QC Copper and Gold Inc. announced preliminary results from its metallurgical testing program on samples from the Opemiska Copper-Gold Deposit. Preliminary results from ongoing metallurgical studies indicate that recoveries of copper and gold on the Opemiska deposit mineralization are expected to be similar to the historical recoveries during mining operations between 1954 and 1991 despite a head grade for the open pit resource being much lower than the average grade mined underground, which results in lower recoveries. Results show copper recoveries between 94% and 90% and gold recoveries between 81% and 73%, depending on the cleaning stage.

During mining, recoveries averaged 95% copper and at least 80%, and sometimes up to 90% recoveries for gold in a high-grade copper concentrate (25%-27% copper) with very few deleterious elements. Moreover, silver recoveries of the sample averaged between 79 and 71%, very similar to the gold recoveries. As part of the forthcoming updated mineral resource estimate, the Company commissioned SGS to study metallurgical and environmental samples from drill core from Opemiska Deposit.

The Company's metallurgical program began in October 2022, and will be an ongoing process with the development of Opemiska. Copper flotation circuits are typically composed of two parts: the rougher cells, which focus on recovering the maximum of copper from the ore, and the cleaner cells, meant to remove impurities to maximize the grade of the resulting concentrate while maintaining as high a recovery as possible. For this testing, the rougher performance was evaluated with different grind sizes, and it concluded that a primary grind of 105 microns leads to shorter grind times while producing good recoveries.

The rougher test yielded excellent copper recoveries in the 96% to 98% range, with grades ranging between 4.1% and 5.9% copper. Moreover, gold recoveries in the same test ranged from 93% to 96%. Four samples from different parts of the Opemiska deposit were submitted and processed with QEMSCAN to evaluate the copper minerals' liberation grain size and mineralogy.

This study concluded that there was no difference between the four samples. Accordingly, a composite sample was processed for testing, including some grind tests and various rougher and cleaner tests to obtain the best results. Additional work is being undertaken to characterize the environmental characteristics of the ore, waste and tailings.

Preliminary results suggest no cause for concern for the project. However, it is apparent that not all hosts rocks show the same characteristics, particularly the pyroxenite host may have a different behaviour in the acid-base accounting test than the gabbro, which will be the subject of further testing. However, overall the pyroxenite represents a much smaller proportion of the deposit than the gabbro.