What's Gone Wrong at Ivanhoe? (Neil Ringdahl)

JD, I'm not sure if you've been paying attention right, but there's a bit going on with Kokola. So some, some brew pillars are burst effectively and the extent and severity of this situation is, is still kind of yet to fully play out. The both Ivanhoe and Zejin have put out some commentary to the effect to describe what's happening. And it's early days. So we still don't kind of know everything, but the, the share price has fallen that 20% already.

I'm talking about about Ivanhoe in in this case. And as everyone's kind of trying to piece things together, I thought it would be just absolutely awesome if we got the insight of Neil Ringdial, who, who is a mining engineer who is so like pointed and thoughtful and great at explaining like what he is interpreting based on the press releases.

I caught up with Neil this morning just on a, on a, on a call and I asked him some questions, mostly because he put out a couple of tweets, which I, I just found so insightful as he as he spoke about what, you know, his interpretations of the events are, how serious they might be and what the implications could be for for Ivanhoe A. 100% mate. It's the biggest copper mine in Africa. It's one of the biggest copper mines in the world.

It's been a glowing success story for a number of years now. Obviously owned by Ivanhoe as well as the Jin and the Congolese government. And like you said, the the news has sort of rocked the stock market. So we tacked on a little bit of a conversation with the Koala at the end as well to get a more of a, a market's kind of perspective on this and how he kind of interprets the event.

But I'm super excited to share the the technical conversation with Neil as he sort of understands it, his experience in underground operations. Very excited to bring bring Neil's voice to the potty. Let us know guys if you you want more from from Neil in the future. I I really enjoyed speaking with him and but first mate it's Friday, which means it's called KCA Friday. Normally I like to surprise Adam on Fridays, but today he's told me to call Kca's recruitment manager, Christian Dean.

Hello. Trav. What? You saved my number, Adam. Switched me up. What would it take for a guy like me who has zero underground mining expertise to to? Become an underground miner. They got a manual. License, Yeah, yeah, that's good start yeah for. Sure. Like we're, we're all about helping our clients. So it's what they want if they need actually little people and they want to come to us.

But in all honesty, like coming from those experienced people, people with the skills that they're looking for, people that are a bit tired of find. So we generally have to go kicking, excuse the pun. We're all this pretty much ex operators. It's people they trust, people that have done it so we can relate to the people we're speaking with, obviously know some of those nuances that might be required and understand what they actually need in both the

candidate and and the client. We know what it's like to be on site. If they're not coming down the hall, if you don't have the people, well that's not working. So when they call that you really need someone and I need them yesterday. So having that sort of mindset as opposed to just like just recruiting, you know, so it happens. I think that helps. Just called KCII. Like to talk about things that

I'm interested in and I've always been interested in having her. I should think before, you know, this is negative news, but I must just say I'm very impressed with the ability of that company to execute on building new mines and power plants. And you know, they're very, very, very good at that. You know, they're done projects, they've met, you know, projects have been on time and they've had the glitches and but they've been like worked through them.

And I guess this is another one, but I'm also a shareholder. I like to talk about, I like to talk about stuff I invest in. And I know what it's like to be on both sides of the story enough. I've worked for public companies

before in executive positions. And, you know, there's that famous phrase that goes, you know, if there's a bad press release in for a mining company, then the news must be very bad, very bad indeed because they always have to try and present the bad news in the best possible light because of the obvious impact. It's material, material information. So it's always quite difficult

to decipher these things. And I felt I just wanted to, you know, share my own thoughts on what I thought was really going on behind the scenes and what might be the case, what might be happening there. Yeah, I think that it's been super useful because originally it appeared like, you know, the the owners of this operations that Gin and Ivanhoe disagreed on. Maybe. Maybe it was semantics. Or. Or the sensitivity as it related to what was actually happening

here. But there there was a geotechnical event of some sort, but the the severity of it kind of took a little bit little while to understand. You. Were pretty astute, like early on when there was that initial understanding that there could be a bit more to the story. Yeah, I mean, my ears picked up

when the first press release came out that there were some problems. And then then I got very concerned when the second press release came out and there was some objection to the Zigen press release from Ivanhoe. So the two major shareholders had a disagreement. And I think it wasn't really anything, as I said in my first tweet, I didn't think it was anything malicious.

I just think that maybe there was a little bit less understanding or maybe there was some concern about the the possible misunderstanding of the audience what was in the decision press release. But essentially both press releases were saying the same thing. The one said that there was spalling and falls of hanging wool. And the other one said that there was some seismicity and, you know, pillar bursts, OK. And when you have pillar pillars bursting, you get spalling of

the pillars. That's what it's called. When you know the size of the pillars flake off, that's called spalling. And you'll get bits material falling off the hanging wall as well. And it's obviously very hazardous. If anybody's in that area, these things happen, you know, seismics, the site, it's mining induced seismicity. In other words, the seismicity wasn't there. That's very lucky, in my opinion.

It wasn't, it wasn't, you know, that part of the Congo is not very seismically active as far as I'm aware. And so it has to be mining or induced. And and that's, that's quite normal for many operations.

You know, even in ALMA here in Honduras, we have, we also get, we also get pillar bursts from time to time, but we don't have the same kind of very widespread board and pillar layout that they've got at, at Kakula. And in the shallow mining environment, like at Kakula, you've, you've got a, you know, when you see, when you hear about seismicity in a, in a shadow mining environment and multiple, you know, multiple events or multiple, you know, you know, bursting of pillars,

that's, that's very big cause for concern in any mine. OK, It's OK if you have one now and again, but if you have multiple to the extent that your main accesses, you know, you have to, you have to get people out of there and that, you know, you have to start looking at alternatives to replace your pumping system because your pump columns have broken because of the because of the police bursting, you know, that suggests that there's something more serious, OK.

Can you help me understand that the difference between, yeah, like experiencing this in a date mine versus a shallow mine and why? Why the extra level of concern? Well, with deeper mining you get more elastic behavior to the rock because of the depths and you also have a stronger horizontal stress component normally as well as a strong obviously a very strong, much stronger vertical stress component. With a deeper mine, you've got all this weighted rock above you.

You also get horizontal stress, increase horizontal stress. And with ultra deep mines, like, you know, the deep platinum mines and gold mine in South Africa and in do some of the deep mines in North America that I'm aware of, you know, you, you, you get the, the rock actually behaves more plastically. And so your support regimes are different, OK, to what you need. You know, they're more of a

yielding support. And you have to, you have to do a mine layout that's, you know, that suits, suits whatever environment you're in. But the shallow mining environment, you're dealing more with dead weight. OK, so we're talking anything less than some people might think is deep, but it's 1000 meters or less is from where where I grew up was considered shallow. And so that's, that's the environment we're talking about

a cooler, cooler. I don't know what the depth is now, but it's probably less than 500 meters at this stage. I know that all body goes down to about 1000 meters, but they haven't got that deep yet. And so it's fairly shallow. And so when you do a mining layer, and it's also a flat ore body. So when you're mining a flat ore body, you're obviously going to leave pillars to support the, the beam, the weights of everything above you. Those pillars have to be designed for the entire rock

mess above the pillar. And but that's, you know, overhanging between the excavations between each pillar. OK. And, and then how those pillars will fail will depend on the size and the amount of stress on them. And so if you make them smaller or if you start with a big pillar and you might not, you know, or we make them too small, depending on the rock characteristics themselves, it will they will fail the other flail plastically or you know, they'll burst.

OK. And you know, when a pillar bursts, I think it's important to understand that it can still have a yield resistance after bursting. It just means that the solid part of the rock in the middle of the pillars definitely cracked. OK, And you have broken rock on the sides that Spall out OK, But as long as you keep that intact, it's still got some support

resistance left. OK, Things can happen where you have if you have a very hard ore body, for example, and maybe the foot wall or the floor is very soft, you can have what will happen there is the pillow will stay will will punch into the football and and it'll it'll seem as if the floor is coming up, but really the pillow is punching into the football. OK. That's a different type of

failing mechanism. You can also have the reverse if you have a soft hanging wall and you have a hard ore body that you're mining and can punch into your hanging wall and that's going to be that's going to also be pretty bad. In this case, from what I've read from the technical reports, the foot wall is very hard and in the all body itself is quite soft and in the material on top of it is also quite soft.

So they have to do a lot of shotcreting and you know, a lot of support, a lot of shot creating is just basically putting the concrete skin on the inside of your tunnel. And then you know, you know, your usual, your whatever support, your local support regime they've got in form of of of bolts or anchors. And then you've got your pillars which are holding up the mass of everything above it. And so I don't know what what is bursting.

We don't have enough information available to us to know exactly what's happening. It could be the concrete skins on the shotcrete that's bursting, but I don't think so. I think what probably the pillars are solid rock pillars. And even though the rock is very poor, the whole body is very poor. It's it's, it's, you know, it crunches and when it crunches, it makes a burst and it gives, it gives, you know, it releases energy rapidly in that as that

happens. And then what's worrying to me though, and that can happen fine. You know, sometimes you'll have a small pillar that's kind of taking a bit more load than than than than the others around it. Maybe there's bigger spans between that pillar and others and it'll fail. It'll fail like that. It'll be a big thump underground. You'll hear it and it'll give you a scare and that pillar will Spall and if you're nearby you'll be OK.

As long as you're not standing next to it, you'd probably be OK. But when you have multiple pillars failing, that suggests that they are losing. So that beam that pillar fails is a little bit of movement. Now that hanging wool beam has to be supported by the remaining pillars, which are still stiff, but they also start failing. Keep putting extra. Extra like a runaway train. OK, so you'll get a whole area that starts to fail and that's

what's concerning. OK, if it was just one or two pillars, it would be OK, but it seems to be widespread. Otherwise, why would they have to evacuate the whole mine? OK. And so that's very concerning. And so it's not really the failure mode, which is what was the the objection of of the Ivanhoe guys were, you know, objecting to what surgeon mining was saying in my opinion, and this is just my opinion, OK. You know the I think I think it's I think it's something more serious.

I'm more concerned about the number of pillars that have failed. And it'd be great if we got some clarity from the company on that and I'm sure we'll get that. But you know, they have, they have to be very careful how they, how they, you know, how they, how they explain this, you know, to avoid liabilities. Yeah, it's, it's, it's a risk that was date detailed in, in their technical reports 2020

like initially in 20/20/19. And is that a risk that's there just because of the, the mining method itself or is it to do with the, you know, the, the ground conditions as well, a kind of combination of all those factors? Is, I mean, I don't, you know, at this stage it's too early for us to comment on whether it was a bad mining method or obviously there was something that that was planned that never went according to plan that resulted in this.

So I mean, I'm actually looking at the technical report right now here and it says, you know, in the 2023 it talks about, you know, major structures, namely the waste fault structures that still contain soft infilling. And this coupled with tight filling during drift and full mining operations, it is unlikely seismic activity will occur on these structures. It's it could be the fault structures that are moving.

OK, but the fact that they've talked about pillars bursting and spalling, I think it is a pillars. OK. Then they'd say in the next sentence of this technical report. The bracket pillars that will be left along the large structures will also assist in containing seismic activity. So if you have a fault going through an ore body and you're mining along the other side, you put a pillow on either side of

the fault. You don't actually mine on against the fault or through the fault except for your excesses. And you leave a pillar. Those are called bracket pillars. And that's to prevent because you'll have a different stress regime in this block, which is defined by the by the fault on the one side. It'll have different stress and this block will have different stress depending on the load. And so you can get movements on a fault and they can correct that can be seismic, OK.

And that's what that's what happens in the deep mine very often, OK. And I think that's what they were concerned about here, OK, But it's not a deep mine. Nevertheless, it's a consideration that was taken into account by the geotech guys, OK. And an induced localized goes on to say, hey, the induced localized seismic response associated with strain bursting and or pillow bursting, which is the same thing may occur.

This will be contained a result of tight filling and correct sequencing during cut and saw mining operations. The seismicity in this case must be related to the pillars failing. OK. And then probably because they were too small or the mining spans were too large for that rock mass rating before that particular rock time. OK. And and you know in the previous technical report that said there was not enough information. They need to do more work on it.

I'm sure the team, they have been doing work on it, but they made a decision based on recommendations by subject matter experts to do a particular mining method and then they went and mined it. And now what's happened is they found that the regional low bearing capacity of this pillar seems to be aggression. OK. And that's the question that they are probably looking into right now. Is it that bad that they have to go and redevelop a whole, you know, new mine adjacent to the

existing mine? Or is it is it going to be something that is, you know, maybe they can manage, maybe it's just, you know, a localized area in this in a one in, you know, in a in one section of the mine. They can still continue to mine. And then they have to ask yourself the question, what mining method were they using? And it was a drift and full mining method with backfill is a brand new backfill plant on site, fully commissioned, very state-of-the-art. But there could have been a

management decision there. And that's what I seduced it as well. There might have been a management decision to delay the backfilling and just mine the primary drifts and then not not come back and backfill them, just mine the primary drifts and keep going because it's such a huge ore body. You could probably get away with that as long as you don't go back and rob any pillars. Maybe maybe that's what maybe that's what the issue is.

Maybe they, you know, maybe they should have backfilled this, OK. And or maybe there was secondary extraction going ahead of time. People were taking a bit of a chance. It could be an operating thing. OK, The geotech consultants will be quick to jump on that. If that is the case, I'm sure, OK. And I'm sure the truth will come out in the wash, but it could have just been a case that the pillar designs were, you know, it's normally multiple factors as well that causes something like this.

Like any incident in the mine, there's not one factor that normally results in an incident or or injury or a fatality. There's normally multiple factors. Just like, you know, when you look at an aircraft investigation, I'm sure you've know about the Swiss cheese municipal where you have these walls of safety and they but each have the each have, they're not, they're not fail safe and they've got holes in them. And so if the holes line up perfectly, then that's what happens.

So you've got to think like that. Yeah, so. The, the, the way around this, would it, would it have likely have just been to well, OK, so maybe it was maybe, maybe if it was the lack of back filling, back filling might have maybe mitigated it. But could there also have been an issue with the pillar sizes themselves being too too small? Yeah, of course, could be. Yeah. I looked at the mining plan in my tweets and I tweeted a picture of it. You know, you could see what they did in 2019.

And then here's a photograph of the mine. What's being mined? In 2000 and not a photograph, but as built part of the mine and you can have a look, you can see, you can see the drifts that they've mined and they mine out very quite a large area. It looks like about 500 meters more in span over maybe a kilometer or two. It's I mean they've been mining at quite a right there. And so that's a big area that's mined. And it's like, you know, coal mines developed like that too,

which is a very flat ore body. So it's very similar to coal mining, underground coal mining. And when you do board and pillar mining and coal mining, you know, you've also got to bear in mind that your pillars have to be designed for for the full load over the full span. And if one area fails, the weight be the load in that area that's failed can transfer them to the adjacent area. And I think that's what's

happened here. And unfortunately, it looks like it's gone a bit close to the development into the, you know, the main, the main axis development it might have, that might have gone and affected the main access declines. And I only only come to that conclusion because the pump pumping system was damaged and they're looking at replacing, you know, getting a new pumps and new and new lines to to keep

the mind dry. And I would imagine those lines will probably be in the main access decline if you would think that would be in a more protected area. So. So that is a concern, yeah. When you, when you highlight those two photos, 1 from 2019, yeah, the other one from 2023, what are you comparing there and and sort of seeing that's different? You can see the block that they said room and pillar mining

area. OK, I look at that room and pillar mining area there in scale and I can see the green declines going down there. And I switch over to the next picture, you know as built in June 2022 and I can see that room and pillar mining area. They've done some room and pillar mining there and then there's lots of fingers going along there. If you look very small, they're all Gray fingers. And those are the developments and in between all the pillars, OK.

And I'm not sure which of the pillars have failed and which have not, but I have to imagine that all of those pillars have gone and they've moved over towards the North Port or access area, which is looks like the mining gets quite close there, OK, to that E service perimeter, E perimeter service drift that they've got planned there, OK. And I don't know if you can show

the audience. Yeah. But that area there between the North Port and the east perimeter service drift is what I think is where I imagine the pump column might be. That service drift is a decline going down, probably downed up by the looks of it. And and we've got to see, you know, that axis will be cut off. The part of the analysis you, you, you know, you've put out there that grab grabs me and clearly the the share market as

as well was kind of your, your thumb sucking implications that there might be for both both my life and and operating costs. How, how did you, how'd you come up with with those numbers? Good question. It's I guess it's a it's what I think could be the implication. I mean, if you look at the again at the map, I imagine that N portal ramps pretty good down to the bottom of the straight section there.

But maybe you have to redevelop all the way around to get to access, you know, you have to develop all around, right around that caved area. And the worst case scenario, it's quite a lot of development. There's no scale on this particular plan, but those are big ends. Those are 6 by 6m ends, twin ends. They're, you know, forming the east service perimeter drifts. There's two of them running down there.

So you can get an idea. It's a couple 100 meters, few 100 meters, maybe 1000 meters of development that you'd need to reconnect to that existing design for the east perimeter service drift. And then you have to go back into the ore body and develop into the ore new new access drifts. So I don't think it's that unreasonable to say it could be anything from 6 to 18 months if you have to redevelop the mind if that whole area is unsafe to go back into. But as I said, those pillars

might be good enough. You know, if the size MIDI settles down and the whole thing settles down, you may still be able to go back into the area. That's where the pillars are burst and you may still be able to use some of that infrastructure again, you know, and do it safely. And then just brack, you know, and then the impact will be a lot lower. We'll, I'm sure everybody's doing their sums and their design work and the inspections and that and and working out what to do.

And we need to give the company some time to to come up with a plan how to how to, you know, how to re establish this again, if we look at the resource and reserve, most likely we're going to have a decrease in the reserve because you have to you know, in your reserve caps, you leave pillars outside, outside a reserve reserve is what you can actually put in the mill. So any pillars that you leave behind, stability pillars you leave behind will have to come out of the reserve, out of the

reserve. And obviously if this has failed, we need to be more conservative with our design. So one would naturally cook 2. The pillars have to be bigger. OK, it's possible they won't. I mean, if they can work out a way to backfill and do, you know, complete extraction, that would be great. But that would be another whole new mining method altogether. And I don't know what the geotechnical implications of that would be. OK, but but but I suppose that's a possibility.

I think more realistically they'll probably end up going with bigger pillars and that would mean, you know, how much bigger pillars do you need? I don't know the answer to that. But you know, even if the pillars are 10% bigger, you're probably looking at about a probably looking at about a 30% reduction in reserves. Yeah, OK, maybe maybe less, but probably something like that looking at this layout be. Substantial, OK. But it's substantial. But it's not. It's not really.

An. Enormous resource. It's such a magnificent resource. OK, so that it's just going to take longer to longer to mine and it'll take them much longer to ramp up to the planned the planned numbers that they've, you know they've got in their the phases of phase four phase. I can't remember which phase they're on now, but in the next phase of expansion, OK.

So it'll just be a slower ramp up and they also obviously doing homework as I mentioned, I think they'll they'll they'll be looking at increasing production from Kamoa and maybe they can fast track the IT seems that Kakula W is not that badly affected. If you look at the map, it also seems like you know that South portal ramp is a little bit further away from most of the minings to date.

So not as much bypass development may be required there to go and re establish something to the West and maybe they can get into that a bit faster. Gotcha. So. So we've got to wait and see what they say there. Gotcha. The twin D the twin twin portals in this case, you would you would you would assume you know helps the continuity of of operations as opposed to having like a an elongated period where you can't actually mine right,

correct, correct. Yeah. You know, and I guess, you know, you look at all the plan development there, it's quite hard to see, you know, with this, you know, simplified diagrams for this would be much better to see more detail. And I think there is more detail available there. I haven't looked. Ivan has been very good at presenting detail on their expansion plans as they go with, you know, presentations and

videos. And I've been, you know, been looking at these for months and months and years and years. Every quarter that I think every month they put out a new photo album of each of their projects. And it's very interesting to see what they do. There's a lot of very good info that I get from from those photo reports and, and, and what their display is really impressive stuff.

And with this team that they've got, they'll, they'll do the best that they can do. It's unfortunate markets don't really give credit to teams, you know, for success really. They've quicker to give this credit to discredit the team when they have something like this. And I've mentioned that in one of my comments to some of the questions that got to these tweets is, you know, it's it's very easy for us to say, yeah, it could be management and it

could be management, right? But these guys have done a really good job, really good job of it. So we should give them the opportunity to see what they can do to come back. Market doesn't care about that, though. Market's going to sell on the news, right? Market's forward-looking, yeah, You know, unfortunately. Done. It's baked in, it's baked in now. So you know, so now everybody wants to know well what how bad

is the impact? And it's hard to say with the information we got and we're really just grasping at strolls here. But but I try to give it a go and, and I decided that for now, I'm backing out. So I sold my stock. And but that doesn't mean I think the company's going to do badly. I just think it's, you know, a wise thing to do. And, you know, I'm sure they'll come up with a plan to resolve this and, and, you know, they'll get back into it again.

And this is mining it mining has these problems. Projects, they all, you know, we always say project get delayed, projects will be late and they will overrun on costs. You're always guaranteed that to happen on every project. This one kind of that's happening maybe a little bit later in the cycle. We're really in operation, which is not good, but there's so much expansion going on within, within this, you know, mining complex here. It's something that I'm sure that they'll be able to deal

with in the medium term. Yeah, yeah, it's we're always forward-looking for sure. But I don't think any other company could have could have done what what has been done in this part of the world to actually bring this operation online in the 1st place and. The market needs to be patient because if they, you know, and I and I guess that's the danger. That's what happened with the pressure users. You know, I know what it's like with these things.

Yeah. You know, when you're on the side of this, something like this happening, you, you almost go through a phase of denial, OK, And then acceptance, you know, and anger, you know, all the phases you get when you've got a terminal disease or something, you know, it's a similar type of thing. And you have to be capable. I mean, if you're an executive, you know, responsible for an operation like this, you can't just go out there and put up.

You got to make sure you have all the facts and you've got to have it signed off. Then you got to hear what the experts say and you got to hear what your people say. And then you've got to make some tough decisions and you've got to think about how you're going to formulate this to the market.

You've got to try and do it in the best possible light, of course, because you want to have a minimal impact to your business, I mean, to your share price really, You know, if we were honest about it and, and you know, if you think about the concept of a company, mining company or any company, I have this rather naive, well told us naive way of thinking about it.

You know the old ways you buy, you buy a company stock because you believe in the future, your future, you know, and the value of that stock is should be directly proportional to the future value of the dividends. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't worry. I still think that way too. But not not everything. Not everything's valued on DCF these days in mining. But you've got all these people who have to short the stock on news. OK, That makes things really, really difficult, Pop.

Shops. So, you know, it's kind of crazy that the companies, the share price dropped as much as it has because you know, there's other mines that this company has control of. And you know, while this is a big part of it, it's, it's not 20%. Right. Yeah. The the, the, the one part of everything that that couldn't help but notice, Neil, any commentary was and it relates to press releases, but Turner's law of mining press releases. Now, I actually haven't heard of this before.

I'm, you know, I'd love to, I'd love to just just hear you tell me about that and that relates. There's a there's a newsletter writer by the name of Mark Turner. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's he's the one who's always said that, you know, if,

if a mining company has to put out, given the mining company has to put out. Boyd News always has to always present news in the best possible light, you know, So if it's bad news that comes out, it must be very bad. OK. Indeed, All right. And I guess it's tongue in cheek, but it's true. You know, unfortunately, you know, we've seen that before with, you know, with many companies, you know, that have

to release bad news. You know, there's that Australian, my Capricorn. Yeah, well, 29 medals can be gone, Copper. Right, 31 medals. Yeah, OK, It just got worse somewhere such. A great yeah, I mean, there's a perfect example yeah. OK, it's sometimes that happens and you know it's mining. We mining, we say, you know, shit happens, you got to deal with it so. So that's what happens here and. And they got to deal with it and they'll get through it.

And hopefully the whole management team responsible for this don't get fired. Hopefully they, you know, they, they carry on going. And if they do get fired, it's because they haven't done the right job. They haven't done, haven't made the right decision. They've made a bad decision. Yeah, OK. But I imagine, imagine they'll survive it given the great performance to date. It's in a difficult jurisdiction as well. And that's part of the problem.

These sort of things, unfortunately are going to happen more and more going forward because there's less and less good mining people out there who can, who are able to

run mines and mining companies. You get, you get accountants and apologies to the accountants who are CE OS and, and business development guys and, and bank, you know, bankers who are CE OS mining CE OS, but they, they don't really know much about mining and, and, and it's easy to cut costs, but, but is that really the right thing for the mine? And, you know, you can get into the whole quagmire stuff.

But I think that's the biggest problem is we've got, and the mining engineers we've got aren't really that good. The few good ones that are out there are taken. And you know, everybody who comes out of university wants to become a manager tomorrow and no one really wants to do the dog work, you know, and be a drill operator and A and A and a shift supervisor for five years. And and you know, they want to

get promoted. And because there's no one in the business doing mining, no one wants to go into mining and the kids want to go into mining. There's there's less skills out there. And so people get promoted really fast, too fast. And they don't have the experience and certain experience, you know, even amongst the miners you get guys who you make, you make, you know, bad decisions because they just don't have the experience.

They haven't had enough time learning from the old timers how to how to mine and what to look for when you look in a mine when you go and visit a mine. If I was, if I, if I didn't already decide to be a finance guy in Yale, I'd be listening to you right now. And I'd, I'd, you know, I'd just, I'd, I'd study mining engineering. And I know because. There's a skill. Shortage. I'm going to get paid so well in the future. Right.

But the thing, but I mean the number of of guys, you know, I take a lot of respect for the old time and minor guys who didn't go through and didn't get a degree in mining. And they they are sidelined, you know, because other guys have degrees, but they're the ones with the real experience. They're the ones who teach the people with degrees something. But it takes time to do that. And if the young guys are high fire, he's going to take the highest job.

I mean most of most young mining people that take the highest paying job they can get. Yeah, sometimes what you need to run, yeah. Yeah. And so you end up with people running mines who we have half the experience that should be. And then these sort of things happen or they have a great control problem and the mine has to close down because they never, they never did the, they never did their homework properly. Oh. Yeah, yeah.

So it's not surprising. So it's not surprising that this sort of thing could happen even with a large company like Ivanhoe. You would hope that you guys would attract the best. But you know, it's this. Mine is in the DRC. It's not that easy to work there. You know, I've got friends who've worked out being there. It's not. There's better places in the world you can work. And so they have to pay very well and they may not get the right people there. I don't know if they can.

I know I've turned down a couple of Congolese jobs. I went to the Congo earlier this year. I didn't make it to to cooler Ocamo, but but yeah, that was a an absolutely transcendental experience flying into Lumumbashi airport, I tell you that much. I mean, I do love, don't get me wrong. I love parts of the DRC, you know, but Lumumbashi area and the copper belt area, I don't. I don't love. Yeah. Unbelievable. Neil, this has been an absolute privilege to, to get your

insights. And you know, I'm, I'm certainly very grateful. I'm sure our audience will be extremely grateful that you've been generous enough to, to share your, you know, your, your, your views, reading between the lines and tying it all in with your decades of real mining experience. Extremely valuable. If anyone's interested in in finding Neil is prolific on Twitter, I'll put a link in the in the shower notes. But thank you so much, Neil. This has been, this has been

absolutely. Travis was good talking to you and hope to talk to you again sometime. Mate, how good was that insight? Unreal. Unreal. Yeah, Neil is just like an absolute wealth of technical knowledge. Very generous to share, share his insights with us, I think. And it was interesting, right. One thing we didn't even cover with him, but I've been thinking about mate, it's.

Just like. You know, there's been this like real flurry of, of unexpected disruptions in mining operations lately, especially in Africa as well. Not just Kokola, but like in the last few months I've noticed obviously Alfman's biasing mine when that got suspended because the rebels got close. Cyrus Bulama, I got suspended when farmers protested of all things, Sibanya's Cloof mine, waste failure in the shaft. I'm pretty sure all those things were within the last couple of months alone.

It's pretty brutal for the mining companies out there, so I think there's a sort of lesson to expect the unexpected if you're in the mining business. That is a good saying. I think we should put that one on the wall, mate. I like that. Yeah, it's it's interesting, right? You think about it because the best preparation you can have to be ready for the unexpected is actually just making sure that your insurance policies are

appropriate for your mines bespoke risks. 100% mate, mining companies cannot afford to have insurance policies that are not up to scratch. I just don't think it's conducive to a good night, good night's sleep if you're a minor right and the worst thing about it is it hits you when you can least afford to be hit. That's. Why you got to call CRE insurance JD they have the. 2. Gurus. The gurus.

In mining and construction insurance for underground for open pit or infrastructure projects, gurus, get yourself covered for all possibilities. The unexpected things is what you've got to be worried about, mate. Gets even better mate. They don't do cookie cutter solutions. Tailored.

We're talking tailored solutions, right for your company, right for your situation, right for your mind, right for all the risks you are going to face, the ones you know about, the ones you don't know about. And we're talking dealing with experts. Quick and easy claims mate. I think every, every mining disruption, it's you didn't expect it. If you expected it probably would have happened.

You know, that's like everyone thinks that their policies have sufficient coverage and then something comes up and it was like, oh, damn it, if only I had bespoke insurance brokers that properly understand the bespoke mining risk of the jurisdiction and operation that I have and can ensure my policies are adequate and can price things appropriately. Oh, wait, they exist, mate. It's called CRE insurance.

Oh, by the way, mining contractors, mining service providers gets even better because because they understand mining, it means that they will get you better policies at a better price. Thanks for the support CRE. Go CRE right now to the conversation with Koala.

Have you got any thoughts? Not a mining engineer, so hard to want to be guarded in my comments because it's not my area of expertise. I know the I've no people to be exceptional and straightforward operators. I think that they wouldn't have had a site visit that I understand they cancelled or anything if they thought that the initial seismic was going to continue. And I think this is one of these just very unfortunate situations. And you know what?

I will use Alpha man when Goma felt M23 or when the mindset is an example. The market hates a void of information and uncertainty. You have a spike of uncertainty if you take the complete bullish case, it's ah, there's so much copper there. One or two quarters doesn't change the NAV on a 40 year mine life. I do think there's levers to pull given the Kapushi ramp that should generate some cash. We'll look forward in two to

three years. And even if a portion of Kakula is sterilized, there's enough levers to pull there that you can push more Kamoa, maybe push more Kakula West, develop one or the other. Like I mean, there's like 6 different proposed mines just in the Kamola joint venture area. You can go pull in, it'll be lower grade or, but you can keep those mills full. It might take a little while in a worst case scenario to get those mills filled again.

But I mean, look, it's, it's not great, but it feels like one of these classic, the stock could be down 20 to 3040% initially and we wake up in 12 months and it's recovered 60 to 70% of that damage as we just get more clarity and disclosure and understanding what it is. I mean, another good example is when Glencore DOJ happened, stocks down 10%.

It was down 5-6 billion in market cap from memory in July 2018. And then when we finally get the settlement like five years later, it's it's not even $2 billion. And it's like, why'd we freak out? It's like, because the market just hates a void. So I'm looking at Ivanhoe very carefully. You don't get chances to buy world class opportunities on sale. Even if it's got a little bit of a scratch on it now potentially, it's still a world class district opportunity and team.

How good was that from both, both both Neil and the Koala and a full episode with the koala with everything except for that little quip is going to be out either Saturday or Sunday this weekend. So stay tuned for that one. JD, we've got some partners to thank. We do thank you to the awesome partners at Mineral Mining Services, MMS, Grounded, Sandvik Ground Support, CRE Insurance, K Drill, KCA Side Services, Cross Boundary Energy and Black Diamond. Service.

If you don't like it, you can always become a recruiter it sounds like. That's that's easy. Yeah, well, you know, you know, that's a very valid point. All right mate, I wasn't sure. If you were calling to just let me know or like I was actually recording what I was like, oh shit, what I realised. Yeah, well, I was thinking.

In my head it would be funny as if if I put on some voice and just pretend I'm some rando and my friend told me to call you to get like a job and I'm just asking a bunch of dumb ass questions. But then when you answered. Oh hey, Travis, you threw me off and I was like, there goes my whole stick.