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

Almadex Minerals (TSX-V: DEX)(OTC: AAMMF) CEO Morgan Poliquin on Exploring for Copper and Gold 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. It's great to have you back on. How are you today, sir?

Morgan Poliquin: I'm doing great, thanks. How about you?

Gerardo Del Real: I am doing well. Listen, the company has made a very concentrated effort in developing targets and projects in the Nevada region specifically and in other regions as well, but definitely North American focus on not just gold and silver projects, but copper porphyries as well. The last couple of releases, which were a week apart, kind of speak to that, right? You went ahead and had a release on the 22nd where you sampled 0.59% copper and 0.18 grams per tonne gold in outcrop at the newly acquired porphyry target in Nevada.

Then you followed that up with news yesterday where mapping and soil sampling is outlining a potential porphyry center in lithocap alteration at the Paradise Project. So clearly, you've been busy in the field. And look, given your cash position, given where I think copper and gold and precious metals are headed in the second half of this year, and given the abundance of targets and the history of discoveries that you and the team has a track record for, I thought it'd be a good time to have you on and make the case as to why Almadex is one of the better speculations out there right now.

Morgan Poliquin: Well, thank you very much. Yeah, it's nice to be talking about some new things. Just to kind of describe what we are, we are, people like the term prospect generator. It's a good one. I think Rick Rule coined it. And we were one of the first people to basically, I would say more out of necessity because you can generate more things than you can explore comprehensively in any given time.

We developed the idea of exploring our own properties after we discover them and state them and either ourselves or with other people, and we kind of advanced that by getting our own drill rigs. Of course, we've had a lot of success in the last 20 years in Mexico. I think people know that very well. Changing dynamics there, we've decided to refocus in the United States. And I say refocus because I generated some ideas and some thoughts that I've refined over the years, and we actually acquired the Paradise Project back in 2008, but have been kind of focused elsewhere. And so we've carried on with that idea.

In the last, I would say, couple of years, I've been focused on generating in the United States. And we're putting together a portfolio. There's several news releases that we put out on how many early stage things we've been staking and basically moving through our, call it sieve system, where we obviously, some of them bubble up to the top. And one of these is the newly acquired one that we're speaking of here, which we call radio, and it's in Nevada, and it's a work in progress, but we found indications of a porphyry system. We found copper and gold at surface, as we described in the release, and it's already staged, but it's really exciting to see the thesis, the regional concept that drives the exploration program actually pay dividends in terms of actually finding mineralization at surface and obviously to be able to stake it.

The Paradise Project is something that, again, we've been working on some time, but we've refocused on it and we've done some exploration around the periphery, but have our detailed mapping over the last year has defined basically a core zone, which we think is the upflow zone from a buried porphyry. That's really exciting because obviously, in today's world, finding copper with your gold, and that's what copper porphyries can do, is pretty exciting.

So to define targets like this with various different layers of information like geochem and alteration is, I think, really special. So we're going to continue moving these towards making drill decisions and so on, but we have other properties that are earlier stage in the portfolio that will continue to advance and look forward to hopefully being able to talk about them this year.

Gerardo Del Real: You are one of the busier companies. You're afforded the luxury to be able to be busy at very competitive rates because of the fact that you own your own drill rigs, and frankly, you train your staff very, very well to deploy those rigs really efficiently. Can you just give us a quick contrast as to what the market cap is versus the cash position? Because it's pretty compelling.

Morgan Poliquin: Yeah. Well, as of today, I got to give you the share price right as we're talking here, but obviously the markets have been pretty challenging, but we've got a market cap in the, I guess-

Gerardo Del Real: 13 million Canadian range. I'll help you out just because I was looking at it earlier.

Morgan Poliquin: Okay. 13 million today. And yeah, at the end of the third quarter, which is the last publicly announced financials, we had about 17 million in cash. And of course, we've got some royalties in the portfolio, the early stage. None of them are producing on exploration projects. A couple in Nevada and Canada and so on and so forth. There's problems in Mexico as we've spoken about, but we are focused now in the United States, and we've got one drill that we brought up to the United States, and we hope to do more of that. And we're also developing these early stage projects. We've got a project in the Yukon that we haven't spoken about where we have a resource on a zinc silver project. So there's a lot in the portfolio to kind of discuss and flush out.

Gerardo Del Real: I'm looking forward to a busy year of exploration. We've known each other for well over a decade now, I want to say going on 15 years or so, 14 years. You know my favorite way to add value is via the drill, but there's nothing as exciting, to me anyhow, as a discovery of significance and watching that grow. You've done it beautifully in the past, and I'm looking forward to a busy 2024 for Almadex. And again, the cash position alone makes Almadex a compelling speculation, and then you get all the properties, the expertise, the drills, the royalties. A lot there. Anything to add to that, Morgan?

Morgan Poliquin: Yeah, I think what I really want to tell people is that we've been focused on generating a lot of early stage projects. In the past, we were trying to work through our portfolio of projects, and I think we're basically redeploying our effort to what we're really good at, which is generating new ideas.

And as you say, we have the capacity to move them forward with our treasury. Obviously, these are tough times, but I think with our in-house drilling, we can do a lot with very little. And there's no guarantees that you're ever going to make a discovery on any of these properties, but I think we've shown in the past that we're pretty good at creating new opportunities.

And I'm really excited to be working back in the United States, particularly in Nevada. People may not know, but our founder, my dad, many, many years ago made a discovery not far from the Paradise Project, a high sulfidation project called Santa Fe. It has another life in a completely unrelated to us company, which is exciting to see, but there's a lot to do and it's nice to get back to our knitting as it were.

Gerardo Del Real: Looking forward to you focusing more on what you do best again, and that is making discoveries. Morgan, thank you so much.

Morgan Poliquin: Thank you very much for the time. Appreciate it.

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