Categories: Energy
Topics: General Energy

Infinity Stone Ventures (CSE: GEMS)(OTC: GEMSF) CEO Zayn Kalyan on Advancing a Diversified Battery Metals Portfolio

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the CEO of Infinity Stone Ventures, Mr. Zayn Kalyan. Zayn, how are you today?

Zayn Kalyan: I'm doing well. Thank you for having me, Gerardo. I'm happy to be back on the show.

Gerardo Del Real: It's great to have you back on. It's been a bit since we chatted. Look, 2023 for the commodity space has started with a bang, whether it's copper, lithium M&A, the gold price, there's a lot of interest. I'm getting calls and emails that I wasn't getting three to four weeks ago, and so I reached out because I wanted to have you on. You've had quite a bit of news. You just intersected some gold mineralization at the Rockstone project. You did an airborne geophysics survey in a project in Quebec. You were just in Saudi Arabia and you're looking at lithium projects in Central Africa, and you also added the Shorty West Lithium project back in late December. All of this right after closing a half a million dollar flow through private placement. So thought it was an opportune time to have you back on and set the table for 2023.

Zayn Kalyan: Well, thank you for having me. And I think, yeah, we have a lot on the go, but lots of exciting things in the pipeline, lots of catalysts for growth, and I think we're looking forward to a big 2023.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. Walk me through the order of things, Zayn. What is going on now? I know we still have assets pending and results pending. Walk me through the timelines that you see moving forward here in the next couple of months. Your commodity mix is fantastic. I know that you're looking to advance multiple projects simultaneously and they're all at different stages. So for people that may not be familiar with the Infinity Stone story, can you just walk us through the pace of news that people can expect because it's pretty substantial?

Zayn Kalyan: Yeah, so I think as we've always said, what we really set out to do with Infinity Stone is build a diversified investment platform for exposure to battery metals exploration. I think looking at the high interest rate, high inflation, macroeconomic climate that we're in, commodities have historically performed very, very well in this type of climate. If you look back at 2008, 2009, up to 2011, you look back at the post dot-com bubble, it really is kind of the commodities really perform well in a recession. I think we really wanted to build a platform that investors could get exposure to battery metals, exploration, and commodities in a diversified manner in the exploration stage, and for investors who may be historically have never invested in mining our exploration or junior exploration companies before. So with that, we've put together a very large portfolio as you hit the nail on the head with that and with that obviously then flows through to a lot of news flow as we're working actively on all these projects.

So kind of the core of our lithium portfolio has been the Camaro Hellcat project. We are going to put out results here shortly on what we've got from that. We're going to be working towards a larger exploration program at the Camaro Hellcat as the snow melts towards the end of March. I think our ability to continue to do prospecting up there is a little bit limited right now just because of the snow on the ground. And we really do want to have a little bit more data before we start drilling. So we'll probably fly some geophysics here in the next 60, 90 days and then we'll be up there for when the snow is melting to be doing some more on the ground ground truthing and prospecting. And I always bring up Camaro Hellcat just first because it is adjacent to Patriot Battery Metals, which has seen a lot of growth over the past, call it, year. They've had a great discovery and they're continuing to build that asset out.

Moving to Ontario, I think the Buda lithium project, which we're going to be putting some drill results out on here very, very shortly, lots of great indications thus far, continuing to do work on the ground there. We'll probably do some additional drilling in the short term there. And yeah, we see lots of opportunity on that project as well. And then moving further, moving beyond lithium and, I guess graphite, Rockstone Graphite has been probably one of our most promising, if not the most promising, project just with historical drill results, historical sampling, and also metallurgy beyond that too. So graphite is critical part of all lithium ion batteries. There's actually more graphite in a lithium ion battery than there is lithium, which I think a lot of people don't understand. But I do think the market is going to start to catch up with that here pretty quickly as deficits start to materialize and China starts to bring down production in the winter months, and you're going to start to see the price of graphite increase. And I think we're probably going to be in the right space at the right time with that particular project.

But what's been most interesting on the Rockstone which we announced last week was in the bottom of one of the holes of a previous drill program, we did hit gold mineralization in the last two meters. So we hit very high, three grams per tonne, north of three grams per tonne, gold mineralization in that last meter. And I think it's hard enough to hit gold when you're looking for it, but to hit gold mineralization when you're not even looking for it is even better, especially in Ontario. So I think we're pretty excited about the prospect there. So there's been lots of great VMS gold discoveries in the region. The Hemlo gold mine is probably one of the best examples of that, the Hemlo gold discovery. And we’re very hopeful that we're in similar Archean geology there. That would be very exciting if we could find high grade gold or that type of grade gold in that space.

So the next steps I think is kind of unfortunate that we ended the hole in mineralization. If you look at the end of the core, it wasn't very evident that it would be gold hosted mineralization. But that said, I think we definitely want to extend that hole and continue to drill and we're going to continue to build out that. We're just putting together a drill program to get back on the Rockstone imminently. So we'll be extending that hole probably about another 100 meters or as far as we can continue to see mineralization. And then we'll do a couple more holes to see what else we can find. But to probably one of the more exciting things I think the market doesn't really understand, we're out there saying we're looking for graphite and we find gold. And they're like, "Oh, well what does that mean for the graphite?" But there's still been great graphite grades there too, and I think we're pretty excited to keep building up the Rockstone.

And then beyond that, we have a number of projects in the pipeline. We're going to start spinning out some projects given the project generator model, so we're talking joint ventures, optioning out some of the properties to other operators, other public companies, which will allow our shareholders to get exposure to those companies as well with the intention to dividend out, cut some of the consideration that GEMS receives. But then beyond that, working on bringing some other projects into the company as well.

Gerardo Del Real: That's a lot of news flow for a company that's got such a tiny market cap. We've been in multiple cycles, Zayn. You know the rerating happens quick and violently once the market catches momentum. I think we're on the cusp of that. Where's the market cap stand today, roughly?

Zayn Kalyan: Roughly today, we said just about 20 million market cap currently. We're pretty excited to keep building. I think we do feel we're undervalued, but we do think the market will probably catch up here as we get more news out and continue to build out what we're working on.

Gerardo Del Real: Good stuff. Zayn, great to have you back on. Let's keep the dialogue going. I suspect we'll be chatting again soon given the amount of news in the pipeline.

Zayn Kalyan: Yep, for sure. Appreciate it and thank you for the time.

Gerardo Del Real: All right, thanks for yours. Bye now.