Categories: Energy
Topics: General Energy

Green Shift Commodities (TSX-V: GCOM)(OTC: UWEFF) CEO Trumbull Fisher on Acquiring a District-Scale Lithium Project in the Hotbed of Global Lithium Mining — Argentina

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the CEO and director of Green Shift Commodities — Mr. Trumbull Fisher. Trumbull, how are you today?

Trumbull Fisher: I'm great. Thank you very much and excited to be here to chat with you.

Gerardo Del Real: Look, it's great to have you on. This is a new story for our audience, and let me tell you what I like about the story. One, your market cap is absolutely tiny. Two, you are in the package of metals — battery metals and the clean energy space — putting together a portfolio that, one, is diversified, not just across jurisdiction but also across commodity type. And I happen to really like your commodity mix. 

So I want to get into all of that, including the exciting acquisition of your entry into a big lithium project in Argentina — a country that has become just a hotbed to attract capital for a bunch of commodities. But before I get into all of that, I'd love to hear a little bit about your background.

Trumbull Fisher: Great, thank you. I'm primarily a capital markets professional. I've spent the better part of approximately 17 years in capital markets. I've been at institutional investment banks. I've led their sales and trading departments, and I've raised a significant amount of money for mostly resource companies. 

So after doing that, I jumped over and co-founded a hedge fund. It was an offshore hedge fund based in the Cayman Islands, and we invested in long/short North American equities. While doing that and having a lot of fun and success, we were approached to be acquired, so we sold the fund to another hedge fund in Toronto where I am now. I stayed on for the better part of a year before jumping and going more towards the issuer side.

So since getting out of the side where I was staring at six screens and trading stocks all over the place, I have been involved in a number of different issuers, mostly in the resource space and anywhere from a chairman role to an advisor to president to CEO, which these various roles have led me to Green Shift Commodities, which I'm tremendously excited about and really excited about what 2023 is going to bring us.

Gerardo Del Real: Let's talk about that excitement. Let's talk about why you're excited and then let's definitely talk about 2023. But before we go on, can you share with our audience just how tiny your market cap is right now?

Trumbull Fisher: Yeah, the market cap right now is just under C$10 million — so it's approximately C$8 million.

Gerardo Del Real: Love it! Let's talk about why you plan on making that market cap, hopefully, many multiples of today's valuation. Obviously, you have the capital markets experience, and you know how to advance projects from a shareholder and a capital markets perspective, which is really important to me. 

Oftentimes, everybody in the resource space knows we need more qualified geologists. We know we need geologists that have experience and success but oftentimes if it's just the geologist that's running a company and doesn't have the correct capital markets experience or experience on the board, that can turn into a science project for our shareholders, right?

Trumbull Fisher: Yeah.

Gerardo Del Real: So talk to me about 2023 and how you plan on unlocking some value here.

Trumbull Fisher: Sure, I think there's a lot of different elements that go into having success and having sustained success with a company. There's not one individual and there's not one thing about a company that can make it. It might be able to make it in the short-term but not in the long-term. 

So here are a couple of reasons why I think we have all of the ingredients to make a big success. First of all, diversification. Everybody's heard that word before, especially when it comes to investing. You don't want to have all of your eggs in one basket.

Over the back half of 2022, we started to diversify this company. We have gone from being U3O8 to rebranding the company into Green Shift Commodities. We have kept our rather large uranium asset in Colombia that consists of 22 million pounds Indicated and Inferred of uranium at 0.11%. And we've signed a deal to acquire a massive land package in Argentina that’s 500,000 hectares. 

To put that in perspective, when I say massive, that's six times the size of Manhattan. So we've diversified the portfolio of the company with the closing of that acquisition, which we're expecting to happen this month. But we've also added to a team consisting of various geologists, lawyers, capital markets professionals, and different people on the ground in South America that can really help with this story. 

So again, we’ve got all of the ingredients, we believe, to make us a success and we're going to be putting some money to work down there and going for it.

Gerardo Del Real: Let's talk about putting that money to work. You recently closed a financing to top-off the treasury. I couldn't help but notice that, the last time I checked, you also owned just over a million shares of Consolidated Uranium, and I think a couple hundred thousand shares of Labrador Uranium. And I couldn't help but notice, as well, that one of your top shareholders is Mega Uranium, which held, I believe, a 10% stake, if I'm not mistaken. Is all of that still accurate?

Trumbull Fisher: Yeah, it is. And that's sort of the shocking part a little bit about our market cap because we're really going for this all-encompassing green energy battery commodity company. 

And when you start to add up all the things that we have within our company, those 1.1 million shares of Consolidated Uranium, I believe, as of today, trading at about C$1.85 per share, the couple hundred thousand shares of LUR, which, I believe, is about C$0.40 a share, and then the capital raise that we've done — it all totals up to about C$5 million in working capital. Plus, adding in the 22 million pounds of uranium, again, at 0.11%, which is fairly significant. 

And then, looking at this diversification we're doing of adding this massive land package that already has sampling of 2% lithium, we sort of go, ‘Oh, my gosh, there's a lot of value that can be taken out of this.’ And it should be a good year for the company and for shareholders.

Gerardo Del Real: What comes next for 2023? My biggest success of 2022, and, frankly, one of my biggest successes in my speculating career is a company called Patriot Battery Metals, which, of course, is onto what everybody now recognizes as one of the better discoveries here in the past decade or so — huge, huge lithium discovery in Quebec. And they were able to identify, early on, some lithium spodumene-bearing pegmatites that have proved very, very fruitful. 

I say all of that to say that anytime I see a large land package with scale — with lithium as a targeted commodity — and then there's some historical work that's been done and there's some pegmatites that have already been discovered in outcropping, it obviously gets my attention a little bit because I've come to know a little bit through Patriot and a couple of other holdings how quickly you can go from a company that was C$0.16 per share in the case of Patriot when I first started writing checks and recently hit a high of C$10.50 before a small pullback here.

Tell me about the pegmatite occurrences. These are lithium pegmatite occurrences, correct?

Trumbull Fisher: Yes, correct. And you know what… a tremendous story about Patriot has been how unbelievably fast they’ve done it. I think they’ve put a little bit of the roadmap and showed investors how other people can do it as well — which is exciting. 

Look, there's been work that's been done on the Argentinian assets in the previous years. We are excited to close this acquisition. I'm expecting that we're going to close it this month, January 2023. And then, we're going to have our team, which is already on the ground, immediately going down there and looking at the trenches that have already happened and the samples. 

We know where they were taken and we want to do more trenching and more sampling and looking at all the different occurrences and getting that news in.

Gerardo Del Real: I notice that you have a pretty clear roadmap for 2023. For people out there who haven't taken the time yet to get familiar with the story, can you just map out the next several quarters for potential shareholders here?

Trumbull Fisher: Yeah, I think as an investor/shareholder, you should expect to see the closing of the Argentinian asset. I think you should probably expect to see a work program announced in Argentina. And then, you should start to see perhaps some results of the work that’s going to happen. 

I think the way that the results go is going to determine how it goes after that. Also, I think, with this team in Argentina, there’s potential for further acquisitions. I mean, now that we have the team on the ground, they are being shown things almost firsthand, which is quite appealing to us. So if the right opportunity strikes, there is the potential for more acquisitions in 2023.

Gerardo Del Real: It's funny… you answered my next question. I was just going to mention to you — given your capital markets experience and given the team being on the field now — if you're looking at potentially bringing on other acquisitions that may be accretive or exciting on the exploration side. I think you answered that pretty clearly. 

Look, it's an exciting story. It's an early-stage story. I love getting involved with things early on. A lot of work, obviously, to do over the next several quarters but I'm looking forward to sharing those details with our audience as it develops. Anything to add to that?

Trumbull Fisher: No, I think that's generally the broad story. And you can see why we are very excited because of the underpinned value of what we already have and with the diversification that we've put into this thing. And we'll be expecting to close on this later this month.

Gerardo Del Real: Trumbull, looking forward to having you back on. Thank you so much for your time, sir.

Trumbull Fisher: Thank you.