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

Almadex Minerals' (TSX-V: AMZ) CEO Morgan Poliquin on More Excellent Drill Results at El Cobre and the Potential for Multiple Porphyry Cores

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is Almadex Minerals' (TSX-V: AMZ)(OTC: AXDDF) President, CEO, and Director, Mr. Morgan Poliquin. Morgan, thank you for joining me this afternoon.

Morgan Poliquin: Hey, thanks very much for having me on again. It's a pleasure.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, I thought it was important to have you on. You had a news release on the 15th of December, and let me just read the headline because the numbers were fantastic. It reads, "Almadex hits 268.5 meters of 0.20% copper, and 0.46 g/tonne gold within 497 meters of 0.16% copper and 0.33 g/tonne gold in hole EC16-16 at the Norte Zone and provides further El Cobre project overview and targeted discussion. So let's take those in order, if you will, Morgan. Let's talk about the numbers first off the assays. Excellent, excellent numbers.

Morgan Poliquin: Thank you very much. Well, we're really pleased to be able to further define what we hit in holes ten and twelve, and we're really early in the exploration program of trying to understand the orientation and geometry, but it's really exciting to be able to confirm some of those results that we released earlier in a new hole. This hole is drilled from the same collar as those previous holes, which really discovered this zone, but at a different azimuth. So it tests a different area, and it's a significant step out.

This is a long interval of porphyry mineralization. There's higher grade zones within it, much like what we hit earlier. So I think, you know, obviously we've been drilling since this hole was drilled, and we'll have some additional results to report, we hope, earlier in the new year. All these will go into the interpretation pot, and gradually a picture emerges in terms of the geometry, orientation, and where we should focus next. So we think all this drilling in 2016 has done that for us. We have a real focus of how to follow it up, and we're really excited to start that early in the new year.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. You know in reading through the release, your father, who is was chairman of Almadex, Mr. Duane Poliquin, you know, one of the things that stood out was his quote where he says, "Our drill program has been focused on identifying controls on mineralization in a vector to a porphyry core. Now a picture is developing from the data received to date. It has been a very eventful year, and we're looking forward to carrying out a systematic drill campaign to follow up on these results." How are you feeling in regards to what the program will look like in 2017 to hopefully get towards that porphyry core that you're searching for?

Morgan Poliquin: Well, I think we see four possible different porphyry cores right now, and behind the scenes we're doing a huge amount of geochemical and mineralogical studies that we think will help not jut the assays in defining that. So most of the kind of tea leaves that we're reading are more in the more subtle data, not just the assays. But what we feel confident is that the Norte Zone is – where we're drilling – isn't the heart of this thing. We do have some quite significant grades already, but we feel that there's, you know, a much larger context here that we don't want to lose sight of.

That being said, we think that the grades and the widths that we've intersected so far, if we can continue to define them, we may be able to develop something out of what we have already hit that has the potential to be significant and even economic. So it's very early days, but I think the drill program needs to be focused. It's kind of a two-tiered drill program. On the one hand, we expect to be… we provide some maps in this news release that show the broader context, where some of these drill targets are located, some of the IP anomalies, and how significant they are. So we need to have one drill at least running around and testing the broader context. But I think we expect to have at least one drill focused on the Norte Zone. The potential exists now. We've got a sizable area. We hope that the figures we provided will enable people to understand the scale of what we've hit. We've got mineralization over a considerable area now, and we feel that there is the potential to define something near surface that's important at the Norte Zone.

Again, it's early days, but I don't think we want to, by any means, leave the Norte Zone. We want to be looking at both the project as a whole and continuing the drilling locally here. We think the grades we've intercepted are very significant, and if you look at British Columbia porphyries, for example, Centerra, you know, has a porphyry with proven reserves that are around 0.19% copper and 0.4 grams gold, and that's in a fairly remote part of British Columbia. The El Cobre project is located six kilometers from the Pan-American Highway, gas-line, deep-sea port, nuclear power plant, and we're 100 meters above sea level. So the infrastructure couldn't be better here. So I think what we've hit is pretty exciting, while we think there's a bigger picture to explore.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. And on the infrastructure point that you just made, Morgan, I'd like to remind everybody that Caballo Blanco, which was another one of your discoveries there, is literally a stone's throw away from the El Cobre project, and that project appears to actually be possibly on the path to being permitted, which for a while didn't seem to be the case and obviously it would be a huge benefit to the El Cobre project to have a permitted project right across the hill, per se.

Morgan Poliquin: Absolutely. Very much I agree with that statement. We think that the area is a very developed area. As I mentioned there's a nuclear power plant very close by. From the Norte Zone, it's I believe about seven or eight kilometers, so you have incredible infrastructure, power lines. It's a great place to develop a mine.

Having the Caballo Blanco people, the company that controls that project, if they're able to be successful and get their permits in 2017, which I believe is what they're guiding their shareholders towards, if I'm correct, that would be a huge boon to us because it would demonstrate, you know, some of the social risks which have been perceived for this area as, you know, being resolved.

Gerardo Del Real: Agreed. Morgan, you have yourself a wonderful holiday. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on and explain the results to us, and we're obviously looking forward to multiple drill rigs and more assays here right after the new year hopefully.

Morgan Poliquin: Excellent. Thank you very much. All the best to you and your listeners. Thank you so much.

Gerardo Del Real: Thank you, Morgan.

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