Categories: Base Metals / Precious Metals
Topics: General Base Metals / General Precious Metals

Aguila Copper (TSX-V: AGL)(OTCQB: AGLAF) CEO Mark Saxon on Positioning for a Copper Bull Market & Advancing Multiple Copper Projects

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the president and CEO of Aguila Copper. Mr. Mark Saxon. Mark, how are you today?

Mark Saxon: Gerardo, doing really well. Coming from a different location today, which is nice, so from Beatty in Nevada. So a little bit closer to your place rather than mine, this time. Nice to be here.

Gerardo Del Real: Live from the field. I know that you have spent the last several years vetting projects. I know how meticulous your process is. When I saw the news yesterday about the three high chargeability anomalies from the geophysical survey that you just completed on your copper silver project there in Nevada, my ears always perk up a little bit because I know you don't waste shareholder capital on surveys just for the sake of hoping to find an anomaly. You're very methodical, as I mentioned. I wanted to have you on and just talk about the geophysical survey, what you're seeing, what you're thinking, and then when we get to test this to see what's there.

Mark Saxon: Yeah, for sure. Really appreciate the questions, Gerardo. I'm sitting in Beatty, which is quite close to our Lida project, and spent the day on the ground there yesterday just which happily coincided with having a press release out, as well, talking about the IP survey that we completed there.

At surface, we're seeing a big area of copper mineralization, copper veins and structures and unusual breccia pipes associated with manganese, cutting through with a big alteration halo around it. The target's not at surface. We always knew that because the host rock doesn't look right. It's a sandstone or a quartzite, little bit dry.

We did an IP survey to test what's lying beneath the surface copper, some kind of let's call it a feeder zone or porphyry or something that sits underneath. In that survey, in that IP survey, we've got three in a chain of IP chargeability anomalies that look really great. They're the right size for ore body sized, they're in a place that really makes sense, geologically, and never had a drill hole into them.

Yeah, really exciting time to be out on that project. Yeah, the project is absolutely drill ready now.

Gerardo Del Real: You have multiple projects in the portfolio. With the battery metal space and the demand for copper and the lack of supply and meaningful new discoveries, I just wanted you to hopefully provide a brief overview of the rest of the portfolio, because there's some pretty substantial and attractive projects in there for a company with a minuscule market cap.

Mark Saxon: Yeah, I certainly agree with that. Yeah, we're well positioned in terms of our market cap and we look pretty attractive.

I guess let's jump down to Arizona, which is where I'm traveling down to next from here after looking at a few other projects in Nevada. Arizona has the Cora Copper Project, which is, let's say, halfway between Tucson and Phoenix. Really, that's the land of the giants for the U.S. in terms of copper porphyries and really in every single direction we can talk about. Yeah, the mission camp or we can talk to the south. We've got Silver Bell and the recent float by Ivanhoe Energy, there, their major project sits quite close to our project, also.

At Cora, we flew a magnetic survey earlier this year and published that a number of months ago. The magnetic survey is looking undercover and in a place where we don't see any rocks at all. It's identified what we call a thumbprint magnetic anomaly, which is a magnetic low, which looks very much like a porphyry target.

We certainly know there's copper in that area from past drilling, we've got numbers that include 200 meters at 0.3% copper in historic drilling. I caution with that drilling because it's 1950s drilling, which is the last time it was drilled. So yeah, we can't go back and see core or see anything original from it, but, yeah, it was done by the major companies of the day. So, yeah, we have a high level of confidence. But we're now drill ready there because we know exactly where to drill based on this magnetic survey and that's really given us the leap forward to give us a porphyry looking target in the land of the giants of porphyries. So I think that one's exciting, as well.

Then we look north and we jump up to Manitoba, which is where, we've been calling it our flagship, but we're one hole away from a flagship in the U.S., as well, I guess. But in Manitoba we have the Sherridon Camp and Sherridon is a very large VHMS camp and VHMS deposits tend to be copper-rich and zinc-rich and silver and gold-rich. So those multi commodity metals that the Flin Flon Belt is well known for. We're about 70 kilometers from Flin Flon itself, which is a mine that operated for a hundred years on one of these VHMS deposits, so they're very large systems. And Sherridon has past mining, it's got existing resources, and it's got great potential looking forwards.

Gerardo Del Real: That's a lot of shots on goal for projects that are in excellent jurisdictions. I love the commodity mix. That's a lot of shots on goal for a company with the market cap of, what is it, just above $5 million Canadian today?

Mark Saxon: Yeah. Something like that. And there's many companies in that sphere, unfortunately. Yeah, the market's been a little bit slow for some of us, but we'll turn that around with drilling results and we've still got good cash in the bank to do that. So we're in a healthy position in terms of getting work done. And, yeah, we've got to get out there and start drilling and that's the next goal for us and really... Finding rigs, hasn't been easy across the U.S. or across the world, but we're working towards that now and doing the permitting process to be ready for drilling here in the U.S. And that's where we see the big revaluation coming from.

Gerardo Del Real: I am excited to hear that you will be drill testing these projects, again, because I know the process that you employ when you're vetting these projects. I can't wait to see what the drill turns up. Anything to add to that, Mark?

Mark Saxon: No. I guess all I can say is we've done... We've been very cautious with the capital and the two projects we have here in the U.S. are a hundred percent owned by Aguila. We did our own geology work, we did our own prospecting and we free stake these projects. We're continuing to look at other projects like that and a few other partners, as well. In Manitoba, again, it's a very cheap deal. Yeah. We're in good standing up there and we're earning 90% by spending a small amount of money over seven years. So there's no pressure on us in terms of the work we do, we can move at our own pace which is great in the exploration business.

Gerardo Del Real: Fantastic. Mark, thank you so much for the update. Let's chat again soon.

Mark Saxon: Thanks, Gerardo. Chat soon, cheers. Bye.