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

Almadex Minerals (TSX-V: DEX)(OTC: AAMMF) CEO Morgan Poliquin on Three Newly Identified High Sulphidation-Porphyry Cu-Au Prospects in the Western USA

 

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, how are you today, sir?

Morgan Poliquin: I'm doing great, thanks very much. And you?

Gerardo Del Real: I am well. Thank you so much for asking. I appreciate it. You had some news here recently, about a week or so ago, you provided an update on three newly identified high sulphidation porphyry copper-gold prospects in the Western USA. Obviously, the company is laser focused on expanding and advancing the portfolio of very prospective properties in amazing jurisdictions. These three projects happen to be in central Nevada and Colorado. I thought I'd have you on just to provide an update on the types of prospects that you have and the work that's going into them.

Morgan Poliquin: Thank you very much. Yeah, I like laser focus. That's what we are. We're focused on copper and gold. And we have some pretty successful experience in exploring for porphyry and related systems and particularly identifying new belts. So what we feel that we've done is identify a trend that's important for what we call magmatic hydrothermal systems, which are basically old volcanoes, where the deeper part is where you can find the porphyry and which are big, large bulk tonnage, copper, gold, sometimes too, deposits. And in fact, they produce 80% of the world's copper, 20% of the world's gold, and almost all of its molybdenum. So really important class of deposit. And what they tend to do is... Well, they're formed by intrusions that come up into whatever rock happens to be there along very specific trends and structures, which is what we're working on. And then what they do is they bake or alter the rock above them with the hot fluids that come out of these magmas.

And depending on where you are, you get hopefully the porphyry part of it, deeper down and higher up oftentimes there's other types of gold deposits that can form. So in Nevada, what we've noticed is that there's a trend that we think is important for these things. And that trend is being, in our opinion, under-recognized. And there's real opportunities by identifying the clay minerals that form from those hot fluids above the porphyry and then drilling underneath to find the big... What I think is one of the big prizes in the world in mineral exploration is copper rich porphyries. So that's what we're doing and we've identified these prospects. They go in the portfolio and we're going to explore them this year and hopefully get them to the drill stage.

Gerardo Del Real: You have a lot of irons in the fire for 2024. We're into the second half of the year. Can you kind of set the table for us on what the rest of the year looks like, Morgan?

Morgan Poliquin: Yeah, appreciate it. Well, we are gearing up to drill our Paradise Project, which is another one of these types of targets I just described, and that's also in Nevada. And so we expect to be able to announce that we're starting that very soon. We've got the crew gearing up to do it, and so it's a first pass test of that property for the big deep target, we've drilled other aspects of it in the past. So that is going to be the drilling focus. We would like to consider drilling another one this year, but we'll just see how things go.

But ultimately the plan is to develop the new prospects we've announced and work them to the stage where they're drill ready. We think that the targets are very clearly defined on several of them, and we'd like to get the rest of them there and then systematically explore them. We have the capacity internally to do our own drilling, which I think makes us really unique. So obviously you don't drill them all at once, you have to make a plan for it, but that'll depend on all the different logistical and results that come out of them going forward.

Gerardo Del Real: What do you see in terms of other work going on? There's a lot of field work that you take a lot of pride in and you do it very well when advancing these targets. How much of that is happening right now behind the scenes?

Morgan Poliquin: A lot because we've developed some really low cost techniques using geological observations to be able to not only sieve them out. So we've done a lot of sieving before it comes to a news release like this. There's a lot of prospects that we've rejected out of hand because they don't have the potential that we're seeking. But then we've announced this, we've identified these areas. Now what needs to happen is detailed mapping, and we have some instruments that we use. We have something called a TerraSpec, which enables us to identify the exact mineralogy of the clay and other minerals that we're trying to map out. And the zonation, the distribution of those minerals will vector you into kind of physical processes towards where you expect and interpret mineralization to be. And then we also do things like soil sampling and grids that go along with that interpretation.

So on the one hand, you get real data that relates to where fluids have moved and where you should be drilling to look for the source. And then you get actual elemental results that help with that interpretation. So those things go on in the background and we have other high-tech techniques, but ultimately it comes down to the drill rig and we call that the truth machine. And we think that a lot... Drilling can be very expensive if you're doing it with third parties. And we do it internally as much as we can with our own drills. And we find that that cost saving is much better than spending a lot of time on a project doing deep geophysics. Potentially you can get a lot of geological information out of a drill hole if you can drill it cheap. Even if you don't hit, you can vector yourself in better than spending maybe hundreds of thousands on geophysics.

Gerardo Del Real: No, listen, exciting times. I know the treasury is robust. I believe it's still at or near the entire market cap of Almadex’ drills, human IP and capital and not withstanding. So one of the better speculations in the space. Excellent, excellent exposure to copper, gold, silver. Well done, Morgan, anything else to add?

Morgan Poliquin: No, I really appreciate the opportunity. It's going to be... I guess the only thing I would say is that it's taken a year and a half or longer in the case of the Paradise Project to get us to this stage. So there's a lot of work that's gone into this that we've been kind of quietly testing our thesis, staking properties, and so now is the kind of time where we're going to be advancing these aggressively. So it is exciting.

Gerardo Del Real: Good stuff. All right. Looking forward to having you back on. Thanks again.

Morgan Poliquin: Appreciate it. Thank you.

Gerardo Del Real: Cheers.

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