Categories: Base Metals / Mining Stocks
Topics: General Base Metals / Copper Stocks

Gunnison Copper (TSX: GCU)(OTC: GCUMF) CEO Stephen Twyerould on Advancing Toward Multi-Project Copper Production in the Safe Confines of Arizona, USA

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the president & CEO of Gunnison Copper Corp. (TSX: GCU)(OTC: GCUMF) — Stephen Twyerould. 

Stephen, it's great to have you on. I talked with you a bit off-air. I think your timing is impeccable, and I'm really, really excited to introduce the Gunnison Copper story to our audience. How are you today?

Stephen Twyerould: I'm doing really good, mate. Really good down under here in Phoenix, Arizona. The weather is beautiful… couldn't be better.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, listen, I’ll tell you what else couldn't be better, the timing in the copper space right now. We have structural deficits that I think we're starting to see materialize in the market. 

The futures copper price is closer to US$5 than US$4 now. The spot price is hanging out right around the US$4.36/lb level and looks like it wants to surge much, much higher. I am very much a copper bull. Personally, I'm allocated very, very well.

And so when I started digging into the Gunnison Copper story, it was brought to my attention by a mutual acquaintance of ours, and I'm looking at it and I couldn't figure out why you have such a tiny market cap relative to where you are in the cycle and the many, many catalysts that you have in 2025. 

So before we get to all of that, for those that are not familiar with your background, can you give us just a brief overview of your background because it's a storied one. 

Stephen Twyerould: Yeah, sure. So look, I've been in the mining industry all of my life, Australia and in the US here, and I've been involved in this project for over 10 years now. In fact, myself and one of my colleagues, we put the package together, and we did all of the seed capital ourselves. 

We're heavily invested. We're not just the hired help here. We're very, very aligned with our shareholders and stakeholders to make this company successful. We've got a big asset. We've got a number of assets. In fact, we control the entire Cochise Mining District, and it is the first time that it's been under one company's control.

I mean, this mining district goes back to the turn of the century. They've been mining here for over a hundred years on and off, but it's never been under one control before. So we've done that; consolidated that over the last 10 years. We have a big asset called the Gunnison Project; about 5 billion pounds of M&I (Measured & Indicated) resources in the ground. And we started to develop that in 2020 using in-situ recovery like they do in the uranium business. 

It's a bit of a high-risk project and a big ask for a junior company to take that on. But we're very dedicated and so are our supporters. That didn't go as well as we’d liked. We got rightly punished in the market because we didn't meet our production ramp up hurdles, and it has taken us some time to recover from that.

But the big catalyst last year, we put together an additional land package of about 3,000 acres. And that meant we could now open-pit this thing where we couldn't do that before because we didn't have the land we needed. We put that land package together. This deposit looks great. There's an open pit. So we've still got that drag of the old in-situ on the market cap. Now we've pivoted to the open pit. 

We've got a PEA in the public domain on that; super competitive amongst our peers. So all of that value is going to come back as we start pushing the catalysts out on developing the PFS and the other work on that open pit over the next 6 to 18 months.

Gerardo Del Real: I want to make sure that I provide the proper context on value versus valuation, right? You have a market cap of roughly C$55 million. 

You touched on that PEA, which is in US dollars, and you have an after-tax net present value on the Gunnison Project of US$1.3 billion, right? And that's with an IRR just above 20%; roughly 21%. That's using a pretty conservative long-term copper price of US$4.10/lb.

I can't emphasize enough to people that are looking for leverage in the copper space, and in a company that's actually going to capture the profitable part of this cycle, the leverage that a higher copper price is going to provide to those metrics. 

Can you touch on that because, look, aside from those numbers already being very, very solid, I think both you and I probably agree that copper is likely headed much, much higher. And we haven't even touched on the exploration upside here, right? 

Stephen Twyerould: Totally. I mean, we're really bullish on copper. We wouldn't be in this space if we weren't, and we have been for some time. Everything is pointing towards strong copper demand. One-year, 5-year, 10-year, 20-years, it doesn't matter; super bullish on the copper price. 

At US$4.10/lb copper, we're above that today, and after-tax NPV, like you said, of US$1.3 billion on just what is a very run-of-the-mill standard mine plan, standard operating design, for a larger open pit. And here in Arizona, you have a safe jurisdiction, all of the workforce you need, and all of the infrastructure you need because it's kind of like the copper mining capital of the US.

Gerardo Del Real: I couldn't agree with you more. You touched on something that's becoming more and more critical every day, and that's jurisdiction, right? It’s great to have a PEA that shows over a billion dollars in value and net present value but it means nothing if you're not able to safely mine that and advance the project. 

And so I am glad that you touched on Arizona as a safe jurisdiction because I think it's going to become more and more important as time goes on to operate in jurisdictions where you have the rule of law, where you have a government, and where you have land that responds to ownership and responds to mineral development, right?

Stephen Twyerould: Yeah, and just to reflect back four or five years ago, this project was fully permitted as an operating in-situ mine having literally been through the permitting process. We’ve constructed the SX-EW plant and a lot of the processing facilities all onsite. 

So we understand that permitting process, and we understand your social license to operate. We've been through that successfully and have demonstrated that. There's not a lot of junior companies who've actually been through that bottom line into production.

Gerardo Del Real: I couldn't agree with you more. Listen, I always have to make sure that we talk catalysts, right? And I can't let you go without kind of providing a roadmap for what the rest of the year looks like, what 2025 is going to look like, because Gunnison is not short on catalysts here in 2025. What comes next, sir?

Stephen Twyerould: Yeah, so the next step, ordinarily, is a big Prefeasibility Study. Sometimes they're not that sexy. There's just a lot of work. In our PFS, we’ve identified five or six things that have really high value that can further improve the economics of the project substantially. We're talking about sort of byproducts that can come out of this mine. 

So what we did was we pulled all of that workflow forward over the next four to six months. We're going to hit all of these high value-add projects. Right now, they're not in the economics. Any one of them coming good is going to make it even look better. So all of that stuff is going to be coming out as we get on the ground over the next four to six months.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, listen, I'm excited about the timing. I'm excited for the company in 2025. I'm really, really excited to be able to help tell the story and get it to our audience. I encourage everybody to take a deep dive into Gunnison Copper. Give it a peek, give it a look… it checks a lot of boxes.

You have a lot of pounds, you have scale, you have upside, you have the jurisdiction, and you have a management team that is positioned really, really well and is, by default, positioning shareholders very, very well and has skin in the game, which I absolutely love. Anything to add to that, sir?

Stephen Twyerould: Yeah, I mean, we don't have time in this short interview but we talked about Gunnison; that's the headline project. That's where all of this value is going to come screaming at us in the next sort of 12 to 18 months. But we also have a smaller asset called Johnson Camp right there. That's going into production this year. 

We're working with a group called Nuton LLC. They're a Rio Tinto venture company. They're looking to do sulfide leaching. They've chosen our site as the best place to work on that operation. And we are literally constructing, we're drilling, we're blasting, we're mining, and we're going to be leaching soon. We're going to be producing copper soon. 

So not only are we a junior explorer and a junior developer but we have a small production asset that's going to be coming online this year.

Gerardo Del Real: Exciting times! I'm looking forward to taking a further dive into some of those byproducts because, as you mentioned, when you go through the presentation, if any one of those works out halfway the way it's envisioned, then the value here is phenomenal just on that front alone, let alone all of the copper upside that you get. 

Stephen, it's been an absolute pleasure, and I'm really looking forward to having you back on.

Stephen Twyerould: Yeah, great. Well, thanks for your time, Gerardo.

Gerardo Del Real: Alright, cheers.

Stephen Twyerould: Good stuff, thanks, bye.

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