Royalty Generation
What Is a Mineral Royalty?
A mineral royalty gives its holder the right to a share of the revenue from a mine, without the holder having to pay for building, operating, or maintaining that mine. The most common form in this industry is a net smelter return royalty, or NSR: a percentage of the revenue a mine generates from selling its product, after transportation and refining costs are deducted. A 2% NSR, for example, entitles the royalty holder to 2% of that net revenue for as long as the mine produces, regardless of who owns or operates it.
Royalties typically originate when a prospector or exploration company sells or options a property to another company but retains a small ongoing interest in it, rather than giving it up entirely. An independent umpire is often used to track production and calculate what's owed.
It's worth being precise about what a royalty does and doesn't remove. The holder isn't responsible for the cost of building or running a mine, which is a meaningful risk reduction compared with owning and developing the project directly. It doesn't eliminate risk altogether, though: a royalty is only worth something once, and if, a mine actually gets built and reaches production, and its value still moves with commodity prices even after that point.
Eagle Plains' Long-Term Exposure to Mineral Discovery
Since its formation in 1994, Eagle Plains has assembled more than 70 mineral exploration royalties as a byproduct of decades of project deal-flow: every time the company has sold or optioned a property to another company, it has generally retained a royalty interest in it. Most of these are structured as NSRs, and they span a wide range of commodities and regions across Western Canada, in areas ranging from active mining to early-stage exploration.
This is a distinctive feature of Eagle Plains' business model. Rather than treating a sold or optioned property as a closed chapter, the company retains a small, ongoing financial interest in almost everything it has ever generated, which means decades of exploration work keep paying potential dividends long after the properties themselves have changed hands.
How Eagle Plains Unlocked the Value of Its Royalty Portfolio
A large, decades-old royalty portfolio has a problem similar to the one described on the Corporate Incubation page: its value is easy for the market to overlook when it's spread across dozens of small interests buried inside a much larger, more diversified company. Royalties are particularly prone to this, since each individual interest is often too small on its own to move Eagle Plains' share price, even though the portfolio as a whole represents real, accumulated value.
In May 2023, Eagle Plains addressed this by transferring many of its royalties into Eagle Royalties Ltd., spun out to EPL shareholders on a basis of one Eagle Royalties share for every three EPL shares held. Eagle Royalties was later acquired by Summit Royalties in November 2025 through a reverse takeover, converting each Eagle Royalties share into one-fifth of a Summit Royalties share. Summit Royalties (TSX-V: SUM) now trades as a larger, multi-asset royalty company built in part on the foundation of Eagle Plains' original portfolio.
Eagle Plains continues to generate new royalties organically through its ongoing deal-flow, meaning the portfolio keeps growing even after a significant share of it was spun out in 2023.
For more on how and why Eagle Plains structures transactions see Corporate Incubation
Eagle Plains' Current Royalty Portfolio
As of this writing, Eagle Plains' live royalty portfolio lists 18 active royalty interests across British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and the Yukon, covering base metals, precious metals, industrial minerals, rare earth elements, uranium, and lithium. For the most part, these are structured as 2% NSRs, with an option for the optionee to buy back 1% of that royalty from Eagle Plains for $1 million, though terms vary somewhat by property.
Because this list changes as new option and sale agreements are signed, the current, sortable version is always maintained on Eagle Plains' royalty portfolio page rather than duplicated here.
