Royal Road Minerals Limited provided an exploration update for its projects in Colombia. In Colombia, Royal Road owns either directly or by way of rights 334,000 Ha of application areas and 37,000 Ha of concession contracts in the highly prospective Andean provinces of Antioquia, Caldas, Nariño and Cauca. Royal Road is committed to a new model of exploration and mining for a new world, one which reduces environmental impact, benefits communities and contributes to the development of host countries. Royal Road is a signatory to the British Embassy's Business and Peace initiative in Colombia, a participant in HRH Prince Charles's Sustainability Markets Initiative (Terra Carta) and the Company has executed innovative agreements
with post-conflict cooperatives community groups and informal miners. The Company aims to discover world class copper and gold deposits and to develop these in accordance with national and international standards whilst also seeking to push the boundaries of sustainability performance by identifying new approaches and trialing innovative initiatives to change the mining paradigm. Royal Road is one of 400 participating companies in Colombia's National Program of Carbon Neutrality and in 2021, the Company received three awards in recognition of its sustainability performance. Whereas the Company's principal focus in Colombia has been the development of the exciting Guintar-Niverengo copper-gold project in Antioquia,
since 2019, Royal Road has also conducted extensive regional exploration campaigns, including systematic drainage sampling and airborne geophysical surveys in both its Northern and Southern blocks. This work has identified several prospects of significant interest throughout both the Eocene porphyry-copper and the Oligo-Miocene copper and gold belts. La Merced is a newly discovered prospect area in Caldas province. The prospect was identified by the follow-up of systematic drainage geochemical sampling. The area is represented by intrusive rocks, predominantly porphyritic diorites and quartz diorites with strong hydrothermal alteration characterized by sericite + quartz + pyrite (cores) surrounded by kaolinite+ illite + montmorillonite (haloes). Rock-chip channel samples collected from heavily oxidized outcrops of vein stockwork and breccia have returned up to 1 m at 9.6 grams per tonne gold (total 209 rock-chip samples, minimum 0.003 grams per tonne, average 0.10 grams per tonne gold) and define an anomalous area of approximately 0.7 by 1.3 kilometers. Preliminary interpretation of the La Merced prospect implies a concealed porphyry-type target with potential for an underground bulk mining type scenario. In the Northern Cauca area, the Company has conducted extensive consultation with local communities, executed preliminary agreements guided by the principles of Prior Consultation and the Ethnic Chapter of the 2016 Peace Agreement and collaborated to fly a joint area of interest (AOI) of approximately 100 square kilometers with airborne magnetics, radiometrics and LIDAR. When coupled with reconnaissance surface geochemical sampling, this new information has helped identify several new (sheeted vein-style) gold and/or copper targets for further follow-up work. The Company also plans to assist with the formalization of informal miners within the AOI and to collaborate on the design and development of various initiatives, effectively linking responsible mine development with the Colombian governments aspirations in respect of sustainability and the 2016 Peace Agreement. In the very south of the Southern Block, the Company has conducted joint drainage and reconnaissance rock-chip exploration programs in collaboration with post-conflict cooperative ECOMUN These programs have identified previously unknown porphyry-style copper and gold occurrences which have returned significant initial channel rock-chip results including 1.5 meters at 6.5% copper, 38.5 grams per tonne gold and 1.0 meter at 7.1% copper, 55.9 grams per tonne gold (total 52 rock-chip samples, minimum 0.01 grams per tonne gold, 10.0 ppm copper; average 3.4 grams per tonne gold, 0.3% copper). This southern extent of the Eocene porphyry copper belt in Colombia is deemed to be highly prospective and remains mostly unexplored.