Omai Gold's Updated PEA Puts Guyana Project At ~350,000 Oz/Year And Just-Under-$4B NPV

## What the updated PEA actually says

Omai Gold Mines Corp (TSXV: OMG; OTCQB: OMGGF) released an updated Preliminary Economic Assessment on August 19 covering both the Wenot open-pit deposit and the Gilt underground deposit at its past-producing Guyana project. The headline move: planned annual production jumps from about 142,000 oz/year in the 2024 starter PEA to roughly 350,000 oz/year over an 18-year mine life, with total output of 6.3 Moz (million ounces) of gold. The NPV (net present value — the future cash flows discounted back to today's dollars) at a 5% discount rate and a $3,600/oz gold assumption comes out to just under $4 billion. The IRR (internal rate of return — the project's annualized effective yield) also improved, per the host.

Management framed the result as a step-change, not just an update, and pointed to three numbers investors should focus on.

## The three numbers that anchor the new case

- **Strip ratio: 5.9.** The strip ratio is the tonnes of waste rock that must be moved for every tonne of ore. Skeptics had expected the larger pit to push this above 10. Instead, drilling on the southern flank captured lower-grade but still-economic zones and kept the ratio at 5.9. - **Average grade: 1.35 g/t (grams of gold per tonne of rock).** That sits well above the 0.3 g/t cutoff the team used at current gold prices. - **Plant throughput: 25,000 tonnes per day, up 270% from the 2024 study.** Plant size is the lever behind the higher annual output.

## Why a brownfield site matters

Omai's project in Guyana previously produced about 3.8 million ounces of gold roughly 30 years ago. CEO Elaine Ellingham emphasized that legacy infrastructure trims time and capex off the build: a cleared site, a paved highway within 8 kilometers, and existing tailings facilities (the engineered ponds that store processed waste rock) that can be refurbished and expanded.

The PEA envisions a single dominant open pit at Wenot — what the team calls a "superpit" — measuring roughly 2.4 kilometers long, 1.1 kilometers wide, and about 550 meters deep. Just 450 meters away sits the Gilt underground deposit, an intrusive body where a recently completed 1,400-meter drill hole still ended in mineralization. The PEA plans a double-ramp underground operation (two separate access tunnels from surface — one for equipment/personnel, one for ore haulage) at 4,000 t/d using Drift and Fill, a selective mining method that extracts ore in horizontal slices.

## Where the next round of cost savings could come from

In the PEA, Drift and Fill drives the underground Gilt cost to roughly $81/ton. VP Operations Jason Brewster argued the deposit's central core — areas up to ~20 meters thick — could instead be mined with long-hole open stoping, a bulk method that uses long blast holes drilled into the rock face to break larger volumes at once, which would bring the cost down materially. Management asked SLR to blend the methods; SLR said the additional engineering would push that work into a pre-feasibility or feasibility study.

Ellingham said Omai may skip a standalone pre-feasibility study (PFS) and go straight to a feasibility study (FS), citing the brownfield advantages. Work already underway includes geotechnical and condemnation drilling (drilling to confirm areas planned for infrastructure are indeed barren of ore), hydrogeology studies, and wider-diameter core for comminution testing — crushing and grinding work that determines how much power the plant will draw.

## Metallurgy came back clean

Metallurgical test work on 63 Wenot samples and 12 Gilt samples returned gold recoveries of 93–95% with a 32-hour leach time (the duration the ore sits in cyanide solution to dissolve the gold). "It's pretty much gold," Ellingham said. "There's not even much silver." No deleterious elements (problem impurities such as arsenic or mercury) showed up. The comminution results on the new wide-diameter core are the next data point.

## Exploration still adding

Wenot hosts on the order of 20 mineralized zones, and holes are routinely cutting multiple stacked intercepts. A September 1 press release included 5.12 g/t gold over 40 meters and 2.68 g/t over 40 meters at Wenot. A 2-kilometer cross-traverse hole extended Wenot-style geology 700 meters below the existing resource, and the deep Gilt hole ended in mineralization at 1,400 meters vertically. The company is running five drills.

Blueberry Hill is the next near-mine target: high-grade saprolite (soft, weathered near-surface rock) trenched over a 300–400 meter strike, with a drill mobilizing within days. Ellingham expects it to "augment the front end of the mine plan" — higher-grade mill feed in the early years, which improves project economics when discounting matters most.

## The M&A backdrop

Host Shad Markowitz asked directly whether Omai is building this itself or showcasing the project for a larger producer. Ellingham said the team is driving it toward production and is well-financed; if an offer comes in, the board would present it to shareholders.

Markowitz added the Guyana context: Reunion Gold, G2 Goldfields, and Goldsource were all taken over in the past couple of years. "You're the last company standing with a big resource," he said. Ellingham noted that majors are flush with cash and that the long-term gold-price floor looks supported.

## What to watch next

- The PFS-versus-direct-to-FS decision. - Comminution and grinding test results on the wide-diameter core. - Drilling at Wenot's western end, where ~800,000 oz currently sits outside the engineered pit shell. - Blueberry Hill drill results and any initial resource. - Gold-price assumptions: the PEA used $3,600/oz, so any sustained move higher would lift NPV roughly linearly.

*This article summarizes what was discussed in the video. Claims attributed to speakers are their view, not Pixys's. PEA economics are not production guidance.*