only on a small open pit and we did it, again we were still kind of financially challenged so we wanted to do it quickly and cost effectively, we didn't include the underground at all and it wasn't because we didn't have faith in the deposit, it was just it was easier to just do, throw a pit on the on the one deposit. So yeah it's come a long way, also we used a 1850 gold price last time, I still believe oh my would do fine at that. That's what you'll do is you'll lower the cutoff if you have a higher gold price but our open pit deposit, it's fairly insensitive to that, to the cutoff grade so we probably won't lower the cutoff grade. Well what's so in terms of cost and cost inflation, all price has been relatively stable, that's

7:12perhaps changing as we speak because of the events in Iraq and the Gulf, Guyana's a very resource friendly jurisdiction, a number of your peers talk about the relatively short permitting timeline in Guyana, Guyana's obviously got a very big and evolving offshore oil and gas sector, what impact does that have potentially on cost inflation, the availability of services, the cost of services, labor, it's not a big country, there's not a large population, any fraction to these factors, what sort of things are you seeing? Right, that's kind of a loaded question, I don't have a crystal ball, but I absolutely, I mean the offshore oil business has changed Guyana, essentially overnight, the five years I've been going there, it's just an incredible investment in infrastructure, like we didn't talk about infrastructure but with OMI, we ever rode within 10 kilometers because of course it was a past producing mine, but that road's being paved to within 10 kilometers, and

8:16so I think we're about 15 kilometers, they're on their way, it's a road that will go all the way to Brazil, but yeah the government, the offshore oil, it's offshore oil, so it's had a tremendous impact on the capital city of Georgetown at the coast and the other coastal towns, but in the interior, it's had fairly little effect, so in the interior it's all about jobs, and when it comes to jobs in the interior, it's mines, so that's why they're so committed still to seeing these large scale mines develop, with respect to inflation, yeah I mean the oil boom is creating so many jobs that the government is looking at immigration, they need, that's a population of 800,000 people, they need more workers, I think they built seven or eight hospitals, one in each region, but then they realized that they didn't have the medical staff to populate them, so they're trying to attract immigrants, so you know it's a big loaded question, but there's a lot of things, a lot of moving carts, I think on the fuel front,

9:18you know it's hard to know where they'll go, a lot of fuel, we also have a hydro power plant, just 100 kilometers away, that's been approved and permitted, everything designed in the financing fell through about four years ago, out for tender again, our dream is that that would actually service oh my, and the line comes within 30 kilometers, so I have talked to the finance minister and said like our hands up, like could we be one of those users, because as you know the costs, if you can use grid power, what a difference that makes, right? Absolutely, I guess one of the issues or challenges they would be getting allocation from that, well that's a whole nother story too, because it was originally designed to service Georgetown, because Georgetown was having brownouts as they grew, but now there's a they have a gas to energy plant that's going to be commissioned by year-end, 300 megawatts sitting right beside Georgetown, so they actually don't need that hydro power now.

10:21Okay, so what's the sort of approximate timeline when the PA is going to be published? That's about two months out. Two months out, and what's the overall plan or strategy, what comes next after that? So we already, despite we've done all our work for that resource and for the PA, so we've got four drills turning five starting next week, so we're going to blast through, we still, the deposits still open along strike and at depth, but we are basically looking at continuing to expand the deposit while starting to do the infill drilling to get us towards a feasibility. Okay, we've come to another ground Elaine, what are some of the key catalysts our viewers should be watching out for for this year? Yeah, well clearly the upcoming resource estimate, which is, you know, Q1, Q2 is going to be the PEA, we drilled 11 months last year, we're going to be drilling probably 11 months this year, so there's going to be ongoing work on the, on the deposit, but also this, we have the financial, financial strength and the, to do a bit of exploration targets targeting, and so we know where they are, it's just, we've always gone

11:26for the low hanging free, so I think we're going to go for some of those, those interesting targets. A little more, a little more results to come. It's a fun stuff. Excellent, well, congratulations on a great, great 25, and the great share performance, and also congratulations to your nomination the CEO, Kiko Mining CEO of the year. Great. Elaine Ellingham, thank you very much for joining me today. Great, thank you. And we have a lot more to come from the 2026 perspectives and developers association conference here in Toronto, so stay tuned and hit that subscribe button. I'm Paul Harris and this is Kiko Mining. Kidco Mining's on-site coverage of PDAC is presented by Gold Mining, US Gold Mining, Uranium Energy Corps, and Uranium Royalty Corps.