Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: Gold Stocks

Osisko Development Corp. (NYSE: ODV)(TSX-V: ODV) CEO Sean Roosen on Advancing the Flagship Cariboo Gold Project, British Columbia, with Feasibility-Stage Economics and District-Scale Potential

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the Chair of the Board of Directors and the CEO of Osisko Development Corp. (NYSE: ODV)(TSX-V: ODV) — Mr. Sean Roosen. Sean, it's so good to have you on. How are you today?

Sean Roosen: I'm most excellent, Gerardo. As we were talking before the show, it's a very good time to be building gold mines.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, let's talk about it. I had the privilege of interviewing Mr. Rick Rule a couple of weeks ago, and he was touting his phenomenal Natural Resources Symposium. 

Sean Roosen: Yes.

Gerardo Del Real: And he talked about the phenomenal lineup, and he talked about having people there — presenting and sponsoring — that have been in the belly of the beast. 

And look, you’ve built multi-billion-dollar companies in bear markets, in solid markets, in really good markets. But I don't think — well, it's not that I don't think, I know — just because we're at historic highs here, or near them, you haven’t had a market like this to really cook and to really use your skill set.

So when I look at Osisko Development, and I look at the fully diluted market market cap of around CAD$600 million — and how fertile the environment is — and then I look at the background of you and the team, it makes me excited to talk with you, and it makes me excited to get your thoughts here on the gold space.

Let's start there. How are you feeling about gold? It’s hard not to feel good — but what are your thoughts?

Sean Roosen: Listen, we've all been waiting for gold to sort of break loose out of the trading range around the US$1,500 to $2,200 window that it was stuck in for quite some time. We're here now — we've been above US$3,000 an ounce for an awfully long time. 

That's US$100 a gram or better. It's 31 grams in a troy ounce. So US$100-gram gold makes a one-gram deposit US$100-a-tonne rock. This is a 3.62-gram per tonne of rock that we're trying to do here. So this is US$360 rock that we're dealing with, which is a pleasure for me because I'm used to working with US$50 rock.

Gerardo Del Real: Rick does an amazing job highlighting how, yes, we can get excited about US$3,500 gold — that's great. But if you look at historical ownership of the gold price, we're really, really near lows relative to the S&P and the major indices, right? 

And then, he talked about how you would have to have a factor of ownership — many multiples of today's percentage — in order to get to a true back to the mean as it relates to the major broader indices here in the US. 

So how do you feel about the potential runway? Do you need US$4,000 or $5,000 gold to make 3.6 gram-per-tonne gold rock work?

Sean Roosen: Well, we don't — but we'll sure take it. Our project, we just put an updated Feasibility Study, and our cash costs — all the sustaining costs — are about US$1,150 an ounce. So in today's market, we'd be making US$2,000 an ounce in gross margin. So more than 300% times our base cost. So there are not many businesses that can say something like that.

And the greater theme of gold — the devaluation of the US dollar — seems like it has to happen. If you want to deal with the $31 trillion deficit and you want to get the economy in the US rolling again, the strong dollar won't let that happen. So I think we're more in a US dollar devaluation market, as per se, an increasing gold market. But we've seen gold do its job the last 20 years. 

I started out as an underground miner in 1981, so I've been at this a while. I'm a technical guy, so I've been running mines and doing that kind of stuff my whole life. This is the best I've seen for gold mines ever. That said and done, we haven't seen a lot of new, big projects come online. We're seeing the big companies making a huge amount of money.

We built Canadian Malartic, which is Canada's largest gold mine — the ninth largest gold mine in the world — in 2008-09 when the world was ending. We raised C$900 million in February of ’09 to go build that mine because nobody else wanted to finance it.

That mine has been producing ever since, and now Agnico owns it. We sold it for C$4.1 billion in 2014 and then created a royalty company out of that with a spinco, which is now worth C$6.5 billion or US$5 billion. So to your point, we've been through the hard times and we've thrived in that stress environment when everybody else was sort of throwing their toys out and going home.

And I've been hanging around with Rick for a long time — he may have told you that. And I often sit on his Living Legends panel… which is far better than his Dead Legends panel!

Gerardo Del Real: Listen, we have to talk about the project, right? It's 100% permitted. You can have your hand of projects, you can have your pick of projects, right? Why this project?

It's fully permitted, as I mentioned. It's 100%-owned. You talked about the margin and you talked about the leverage there. Can you speak to what it is about this specific project that made you say, yeah, I'll dedicate my attention and my skill set and my team's focus on this?

Sean Roosen: Well, the reason I'm still in the game is because I've been good at big projects and big companies. Where other people didn't see value, we found Canadian Malartic. We bought that mine for C$88,880. We sold it for C$4.1 billion. 

If you broke out Agnico right now, it's worth about C$20 to C$22 billion of their C$75 billion market cap. So we know what big assets look like, and we know the power of those assets. So we focus mostly on trying to identify things that we think can be exponentially larger than everything else. Cariboo is one of those things. This is 500,000 acres — about 50 miles of total mineralized trend. The Carlin trend is 50 miles.

Gerardo Del Real: Right.

Sean Roosen: So this is two parallel trends. We went in there looking for the next big project that would be Osisko-size. We have a program internally — our strategy is called SUDS, which stands for “shut up and drill, stupid!

Gerardo Del Real: I love it! 

Sean Roosen: But for us, we need something big. That's what we're known for, and that's what shareholders will finance with us. This is a big project. The starter project here is 200,000 ounces a year at cash costs under US$1,000 an ounce, all-in sustaining costs around US$1,157. 

We've got 2 million ounces in the reserve category right now. We've got another 1.61 million ounces of Measured & Indicated, and yet another 1.8 million ounces of Inferred. So our next extension to grow this thing from 200,000 ounces a year to 400,000 to 500,000 ounces is already within that category of Measured, Indicated, and Inferred. We need to be drilling enough to convert those ounces.

But the good news is with the 2 million ounces and this mine build that we put out, we have about a US$650 million CapEx on this. So for the size of the price for what we're doing here — the ratios are very good. The repay on this thing is about 1.6 years. If we were in production right now, we'd be making about C$450 million of free cash flow a year from this mine — and that's without the expansion capability.

Now, we've sized this thing. Originally, we put out a PEA study in 2022 at 8,000 tonnes per day. But because of the permitting restrictions in Canada, we only permitted for 5,000 tonnes so that we would stay within the boundaries of the provincial permitting process. But we're going to apply for an expansion process as soon as it's practical. But we think as this thing builds, we’ll end up with three to five of these things up and down the belt.

We've drilled this thing down to 1,000 meters but we didn’t do enough drilling down to that depth to put a resource on it. We’ve put the resource down only to a depth of 350 meters. So we’ve been averaging about 15,000 ounces per vertical meter.

This is a rare beast. It’s a sediment-hosted vein system. Some of the things that are like that are Muruntau, which is the largest gold mine in the world. So these aren’t particularly traditional gold deposits that we see in Canada — that are typically the Archaean Greenstone belts that I’m used to. And so this one’s a bit off the chart for what we would do but it only exists in this environment in B.C., in these younger rocks. It’s in Jurassic-age rocks. So this is a pretty exciting play.

We were the first ones to actually figure out the geology. It’s been mined there since 1858. It’s a brownfields mine site. We can order pizza and McDonald’s to the mine site, and we could be at the Tim Hortons drive-through — which is important for Canadians — in about 45 minutes.

Gerardo Del Real: I love that. Listen, you mentioned your ability to monetize assets to unlock value, and a big part of that is limiting dilution. You have a project financing decision here to make, likely in the second half of this year. How do you approach that — again, given the background, given the network, given your access to capital. 

Sean Roosen: We have a couple of analog companies that we'd like you to look at: G Mining Ventures — they built about a 170,000-ounce-a-year mine in Brazil, and then they have their second project that’s going to be another similar-sized asset in Guyana. And they’re at about a C$4.3 billion market cap or around US$3.5 billion. 

We have the two mines that we need to get, similar to where they are, within the same site. So we have the reserves in here, and then we have the Measured, Indicated, and the Inferred here. And by converting those, we duplicate basically what they had to do in two different countries — we can do it in one spot.

If you look at just the 200,000-ounce-a-year producer, we would have similar production to something like Wesdome — but again, only one mine site to manage and a significant amount of upside. With the at-depth potential, we've got 10 km that we've drilled on to the extension of the strike.

So this is on 4.4 km of strike length — about three miles — and then we've got roughly another seven miles on strike with us that we've drilled on. We know it's there, but we didn’t do enough detailed drilling to define it. And we've averaged about 1.2 million ounces of overall resource for every kilometer that we've drilled over the 4.4 km.

So the next plan is — we’ve got the main 2 million ounces is there. The Measured, Indicated, and Inferred that’s in and around that is the next plan. The at-depth target is just to keep extending these vein corridors. At depth, this is a neurogenic system — very predictable, very knowable. And then we've got the on-strike upside.

So this is a project that I don't think I'm going to see the close of. I think my grandkids may be working on this one. This is a big project — and this is what we do. We've had the context. I ran the royalty company for 10 years, so I pretty much got to look at every project in the world through the royalty business.

And my job — my think tank and my brain trust — Chris Lodder, Ruben Padilla, Terry Harbort, all the Osisko guys — we've worked internationally. I was in Africa for 13 years. I've worked around Central Asia for 18 years. So we know which one of these projects is better than the other. We have context and we can measure against them. So we've chosen this one as the next big thing for my team.

And it’s the reason that I'm not at the dock driving my boats around. You can only do that so much. It gets a little boring after a while.

Gerardo Del Real: I hear you.

Sean Roosen: And if you've seen my golf game, you know why I stick to this… 

Gerardo Del Real: No, look, it is hard to argue with the boat — but it's also hard to argue with not taking something like this and running with it. 

Sean Roosen: Yeah, this is an exciting project. I mean, most people would be lucky to have one of these in their lifetime. This is kind of like the fourth one for me. So we've been very fortunate — and there's often people who will say it's far better to be lucky than to be good.

Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely!

Sean Roosen: My analogy on that is nobody ever scored the winning goal sitting in the stands either. You have to be on the pitch.

Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely.

Sean Roosen: So we skate our shift. We work hard. We're 100-hour-a-week kind of guys. The management team — between myself and Bob Wares, and John Burzynski who founded Osisko back in the day — has been together for years.

We sold Windfall Lake, which was under Osisko Mining too, to Gold Fields last year for C$2.1 billion. They've got Osisko Metals, which has the big Gaspé Copper deposit on the go. So we're still super active on big deposits. And normally, these things take between 10 to 15 years. We’ve permitted this mine; the other aspect of this mine is that we have the permits.

Gerardo Del Real: Yeah.

Sean Roosen: There are only two shovel-ready mine projects in Canada right now that are fully permitted for construction and production. One of them is Seabridge, which is a US$6.5 billion capex. We're a US$650 million capex. And this is the project that I think is Canada’s next big gold producer.

We're very much on the target list for acquisitions. If you look at a top-ten list for acquisition targets over the last two years, ODV has always been on that list. We also have a project in Utah called Tintic where we are there to look for a Bingham-style lookalike porphyry. 

We're drilling at depth there. We're surrounded by my friend Robert Friedland at Ivanhoe Electric who has the ground to the southwest of us, and our friends at Freeport to the south of us. And we're 40 miles from the Bingham smelter.

This camp has 23 previous producers on it that were built by Kennecott. So we're hunting elephants there — we're looking for a big Bingham-style copper porphyry at depth. The difference with Bingham was it came to surface. This one may not. But in the meantime, we have five historic gold mines. The highest-grade one on the east flank of the graben was 45 grams per tonne. We've accessed the underground there, and we have a small resource we're working on.

But those five mines — they’re connected up. And the only reason they stopped mining them is they hit water. Subsequently, that water has been pulled down, so all five mines stopped at the 1,300-foot level, which is about 300 to 400 meters. And that exploration at depth hasn’t been done.

We've got 18 CRD deposits — so silver, lead, zinc deposits — that actually had some manganese in them, which is quite strategic these days. And the gold deposit also has some tellurium in it. So there are some critical minerals in that project. So stay tuned on that one. It’s an exciting piece of the surface of the earth — and Mr. Friedland and his team are working hard to the southwest of us; the Freeport guys are drilling, and we’re underground there now.

So that’s our second project. But the focus for us is to get the financing in, build Cariboo, get the first 200,000 ounces commissioned, and then focus on scaling this asset up. My last company, when I sold it in 2014, we were producing 670,000 ounces a year. That’s the destination of the GPS — is to try and round off and head for a 700,000-ounce-a-year company.

Gerardo Del Real: Yeah.

Sean Roosen: So we know what that looks like, and we know how to do it — and we've got the team to do it. And I think we've got the backing of the financial markets, both through traditional debt and private equity, as well as very good equity partners.

Twenty-four percent of our company is owned by OR Royalty Corporation, and 10% is owned by Condire Investors out of Texas. So we've got some big kids at the table. The stock has had a nice little boost here lately as we get the risk off the table. But again — shovel-ready, fully permitted mine in Canada and on-grid power.

We're using hydroelectric power from site at US$0.05 a kilowatt, and we're on infrastructure. We also own a mill. So we have two mills — we have one at QR, and then the one that we bought to install on this site for the Cariboo Gold Project. We purchased an all-new kit that didn’t get installed by Hudbay on their Lalor project.

So we have brand-new equipment, still in the box — and we bought it for 9 cents on the dollar four years ago. It’s sitting in Prince George. That solves a little bit of engineering because we already own the built comminution circuit, the crushers, the SAG mills, the ball mills, and all the ancillaries that go with that.

We also have 150 beds in site campus up and running. And like I said, we’re 45 minutes from Quesnel, which is a 28,000-person town, and we’re an hour and a half from Prince George, which is 180,000 people. And we're near Mount Polley and Taseko's Gibraltar Mine. So we’re in a mining area.

This has always been a mining camp. We have the historic park there called Barkerville Heritage Site, which is still one of the cooler places to visit. It’s an 1860s mining camp set up with period-dressed actors. They’re about 15 km from us, so we still have traditional placer miners in the valley.

This area has produced about 4 million ounces in total — but we’ve done what Osisko does. We go to old brownfields mining camps, redo the geology, introduce the science, and then bring in the appropriate technology. Like at Canadian Malartic — we built a 55,000-tonne-a-day mill, 120 megawatts of power. We went big on it, and we built Canada’s largest gold mine both by ounces per year and by tonnage per day. So that’s what we’re looking to do here — bring that thought pattern and that style of entrepreneurialism to this project.

And I think we're just coming out of the Lassonde Curve. We’ve gone through the bottom. We got the permits last fall. We've got a beautiful period right now; with the tariffs in Canada, we've got a very willing government to get resource projects done — because, as Canadians have learned the lesson, it doesn’t matter how many tariffs you put on a mine, you can’t move it. It’s staying where it is, and those jobs are staying where they are.

So we’ve got a new refocused government and good regulators behind us. They gave us this permit in 4 years and 10 months. The industry average is 14 years. So we've got a lot of things lined up.

We've got a great partnership with Lhtako Dene, our First Nations host, as well as Williams Lake. We’re still working with our friends from Xatśūll — but the main host is our Lhtako Dene partners. They’ve been just great.

Gerardo Del Real: I mentioned earlier that you had roughly 220 million shares outstanding fully diluted as of the latest reporting period. You’re trading at about three bucks on the Canadian side of things. So you’re roughly around a C$600 million fully diluted market cap. I’m pretty sure you’re going to figure out a way to push that valuation up because I doubt that you’re selling it for anything close to C$600 million.

Sean Roosen: Right. I’ll tell you one thing — I sleep better north of C$2 billion.

Gerardo Del Real: I believe that. And the track record speaks for itself.

Sean Roosen: Yeah.

Gerardo Del Real: Sean, it's been an absolute pleasure. I want to thank you so much. It's an exciting time. I'm looking forward to doing this again. I know it's a busy, busy second half of the year — and again, I think it's going to be a fun second half of the year for you and the team and shareholders.

Sean Roosen: Yes, we're going to start drilling again. There’s another whole exploration program to be run here, so we encourage your shareholders to have a look at this one — ODV on the New York Stock Exchange and ODV on the TSX-V.

And good luck to your investors taking advantage of this gold price. We’re one of the developers that’s de-risked right now, so I think we should be in the queue to see some valuation. Obviously, the producers have taken off like a rocket.

Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely.

Sean Roosen: Hopefully some of that money comes back down-market here, and we’ll be ready to host the party.

Gerardo Del Real: I like it. Exciting times, sir. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.

Sean Roosen: Awesome. Thanks so much, Gerardo. Best of luck to all your investors.

Gerardo Del Real:  Alright, cheers.

 

Cautionary Statements
This video may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws. Forward-looking statements relate to future events and conditions, and therefore involve inherent risks and uncertainties beyond the control of Osisko Development. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated in such forward-looking statements. Viewers are cautioned that Osisko Development does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements, other than as required by law. For more detail viewers are urged to consult the disclosure provided under the heading "Risk Factors" in the Company's annual information form for the year ended December 31, 2024, as well as the financial statements and MD&A for the year ended December 31, 2024, which have been filed on SEDAR+ (www.sedarplus.ca) under Osisko Development's issuer profile and on the SEC's EDGAR website (www.sec.gov), for further information regarding the risks and other factors. Information relating to mineral reserves and resources is supported by technical reports prepared in accordance with NI 43-101 and available electronically on SEDAR+, EDGAR, and on the Company’s website at www.osiskodev.com.

 

Information relating to the Cariboo Gold Project and the 2025 Feasibility Study is supported by the technical report titled "NI 43-101 Technical Report, Feasibility Study for the Cariboo Gold Project, District of Wells, British Columbia, Canada" and dated June 11, 2025 (with an effective date of April 25, 2025) (the "Technical Report"). For readers to fully understand the information in the Technical Report, reference should be made to the full text of the Technical Report in their entirety, including all assumptions, parameters, qualifications, limitations and methods therein. The Technical Report is intended to be read as a whole, and sections should not be read or relied upon out of context. The Technical Report was prepared in accordance with NI 43-101 and is available electronically on SEDAR+ (www.sedarplus.ca) and on EDGAR (www.sec.gov) under Osisko Development's issuer profile and on the Company's website at www.osiskodev.com.

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