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

Almadex Minerals (TSX-V: DEX)(OTC: AAMMF) CEO Morgan Poliquin on Drilling at Paradise Copper-Gold Project in Nevada

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the president and CEO of Almadex Minerals, Dr. Morgan Poliquin. Morgan, you are back doing what you do best, which is drilling for a discovery. You had a news release here recently, the first of many to come, drilling is underway at the Paradise Project in Nevada. You're taking a unique approach on this porphyry copper gold target. We spoke a bit off-air, so I want to thank you for coming on and I would love for you to provide the context of that unique approach.

Morgan Poliquin: Yeah, thanks very much. Well, great to be on. Yeah, it's fun to be drilling, as you say. We call it the Truth Machine. This is how you find things is actually getting out there and drilling. Basically what we're doing is we believe that there is, I mean number one, we believe that there's copper porphyry deposits left in the world to find. Most of the world's copper’s produced by this type of mineral deposit, copper porphyries, almost all the world's molybdenum and a sizable chunk of the world's gold, I think maybe a quarter of the world's gold, comes from porphyries.

They're magmatic intrusions, we call them, so like magma bodies, that hot fluids come off them, deposit the copper close in to the intrusion, and then the hot fluids continue up and they can affect sort of reactive rocks for a huge area and create a large pile of, call it clay for lack of more descriptive scientific term. You've got this big pile of altered rocks changed by the hot fluids that is commonly called a lithocap, and so those lithocaps can be completely barren of copper.

There can be a little gold in them here and there, but there's been spectacular discoveries over the last couple of decades drilling through these barren clay zones and finding the copper gold deposits underneath. I would point to one somewhat recent discovery, which is unbelievable, probably isn't well known because it was found by a major in Indonesia – Vale’s discovery of Onto, O-N-T-O. It's a huge copper gold porphyry found under this pile of clay, so clay is not always clay in terms of these porphyry systems.

So what we've done is we've found what we think is a belt of porphyry deposits going across the Western United States or lithocaps, porphyry lithocaps, alteration zones. We believe that porphyries are associated with these alteration zones and they need to be found, and we recognize that they're going to be deeper underneath, but we've got all the right signs. In the case of Paradise... So we've staked a number of these things just to finish that point. They were available to us, these targets, for outright staking, and we're doing the detailed mapping, which defines where you might want to drill in these systems.

We have something called the TerraSpec. There's other tools, but that's the one we have. It's able to identify the exact minerals that we're dealing with and we're able to map them out and determine, number one, if it's the right kind of clay with a porphyry lithocap, and, second, where the hot spots are, so to speak, where you'd like to drill. Then we have done soils on this project as well where we've got a very clear anomaly that's giving us the right metal signature and directing us where to drill.

That happened to coincide at Paradise with the high temperature clay minerals that are indicative of a very specific process that is the formation of particular clays above a porphyry environment. So we've gone and done the gutsy thing of drilling in this blind. There's no copper at surface, and we're hopeful that this program will be able to help direct us what to do next. You always hope that you're going to hit on the first hole, but we're hopeful that these two holes we're drilling right now will guide us to what to do next.

This is the first step in really a big program. We've taken two years to do the scientific work to define the targets in the Western US and to stake them and do the preliminary work, so we hope this will be the start of a big program where we systematically go and drill these things and, obviously, hopefully we'll be able to report what we're finding in these holes soon.

Gerardo Del Real: I'm looking forward to the assays. I know that Almadex obviously has a lot of projects that it is advancing towards that drilling stage. I want to emphasize to listeners and readers that the company's basically trading at cash. The entire gold space and the entire resource space is pretty much trading for pennies on the dollar. I think the deal today where Gold Fields bought Osisko for a 67% premium in a $1.5 billion transaction underscores the severe disconnect between the value that the market is assigning companies and the inherent value within a lot of these companies.

For Almadex, obviously a much earlier stage company, but when you're trading at cash and you own drills and you have the technical acumen that the Almadex team has, along with the history of discoveries, I get really excited to know that you're now being aggressive in deploying the drill rigs to multiple projects over the next several quarters. So I'm definitely looking forward to having you back on and definitely looking forward to assays to see what you uncover literally. Anything to add to that, Morgan?

Morgan Poliquin: Well, just to corroborate what you're saying, I think the macro perspective is very true. There's a geopolitical situation that means that it's challenging to go and explore in a lot of the world. I also think that we're going to see a real decline in production from the larger deposits, for example, in Chile and whatnot over the next couple of decades. So we've decided to focus in North America for those reasons.

We feel that we're North Americans, number one, and this is our home cooking and that's where we want to be, but we think that copper, obviously there's this electrical component that we're all talking about, but either way, copper is going to be a very important metal. I think what really excites us is to find these kinds of targets right in our backyard, in terms of North America. Yeah, I think the big companies are almost, I wouldn't call them desperate, but there's a real shortage of new prospects in a pipeline. So hopefully we can update people soon on what we're doing, and it is an exciting time to be drilling.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, looking forward to having you back on for the result, and looking forward to many, many drill programs to come. Fully funded ones I should add. Thank you so much, Morgan.

Morgan Poliquin: Thank you, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: All right, cheers.

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