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

Almadex Minerals (TSX-V: DEX)(OTC: AAMMF) CEO Morgan Poliquin on Drilling at the King Copper-Gold Porphyry Exploration Target, Colorado

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the president and CEO of Almadex Minerals (TSX-V: DEX)(OTC: AAMMF), Dr. Morgan Poliquin. Morgan, always a pleasure to chat. How are you today?

Morgan Poliquin: Excellent, thank you. And you, and it's always a pleasure to chat to you, by the way.

Gerardo Del Real: I appreciate it, Morgan. Listen, nothing excites me in the junior mining space more than seeing the drill bit start turning and hunting for a discovery. You and your father have a track record going back many, many decades of making those discoveries. You are a proponent much as I am, except you are the one employing the drill rigs, that the best exploration tool is the drill bit and getting out there and seeing what's underneath the earth. So let's talk about this King Project in south central Colorado. It's a copper gold porphyry target. Why King? Why now?

Morgan Poliquin: Well, we've got a whole portfolio of early stage projects that we've assembled over the last few years. And this is one of the ones that we were able to move pretty rapidly to first-pass drilling. And basically what we're doing right now is moving the drill through our portfolio and gathering information. Obviously whenever the drill is turning, you have very high hopes for an initial very good result, but the odds are long in the first-pass and we hope to just assemble some geological information. But King really popped for us as we have a lot of things going on there that made for a very cohesive target for sticking a drill on for first time ever for us drilling the property.

Gerardo Del Real: You also just announced the completion of the sale of some royalty interest. And I think it's worth mentioning to people that may be new to the Almadex story, that may be new to the space that want mitigated risk in the exploration space. And I can't think of very many companies that own their own rigs, have the technical capabilities that you have, have the treasury that you have. And oh, by the way, you're still monetizing royalties. I believe that you sold some royalties to the tune of 2.5 million U.S. in total consideration. Is that accurate?

Morgan Poliquin: Yeah, that's right. Well, look, we generate things through geologic exploration and boots on the ground. We're the real people going out there looking for the brand new thing. Somebody has to do it. And there's an emphasis in the exploration industry to focus on established resources, focus on areas that have already seen some production or nearby. And there's great value in that, but we believe that there's things to be found.

We believe over the next hill there's something that nobody's recognized. So what we try to do is go out there and do that initial work. Now, that initial work comes with fairly low odds, fairly high risks. I define risk and exploration as a factor of the odds of success by the capital needed to employ. And so the first-pass drilling is always the most difficult. And we've found a way to finance that without significant dilution to our shareholders.

If I'm not mistaken, the last time we issued capital in a public... in a financing was 2018. So that's pretty unheard of. That's the life cycle usually of a company, let alone the period of time when you don't need to go to market and are actively exploring and doing things. So we've been able to do that by creating value. And one of the ways we do that is generating things like royalties. We also are able, by owning our own diamond drills, we are able to generate here and there, no guarantees I always like to say, but revenue from that sort of service. So if we have extra capacity available to do that. So basically the objective of our company is to make an initial discovery to create new mineral wealth that is hitherto unknown. And we do that by this first-pass drilling, and we fund it through asset sales, as you say, and other means when they're available to us. And knock on wood, we've been able to do this for some time.

Gerardo Del Real: Look, I'm of the opinion that we see much higher gold, silver, and copper prices. Can you explain to the good folks at home what the rest of the year looks like? Because there are a lot of catalysts for Almadex.

Morgan Poliquin: We are going to just continue this process of going through our portfolio, doing first-pass drilling, and then obviously we hope that there will be a very clear focus. We're trying to make a discovery here, let's be clear. But the odds of doing that in the initial drilling are generally against you. But what we hope to do is get the right geologic information to do the follow-up drilling. And so whenever you're drilling, you got a chance. You're never going to catch a fish if you don't have your line in the water. And our line's in the water right now with the drill. And we hope to just cycle through the portfolio here. So we spent the last four years assembling this portfolio.

We have, I think, a pretty special idea on where there might be porphyries in the Western United States that are not well recognized and completely under explored belt. And we've spent the time confirming that that belt is real in our minds and staking these properties. And now it's about drilling. So the rest of this year, we anticipate having that drill turning and next year as well.

Gerardo Del Real: Looking forward to September, October, November, December. I think it's going to be action packed. Always rooting for a discovery. Looking forward to having you back on here, Morgan, on the next bit of news here. I suspect we'll be chatting often in the coming months.

Morgan Poliquin: Look forward to it, Gerardo. Thanks very much.

Gerardo Del Real: All right. Thanks for your time.

Morgan Poliquin: Cheers.

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