Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Aldebaran Resources (TSX-V: ALDE)(OTCQX: ADBRF) CEO John Black on Long Copper Intercepts and Next Steps at Flagship 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 — Mr. John Black. John, it's been a bit. Your timing is impeccable. Copper is at record highs. How are you before we get into the news here?

John Black: Doing well, Gerardo. Just absolutely crazy at the moment between both of our companies, each of which has a great project moving forward. We couldn't be happier right now. We look for these moments in our business to be delivering projects like we have.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, you just provided results from six holes from the 2025-26 infill and geotech program. Amongst them, 513 meters of 1.06% copper equivalent. That's within 1,257 meters of 0.66% copper equivalent. This, of course, from the Altar Copper-Gold Project in San Juan, Argentina. 

Look, with copper being where it's at and with copper likely headed much higher, I’ve got to believe you and the team are feeling really good about where you're at with the project right now.

John Black: Yes, this is great. And just to put it in context, this drilling was last season. It's a combination of infill drilling and geotechnical drilling with many of the holes serving both purposes. 

So we already have a very large resource, but as we move from a PEA, which was out last year to a pre-fease, which we anticipate about the middle of next year, we need to convert as much of the inferred mineralization into measured and indicated as possible. We're already about two-thirds measured and indicated, but we need to get some more of that inferred converted over.

So these are holes that are drilled with a high probability of success, they should hit well, but they improve the confidence in the resource that we have. And then they provide a lot of detailed geotechnical information, which will help us better model pit slope stabilities and determine where there's water in the deposit and how we get that out of the deposit, which isn't necessarily bad news because that's water you can use for your processing plant as well. 

It’s a lot of detailed and more engineering-type work that we're doing as we move towards pre-feasibility. So it's a real fun time for us and we couldn't ask for a better place than San Juan to be working in right now. Very supportive of our work moving forward and a lot of interest. Somehow as an industry, we're going to have to get a lot more copper in production and I think Argentina is going to be one of those places we see it come from.

Gerardo Del Real: John, I’ve got to believe that given the scale, given the grade, given the tier one jurisdiction that you're operating in and given where copper prices are and where I think, and I think a lot of us think they're headed, you're fielding phone calls from potential suitors.

Or at the very least, people that want to let it be known that they would love a seat at the table and maybe an eventual shot at getting Altar under their belt. How is that behind the scenes?

John Black: Like you said, I have to be a little cautious about what I say… but it is the type of environment where we start to see M&A-type activity take off. For years now on our projects, we've had companies monitoring what we're doing. Any large copper company should be watching a project like we have.

But most of them have been talking about that even though prices at $4 or $4.50 were good prices, they were making decent money, but they weren't strong enough prices for them to justify building new mines or acquiring new mines to be built. 

They kept talking about seeing an incentive price at more than $5, a sustained price above $5. Well, in about October of last year, we passed through that barrier, and now we're well above that. We're approaching $7 a pound now.

So that's clearly put us into a space where companies are interested in building new projects, and there are many companies that either don't have projects of their own to build or we can offer a better opportunity for them. So that puts us on the radar for them to consider looking at us and possibly acquiring us, which is our strategy. It's our business model.

And it's one of the most difficult ingredients for us to control because it's hard enough finding a big deposit like this and moving it along and de-risking and showing it. But then we also have to deliver that project into a robust market. And so this was that missing piece that we hadn't seen in the last year or two that's come into place now.

So we're in many ways kind of in a perfect storm for M&A activity in the copper space, which is what we like to deliver a project into.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, I’ve got to believe that as you further de-risk the project, you're going to get a bigger target on your back there. And I mean that in the best way possible. What comes next, John?

John Black: As you're probably well aware, we did do a spin-co recently where we spun out some assets that we had in Aldebaran up in the north part of Argentina. We were managing two companies with Aldebaran and the Altar project that we're talking about. We also have our sister company Regulus with the AntaKori project in Peru, which is an equally exciting project moving along well.

For us to run a third company with our same management team was a bit of a stretch, and we're quite busy doing what we're doing, but those projects that we had in the north weren't receiving the attention they needed to. So we determined it was best to spin those out into a new vehicle, and we identified an outstanding person in Sam Leung to be the CEO of that moving forward.

And he's up and publicly trading right now. That's doing well. So it's one to keep an eye on. They're slightly earlier-stage projects.

But shareholders of Aldebaran received spin-out shares of those. And as Aldebaran, we still hold a significant shareholding in Centaur, the new company. So that's one that's drawing a lot of attention and is well worth it.

And then we'll always keep our eyes out for something else coming up, but our focus right now is executing well on the ones we have in hand.

And another point on that is that these type assets, these really large copper deposits that we've been fortunate to find one in our first company with Antares, and now we have one each in Regulus and Aldebaran. They're increasingly difficult to find. There will be some more out there, but it's not easy to get these ones anymore.

Ourselves and others operating with the same business model have pretty well cleaned the shelves out of these right now. And so that creates even more of a scarcity factor and more interest in groups to acquire those right now.

But having said that, if we identified a situation for another one of these, we'd probably think about that, but let's focus on getting done what we have in hand right now.

Gerardo Del Real: Never a dull moment. You have a tiger by the tail with Altar and clearly a market that's providing a ton of tailwinds. John, it's great to catch up. I'm looking forward to doing it again soon. Thank you so much for your time.

John Black: Okay, great. Hope to see you in a couple of weeks here at Beaver Creek.

Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely, we'll see you there. Cheers.

John Black: Alright, take care, Gerardo. 

Click here to see more from Aldebaran Resources