i-80 Gold Corp.

Good morning, my name is Cody and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the I-80 Gold Corp second quarter 2021 results conference call. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, please press the star, then the number two. Thank you. Mr. Goulet, you may now begin your conference.

Thank you, Mr. Operator. And sorry all for being a few minutes late here this morning. We had a few technical issues with the presentation. But with that, we'll start the call. So yes, welcome to our 2021 Q2 operating results conference call and webcast. And I'm happy to say it's I-80's first quarter as a publicly traded company out of the spin out of Premier. And we're very excited to get in front of you and tell you about all the great things we've been up to and how we plan to grow our business. Moving on to slide two, we've got the management participants that are on the call today. So, we have Ewan Downey, the Chief Executive Officer, Matt Geely, President and Chief Operating Officer, and Ryan Snow, Chief Financial Officer. On to slide three, I'd just like to bring everybody's attention to our standard disclaimer slide, and I encourage everybody to have a thorough read of this disclaimer in the context of the presentation. Now, finally, onto the fun stuff. Introducing i80 Gold. Onto slide five, I'd like to just give a brief overview of the company and just talk about why we are excited about the company and what makes it a differentiated company in this environment. So we built the portfolio or the company based on three key aspects. One is hiring key management and experience management team to run a business. Management that is focused on building a company in Nevada has tremendous knowledge and experience doing that. We're building on quality production with three permitted development stage assets and multi-million ounce of resources. All of our deposits have significant resource expansion. And we built it on a risk profile that is second to none, in my opinion, in the world. So all of our land positions are in Nevada, one of the best most productive mining regions in the planet. And we believe that these three key aspects of the business is what is going to make this company successful in the future. So with that, I'm going to pass the presentation on to Ewan Downey, who's going to talk to slide six and beyond.

Thank you, Matt. As Matt mentioned, one of the key things in building I-80 when we decided to launch this company was ensuring that we had a very experienced and technically strong management team. And I'm pretty proud of the group that we put together. We have, in our operations group especially, tremendous experience successfully operating mines in Nevada. Matt Geely previously was the executive general manager of the Cortez District for American and Nevada goldmine. Brent Kristof previously was the general manager at the Turquoise Ridge operation, another one of the three major complexes of Nevada goldmine. And Andy Snow has joined us recently as senior mining and processing advisor. after having been the general manager of the gold strike operation, Nevada's gold mine's largest facility. We've also complemented that team with our geological group and our engineering group that works with us out of Reno, Nevada. And we believe that we've built one of the best teams when it comes to developing assets in Nevada. And I'm having a great experience working with this group. On slide seven, just give a bit of an overview of what the company is doing. I think this really tells our company's story. Our company projects are all located within the Getchell Battle Mountain trend, as it's called in central Nevada. And the Carlin trend are currently producing assets. South Arturo is a 40% joint venture with Nevada Goldmine. and Nevada gold mines in Nevada is what's likely the world's largest gold producing complex in the world. Nevada was recently ranked number one by the Fraser Institute as the most attractive jurisdiction globally for mining, and every one of our company's projects is located in the heart of the producing, the primary producing area in Nevada. We have the one producing mine three core projects that are all fully permitted for advancing development. And we are, Nevada Gold Mines, only operating joint venture partner in the state. In slide eight, these are sort of what we call the goals of the company, and it's what we intend to execute on here in the coming years. Number one, it's our goal to become a diversified multi-asset producer Number two, we want to be disciplined with our capital allocation as we build out our production portfolio that will see the company grow its production over the next several years to over 200,000 ounces a year. Our goal is to be in the lower quartile in terms of all-in sustaining costs as a miner in the state. And currently, as Matt mentioned earlier, we do have a substantial resource base but it's our goal through successful expiration and continued potential M&A in the state to grow our resource base globally to over 10 million ounces. We currently are in a very strong financial position. At the end of the quarter, we had just over 70 million in cash and equivalents and no debt, and we're well positioned to grow our business. On slide eight, This is really just the fundamentals, one of the key reasons why I think investors should be seriously looking at our company. The company has both in open pit and underground. We have some of the highest grade deposits that you'll find anywhere in North America. Our three underground projects are all greater than eight grams per ton. Two of them have resource grades of greater than 10 grams per ton. And most investors know that there's not too many plus 10 gram operating mines anywhere in the world right now. In terms of open pit, both South Arturo and Granite Creek have grades of over 1.4 grams. Both include mineralization that can be processed by a heap leach, which positions both of those projects as two of the highest grade open pit projects. that you'll find in all of North America, and we're excited to advance these projects to development and production, and that should result in significant production, good cash flow for the company in the future, and with expiration upside, we expect to add to our resource base in the coming years. Our track value, or our track record, I think, in Nevada has really, in Premier, flew under the radar a bit. We successfully, over a period of six or seven years, grew our resource base from just over 400,000 ounces when you look at M&I and inferred resources that we had back in 2014 to where we are today with resources well in excess of 5 million in all categories. We're continuing to grow our resource base through focused exploration. This year, we have an 8,000-metre surface and underground drill program going at South Arturo, mainly focused on expanding the El Nino mine that has so far yielded some very, very good results, and we should see results coming in the future. Our major program, though, is at Granite Creek. It's a project we acquired as soon as we went public, and we are going to be drilling over 22,000, or we have a plan to drill over 22,000 metres this year both surface and underground, and the program has really started out well. We're very excited by what we're seeing, and I'd expect the first results to be released in the next several weeks. That'll be, as a company, our first release of drill results. So moving on to slide 11, our company is very committed to... to ESG and our people. Recently, we have retained a consultant to develop a comprehensive ESG program for the company. Stakeholder mapping has commenced. ESG risk assessment is underway. Governance issues are well projected. Environmental regulatory risks are front of mind. We are always engaging with social communities, including community engagement and with local Indigenous people within the communities. Social and community engagement yields the greatest forward-looking opportunities for our company. And I'd really like to point out in Premier, IAD was spun out of Premier. We had, I think, a very strong track record in terms of ESG, receiving numerous environmental, social, and safety awards throughout our history. And we have successfully permitted several projects. And as most people in the mining sector know, that is usually one of the most successful difficult portions of a mining cycle is actually getting the social license to proceed with your projects. And we've had a great track record doing that. And our new team in Nevada that previously worked in the Nevada mining at Nevada operations have a similar success. And we're looking to continue this with IAD well into the future. So with that, on slide 12, I'm going to hand it off to the next couple of slides to Matt Geely and Ryan Snow so that they can take you through the quarterly results that we have in Q2, our first ever quarter release.