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Infinitum Copper (TSX-V: INFI) CEO Steve Robertson on The Acquisition of HotBx Project in the Heart of the Prolific Arizona Copper Belt
Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today, once again is the president and CEO of Infinitum Copper, Mr. Steve Robertson. Steve, it's getting to be frequent conversation and that's because you have been very, very busy. How are you today?
Steve Robertson: I'm doing really well. Yeah, you're right. We've had a great news flow recently.
Gerardo Del Real: Well, listen, you just announced the acquisition and I have to say I'm a bit disappointed. The name of the project is called the HotBx [Hot Breccia] Project. I really was rooting for Hot Box, but nevertheless, it's a project in the heart of a world class Arizona copper belt.
It seems to have the right rocks, it's most definitely in the right address, and with the geopolitical situation kind of deteriorating in a lot of parts of the world, especially where significant copper discoveries have been made in the past, you have to feel really good about a project like this in a place like Arizona.
Steve Robertson: Absolutely. When you're traveling around in central Arizona, you're thinking to yourself, these are my people. They love mining it's in their blood. This is one of the great mining districts on the face of the planet, and we're right in the heart of it with HotBx.
Gerardo Del Real: Let's talk about HotBx. Tell me what attracted you to the property outside of the address?
Steve Robertson: Well, it, for me, there was a little bit of a personal connection because an analog here is Resolution. Resolution was right next door to the magma mine and the magma mine was mined historically.
They mined about 20 million tonnes of 5% copper, really high grade mineralization and down at the roots of that, they found 1.6 billion tonnes of 1.6% copper. It's one of the most spectacular copper deposits on the face of the Earth, and I had used that analog when I was working for Imperial Metals years ago to support the funding of the deep drilling at our Red Chris project and said, “Look, we've got this great strong hydrothermal system at surface. Let's go look down and see what they're at the roots of it.”
And you know, fast forward five years, we published an estimated resource of 24 million ounces of gold and 16 billion pounds of copper.
We proved that it was indeed a world class giant. Well, we've got the same opportunity here where we're right next door to the Christmas mine, which historically produced about 25 million tonnes of 1.8% copper and very high grade resource.
We know that the host rocks that are present at Christmas are present next door on our property, but it's underneath of a cover that we've at these Williamson Canyon volcanics that are sitting on top of the host rocks, hiding the potential mineralization down there.
And the scenario is just too good to believe that nobody has really taken a serious look at this project since the early 1980s, it was 1981 the last work was done on this, and so it's sort of been preserved for us to come along and resume the exploration story where the others have left off and see if we can find a giant sulfide system down at depth.
Gerardo Del Real: You already have a very, very exciting project in Mexico. I have to commend you on the way that this deal is structured. You've acquired the option to earn into 100% of it, but I couldn't help but notice that a lot of it is really back-end loaded, and what I mean by that is a lot of the work commitments and the cash commitments don't really kick in a significant manner until you're three, four and five, which obviously provides some ample room to explore the project in Mexico while also doing some of the early stage work that you want to do to define quality drill targets here, right?
Steve Robertson: Well, absolutely. I feel that we've got two flagship properties right now. One of them doesn't really take the backseat to the other. In this case, we want to make sure that we're able to move them both forward in conjunction with one another, and Adelita has been producing some absolutely stellar results.
Just a week ago, we announced that one of the new discoveries that we had on the property this year had returned a trench that was over nine meters of over 16 grams per tonne gold and just under 2% copper, so an absolutely stunning result in a brand new area and we really don't know, we haven't figured out the controls on mineralization there yet, so lots of work to do, but clearly we're not going to be turning our attention away from Adelita even though we've got a new superstar in the lineup as well.
Gerardo Del Real: What comes next? Lots of news flow, obviously. Can you kind of prioritize it for me?
Steve Robertson: Sure. I think that the news flow will come slower at HotBx. We've got to get up to speed there obviously and get our crews out on the ground. Whereas at La Adelita, things were well underway. We just wrapped up a geophysical survey two weeks ago, and in another couple of weeks we should have the interpreted results from that and be able to publish those.
Drilling is underway and we're drilling up in the Cerro Grande zone to the north. When we get the opportunity, we'll be moving the drill further south to drill where that recent spectacular gold copper strike was in the trench.
And so it'll be probably two months before we start to see results coming out of the drilling, but that'll start to come out and then we'll have a nice steady news flow coming from the drilling La Adelita for, oh, probably well into the fall, October or November.
Gerardo Del Real: Lots to look forward to Steve, always a pleasure catching up, anything to add to that?
Steve Robertson: No, just thank you very much for keeping up on the story. I know that things are changing quickly for Infinitum Copper. We've only been trading for a month now and it feels like we've already got a year under our belt so much has been going on, but that's our intent and we intend to keep it up.
Gerardo Del Real: Great work. Chat soon.
Steve Robertson: All right, bye for now.