Categories: Precious Metals / Mining Stocks
Topics: Gold Stocks / Copper Stocks

Aldebaran Resources (TSX-V: ALDE)(OTC: ADBRF) CEO John Black on 1,728.9 m of 0.45% CuEq at the Altar Copper-Gold Project in San Juan, Argentina

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the CEO of Aldebaran Resources (TSX-V: ALDE)(OTC: ADBRF), Mr. John Black. John, how are you today, sir?

John Black: Doing very well. Thanks for making time for us.

Gerardo Del Real: No, listen, thank you for making time for an update. The update is timely. It's not very often that I lead with, you just hit 1,728.9 meters of 0.5% copper equivalent. That included 756 meters of 0.68% copper equivalent at the Altar Copper-Gold Project in San Juan, Argentina. Heck of a hole. Congratulations. We've always known that this project has scale, that the project has grade, that the project is open, obviously, to growing, but this is an exceptional, exceptional hit. Can you speak to it a bit? You've been around for a tad bit longer than I have, John. Is this the best hole you've ever drilled as far as the run of mineralization?

John Black: It's certainly one of the best ones we've drilled. This project itself has delivered some similar holes, maybe not quite as long and continuous of a run as this one is, but in some cases better grade. For example, the one we put out in the previous release, we had 1,200 meters at better grade than this. But it's right up there and it's indicative of the size and strength of this system overall.

Gerardo Del Real: You have a resource estimate coming up and you're going to be including more than 40,000 meters of drilling since that last resource estimate was published. How is that coming along?

John Black: It's coming along well. We anticipate that that'll be ready in about a month from now. We needed to get these final assays in and they're now crunching away on the numbers. It's probably important that we remind listeners that what we're seeking on this mineral resource estimate is primarily a conversion of inferred resources to measured and indicated. The hole that we've just talked about and the others that are in this release really fall into two styles of drilling. One is infill drilling, so we're drilling between existing holes that were widely spaced to increase the confidence in the resource estimate.

As people will remember, when we do a PEA, we're allowed to use measured, indicated, and inferred resources, but when we move to the pre-feasibility stage, which we're working on now, we're only allowed to use measured and indicated resources. It's very important that we convert some of that. We're fortunate in this system that two-thirds of our reported mineralization in our last resource estimate was already at the measured and indicated category, so we don't have a lot of it to do, but that's really what last season and this season have focused on, is converting as much of that as possible.

Then the other style of drilling we're doing is geotechnical drilling. Some of the holes we reported this time were off on the margins of the system. They weren't anticipated to hit mineralization at all. In some cases they have hit some low grade mineralization. Those are really designed to determine what the slope angles will be for our ultimate pits and information like that, geotechnical drilling we refer to it as. They're both important to set us up for the pre-feasibility, but we're very much looking forward to this new resource. Having said that, that we're really looking for this conversion to an increased confidence in it. We have notably higher metal prices than we did for our last resource, and so we could see an expansion on this. We're anxiously waiting to see how the numbers come out on this, but we look forward to talking about that in about a month's time.

Gerardo Del Real: I mentioned the 40,000 meters at Altar. You're also including, I believe, something like 30,000 meters at the Radio Porphyry target. Is that accurate?

John Black: That's true, and that's not recent drilling. That's drilling that we'd had in the past there, but we had not done a resource on that portion of the system. That's a satellite occurrence of a few kilometers away from the main area. This will be the first time that we do a resource on the deeper copper gold mineralization. We've had a small resource on a gold-only occurrence near the surface there. This time we'll incorporate that into the overall system, it'll be our first look at what that is, so that's an important one to note as well.

Gerardo Del Real: What comes next? I know that we were both at Beaver Creek. I know how busy you were because I looked to try to book a time for an interview and you were booked back-to-back-to-back-to-back with meetings. I got to believe that the presence in Denver, the presence at Beaver Creek, and the kind of results that you've put out consistently, but they seem to be escalating as far as the runs of mineralization in the last couple of releases, I got to believe all of that has put some new eyes and new attention on the stock. I've seen it, whether it's online or in the share price, obviously. We've definitely seen new shareholders coming to the table. How has that been and how important was it to get out there and run that conference circuit the way that you do?

John Black: Well, Beaver Creek's always a good barometer for us because it's one of the first major shows back after the North American summer or Northern Hemisphere summer. It certainly was a notch up this year. There's record attendance, I think, 225 companies and over 1,800 people. They announced that there were more than 10,000 one-to-one meetings held there, and I think we accounted for about 55 of those ourselves in four days. It was a lot of people to meet, a lot of things to talk about.

We're seeing an interesting shift in that we're seeing much more interaction with major companies evaluating a project like this and monitoring it to see if it's potentially a fit for them going forward, which is part of our business strategy on it. We're also seeing a lot of new investors coming into this space. There's a rotation of money, particularly into the critical metals sector, which is an interesting new development that it's been started for a while, but it really became noticeable at this where every show now we meet a new fund that we've never heard of before that has a substantial amount of financial capacity to move into the critical metals sector.

We're even seeing there's Beaver Creek and then there's what used to be called the Denver Gold Forum, which happens the week afterwards down in Colorado Springs. That's been renamed to the Mining Americas Forum, emphasizing that they're trying to keep that from just being precious metals to open that up into critical metals as well, which is a pretty good indication that we're seeing much more interest and much more generalist interest into the copper space, which is just indicative of where we're at in the cycle right now. We're at record prices, much more awareness of the importance of critical metals and the probable shortage that will become increasingly notable over the next few years here.

Gerardo Del Real: A lot going on, a lot of catalysts. What comes next, John? Obviously we have the resource estimate here, you mentioned in about a month or so. What comes next?

John Black: That resource estimate's the big one coming up quite soon. We're also working on preparing our RIGI application. RIGI, for those that might not be familiar with this, is the investment incentive regime that the Malay government has announced to provide much more attractive investment conditions to develop big projects like a copper mine in the country. The window's open until July of next year to get submissions in, and that's kind of a critical step for us, is to have an application in and approve for that. It makes the project much more robust going forward. We anticipate we'll be in a position to present that in the first month or two of next year, well in front of the July deadline to have that in, so that'll be a critical one to watch.

Then the pre-feasibility we're projecting for Q3 of next year, that's all moving well on schedule. There's a tremendous amount of work we have to do to have that ready. We have a slight challenge in that we've had a record snowfall in the central Andes this year due to an El Nino event that's off the charts on things here. We have much more snow on the project than we've seen in the past eight or 10 years, which is great news for water. We all want more water, that's important for everybody in the area, but it may mean that we are a little bit delayed getting into camp. We're normally opening up our camp this month and ready to go, and we're still cutting snow trying to get into the project and it's still snowing on the project actually. So that may delay us by a couple of months, but we'll see the impact on that once we're into the camp here, hopefully by the end of the year or earliest part of next year.

Gerardo Del Real: John, always good to catch up. I suspect we'll be chatting here more frequently. Thank you so, so much for the update.

John Black: Absolutely, we'll certainly touch base when we get that new resource out.

Gerardo Del Real: All right. Cheers, chat then.

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