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

Almadex Minerals (TSX-V: AMZ) CEO Morgan Poliquin on Latest Assay Results from El Cobre that Hit a High-Grade Enriched Copper Blanket at Surface in the Raya Tembrillo Area

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is President and CEO of Almadex Minerals (TSX-V: AMZ)(OTC: AXDDF), Dr. Morgan Poliquin. Morgan, how are you?

Morgan Poliquin: I'm excellent. Thank you very much, and you?

Gerardo Del Real: I'm doing fantastic. Thank you so much for asking. We got some more assays, assays that we were expecting from the Raya Tembrillo target within the Villa Rica zone. The headline reads, "Almadex intersects enriched copper at Raya Tembrillo (Villa Rica) cuts 94 meters of 1.36% copper and 0.07 grams per tonne gold, including 43 meters of 2.5% copper and 0.09 grams per tonne gold." There were some pretty significant technical pieces of information in the news release that I'd love for you to touch on, the enriched zone and how you think this may be playing out, but I'd love your insight on this, Morgan.

Morgan Poliquin: Yeah, appreciate it. Well, it's still early days. These holes are all drilled from the same pad, but they're telling a story. These are pretty high-grade results for copper and it's thick. Our view is that it appears to be open, really in all directions at this stage. Keep in mind this is a blanket, and we hit in Hole 37, the earlier released hole, a pretty narrow, but pretty nice intercept of what we think could be part of the feeder system underneath. But yet, we're hitting this quite extensive and high-grade chalcocite blanket at surface, so there's two things going on. Very early days, and I'm really excited to keep going and flushing this out.

Gerardo Del Real: What do you think of the grades? We've talked about the excellent infrastructure and how that lends itself to favorable economics and now you're getting grades that, frankly, even if you were infrastructure challenged, would put a smile on any CEO's face. 43 meters at 2.5% copper is a significant, significant hit. You mentioned that it is early stage, but you have to be excited when you start seeing numbers like that.

Morgan Poliquin: I really am. I mean to be honest with you, we didn't expect to find an enriched blanket. We haven't seen that elsewhere in the property, so the first couple of holes at Raya Tembrillo were a real surprise to see that. That's exploration for you. We're in the right spot, we think, with respect to this project in general. There's a cluster of porphyries and the system's big and when you get out there and start drilling, we call the drill the truth machine and sometimes doesn't work out the way you expect it. I would say all the time, it doesn't work out the way you expect it. This is a really great surprise to find this chalcocite blanket. I'm not sure what the extents of it are at the moment, but we know it's open and it's going to be an interesting journey.

Gerardo Del Real: Now something that in my amateur mind excites me is the potential for all of these four porphyry clusters to kind of meet at depth, right? I know it's very early, and I know that you're not one of these promoting type CEOs and you hate to speculate, but can you talk about similar systems with a similar geologic setting, and how that may play out or if you've seen that play out at depth that way in porphyry systems?

Morgan Poliquin: Well, I hate to compare, and I'm not really comparing our El Cobre project to some other things in the world that have wound up to be very big. But I will say that a series of porphyries that seem to be separate from one another at Oyu Tolgoi connect at depth, and sometimes they're isolated separate things. Grasberg and Ertsberg in New Guinea are hosted by limestone, the porphyries there, and they seem to come up as completely separate carrot-shaped intrusions that are disconnected. But in some cases, these things wind up being at depth part of a much broader thing.

We definitely see in the geophysics that it all sort of coalesces at depth, so that's very interesting. As we know, porphyries tend to have huge vertical extents. We are really working with the surface mineralization right now. I think over time, we'll certainly be looking at that because we don't want to overlook the concept that there could be something block cave-able or deep that's high grade.

Another wonderful example, which is probably geologically closer to El Cobre than the other two I mentioned is the Cadia District in New South Wales. There the original low-grade open pit, about 170 million tonnes of 0.2 copper and 0.7 grams gold if I recall correctly, lower grade, good grade. It was an open pit there that operated for number years and gradually, they started to find out that there's this huge ore body beneath and now that's called Cadia East and I think it's around 3 billion tonnes. It just sort of extended away from what they thought was quite a small porphyry. They also found a completely separate thing that is Ridgeway, which is high grade and deep.

We don't know if these things are separate events or how they connect up, but it's a good problem to have because we certainly have multiple targets in the property that are kilometers apart. It's a good indication that this is a big system.

Gerardo Del Real: You also have at least one rig, if I'm not mistaken, that extends down pretty deep, that deep rig that I saw when I was on the property last. Can you talk a bit to that and just how far that thing goes and whether you’ll be using that to test the potential at depth?

Morgan Poliquin: Yeah, absolutely. I think, again, when you're hitting these high grades right at surface, that's going to be our short-term focus. But as we learn more about the system, I think we can be a lot more intelligent with drilling deeper to look for the potential kind of source, if you will, or deep roots of this system, which in some cases around the world can be the highest grade portions of porphyries. We certainly have that in mind. Thanks for pointing that out to your listeners. We have the capacity to drill pretty deep when the time comes.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. Morgan, thank you so much. Congrats again, and hopefully, we'll be chatting soon. I know there's still the rig turning, correct?

Morgan Poliquin: Absolutely, yeah. We're just winding up our program for this year, so within a matter of days, we'll be shut down here for Christmas. But we have more results to report and we'll get them out as we can.

Gerardo Del Real: Look forward to it. Thank you, Morgan.

Morgan Poliquin: Okay, cheers. Bye.

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