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

Avrupa Minerals (TSX-V: AVU)(OTC: AVPMF) CEO Paul Kuhn on Exploring and Drilling Multiple Projects in Great Jurisdictions

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the President and CEO of Avrupa Minerals, Mr. Paul Kuhn. Paul, how are you today?

Paul Kuhn: Hey, Gerardo. Doing good. Bit late for here, but we're hanging in there. Thank you.

Gerardo Del Real: I appreciate you making the time. Listen, I am a biased shareholder. I participated in the most recent financing. I believe in the geologic potential of the projects that you have. I like your technical team. I've been eagerly awaiting to see a couple of these projects, see some drilling, and now that looks like it's about to happen. Let's get right into it. What have you been up to Paul?

Paul Kuhn: Well, the recent stuff. The most recent is the drilling started again at Alvalade. We set up the rig last week, and it's down to 60 meters as of this afternoon. Our target in this is an extension of the historical Lousal mine, in the middle of the project area. About eight or nine kilometers north of Sesmarias. We're going to get back to Sesmarias later in the drilling program, but right now we're drilling some of our targets that we've ... We haven't neglected. We've actually built them up in the last couple of years to be ready to drill. This is the first one. It's located about 400 meters northwest of the last known mineralization at the Lousal mine. Our target is somewhere between 300 and 400 meters, and we expect that we'll probably drill five or 600 altogether, just because we don't know the geology here, and we need to have a better handle on our geology for the successive drilling. It's a wide open area. There isn't much outcrop. A lot of it comes from geochemistry. A lot of the information comes from geochemistry, geophysics and drilling. We're drilling.

Gerardo Del Real: This initial program, correct me if I'm wrong, is going to consist of 10 to 12 drill holes, totaling just over 6,000 meters. Is that accurate?

Paul Kuhn: Something like that. We will play it by ear, but 10 to 12 holes for sure. Might be 6,500 meters, might be 5,900 meters. The geology will tell us, but we've got 10 to 12 holes planned. If we hit anything anywhere along the way, then there'll be more holes to drill.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, there's a natural progression here if you hit something of merit, because your partner is a mining company that has active operations, processing plant, that is very strategically located. For those not familiar with the joint venture and your joint venture partner, can you speak to that a bit?

Paul Kuhn: Yes. Our partner is a company called Sandfire MATSA. Used to be just MATSA, but Sandfire Resources from Australia bought MATSA at around the beginning of the year. They have their own mines in Australia. MATSA is probably the most advanced minor in the pyrite belt of Spain. They've got three operations going on, copper zinc, just like we're looking at here in Portugal. They have a couple of, I guess, advanced projects. They're busy on their side of the border, and they provide a lot of ... Well, half the team is MATSA's group, of course, but they provide a lot of scientific and technical background support because they've been doing this for a while.

Gerardo Del Real: You've just optioned another project to another company in Kosovo, right? Can you speak to that a bit?

Paul Kuhn: Yeah. Well, we discovered a small gold deposit in Kosovo back in 2012 and drilled it in 2014 and '15 and '16 with an Australian partner. Then they lost interest. The deposit didn't get as big as they thought it would get right away. We did NI43101 resource estimate and came up with about 640,000 tonnes of, geez I can't remember now, 4.78 grams per tonne, 4.98 grams per tonne. Something like that. For a total of about a hundred thousand ounces. We were not able to hold onto the license, except that we made a trade with the previous partner that they would drop the license, and we would pick it up. Then the mining bureau in Kosovo went, not out of existence, but the board of directors was not appointed by the government for two years. Now that they got it appointed, we got our license back. It's a new seven year exploration permit. It's twice the size of the original permit. We signed a partner about three weeks ago now to advance it for us.

Gerardo Del Real: You're advancing that project in Kosovo. You're going to advance through drilling the project in Portugal. You also have a suite of projects I really like in Finland. Most of these projects have seen either heavy exploration and/or have been mines in the past, right?

Paul Kuhn: The ones in Finland have had sporadic mining and quite a bit of around here and there type drilling. Nothing systematic it seems. Just a lot of drill holes. We've taken up quite a bit of this data. We've logged some core at one of the projects. We're actually going to discuss a plan for our second project, where we take out selected core and log that. That one's called Kangasjarvi. I put out a little news release about that one a couple weeks ago, three weeks ago or so, saying that we had made the actual mineral exploration application, which starts at moving ahead. There's a clock out there, and it'll take a while, but these projects are bit by bit moving ahead. We expect to start drilling on them sometime within the first two quarters of next year, at least on one of them.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. Excellent. That's a thorough update, Paul. I suspect you and I will be having a lot of conversations here over the next several weeks and months. Thank you again for taking time to update us today. I know it's late out there.

Paul Kuhn: You bet Gerardo. Yeah, it's a little late, but we've got three good project areas, and we're going to have a lot of good news coming out of there. Drilling's started on one, it's advancing on the Kosovo one, and we're moving grassroots exploration into drill targeting in Finland.

Gerardo Del Real: Love to see it. Good luck out there.

Paul Kuhn: All right. Thanks Gerardo. Good talking to you. See you later.

Gerardo Del Real: Cheers.

Paul Kuhn: Cheers. Bye-bye.