Project Generator

By maintaining a healthy treasury, Eagle Plains has been able to acquire quality exploration ground through staking and third-party arrangements, particularly during industry downturns when strong properties are most readily available. A number of the company's current projects already carry millions of dollars of historical exploration data completed by previous operators, meaning Eagle Plains and its partners are rarely starting from a blank slate.

This positioning has taken on added significance in light of a broader industry trend. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence's 2026 World Exploration Trends report, global spending on early-stage, grassroots exploration fell to just 21% of total industry budgets in 2025, the lowest share recorded in the dataset's history, while spending concentrated near existing mines climbed to a record 45% share. (Read the full report)

For a company in Eagle Plains' position, that shift presents two sides of the same coin. On one hand, it reflects a genuine industry headwind: capital for greenfield exploration has become harder to attract, even as junior and intermediate companies overall raised more than $21 billion in 2025, more than double the year before. Investors and financiers have increasingly favoured projects positioned closer to production, leaving fewer companies willing to fund the earlier, higher-risk stages of the pipeline.

On the other hand, that same scarcity represents a meaningful opportunity for a company already established in grassroots exploration. As fewer competitors generate new, drill-ready projects, the pool of viable early-stage opportunities available to well-funded partners continues to narrow, meaning demand for genuinely promising grassroots ground is increasingly likely to outpace its supply. A project generator with an established pipeline of properties already advanced beyond the earliest stages, of the kind Eagle Plains has built over three decades, is well positioned to benefit as that gap widens.

Mineral exploration is extremely capital-intensive, and true ore-grade discoveries are rare; industry estimates suggest that roughly 1 in 3,000 exploration projects ever becomes a mine. Funding exploration in full across multiple projects simultaneously represents considerable capital risk for any single company to carry. At the same time, advancing a larger number of projects in parallel genuinely improves the odds of participating in a discovery somewhere within the portfolio.

This tension is also why some junior explorers end up underusing partnership-based models altogether: giving up 40–60% of a project to a partner can feel like giving away the upside, and finding a partner whose timeline, technical view, and risk appetite actually line up with yours takes real relationship-building. Companies that only self-fund tend to concentrate their risk on fewer properties; companies that are unwilling to ever share upside sometimes end up sitting on ground they can't afford to fully test. The project generator model is a deliberate answer to that trade-off, not just a fallback for companies short on cash.

Before the term "project generator" came into common use, Eagle Plains had already concluded that allowing partners to fund exploration on its ground, in exchange for an earned interest, was the more sustainable way to build a portfolio. This approach keeps EPL's exposure to the financial risk of exploration low while preserving its exposure to the upside of discovery. In essence, that is the model.

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When another company wishes to earn an interest in an Eagle Plains project, the terms are set out in an option agreement: a staged, multi-year arrangement built around a few standard components.

• Cash payments, usually made annually and typically increasing each year of the term.
• Share issuance, similarly staged and increasing over the option period.
• Work commitments, a required dollar value of exploration spending each year, which both advances the project and demonstrates the optionee's commitment.
• The percentage of the project being earned, which may itself be staged (e.g., an initial earn-in to 60%, with a further option to increase that stake by funding the project through to a feasibility study).
• A retained royalty, almost always structured as a net smelter return (NSR); industry-wide, these commonly fall within a 1 to 3 percent range depending on the commodity, and are often paired with a buy-out clause allowing the optionee to purchase part of the royalty back for a set price at a later date.
• A due diligence period, typically 30–90 days, during which the optionee reviews the property's technical and legal history before committing.
• A defined term, usually two to five years, with the agreement terminating (and the project reverting to Eagle Plains) if the optionee fails to meet any year's commitments.

A typical Eagle Plains option agreement asks the optionee to commit, over roughly 3 to 5 years, to pay EPL $1 million in cash, issue $1 million of its own shares, and fund $3–5 million of exploration. In exchange, EPL transfers a 60% interest in the project, retains the remaining 40% plus a 2% NSR, and may elect to fund its share of future work as a joint-venture partner rather than diluting further. Some agreements include a second phase where the optionee can increase its interest further by funding the project through additional milestones.

If the optionee fails to meet the terms in any given year, the agreement ends and full ownership of the project reverts to Eagle Plains, often with the benefit of the exploration work the optionee has already funded, which can make the property more attractive to the next partner.

Current Projects Under Option

Beyond preserving EPL's treasury and share structure, the project generator model creates a few compounding benefits for shareholders:

1. Multiple exploration programs can run in parallel in any given year, funded largely by other companies' capital rather than EPL's own.
2. Different partner teams bring different technical expertise and geological perspectives to EPL-generated ground.
3. This broad, partner-funded approach gives shareholders exposure to several discovery opportunities at once, without EPL having to carry the full cost of testing all of them itself.

In practical terms, this is how the model lowers downside risk relative to a single-asset explorer: a disappointing result on one optioned project doesn't threaten the company's treasury, because EPL was never the one funding the bulk of that program in the first place.