Categories: Energy
Topics: General Energy

Labrador Uranium (CSE: LUR)(OTC: LURAF) CEO John Jentz on Drilling District Scale Land Packages

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the newly appointed CEO of Labrador Uranium, Mr. John Jentz. John, it is an absolute pleasure to have you on. How are you today?

John Jentz: Gerardo, I'm terrific. How are you doing today?

Gerardo Del Real: I am well, thank you so much for asking. Let's get right to it. I joked off air a bit that you and I would likely be chatting frequently because you have yourself a pretty busy 2023 ahead of you. You just completed a $12.6 million financing, the treasury is robust. You also just announced a transformational acquisition that obviously paves the way for a ton of drilling in 2023. So, first and foremost, can you give us a bit on your background for those that may not be familiar with your extensive history?

John Jentz: Yep, for sure, Gerardo, I can. I've been about 20 years in the mining business, about 15 of that as a banker and senior banker in the mining industry serving a variety of clients, primarily based in Toronto but also in New York. And then I went to the dark side, started joining some boards, North American Palladium, for anyone who knows the palladium game, that was a mine called Lac des Iles in Thunder Bay in Ontario. That was sold to the South Africans two years ago for a billion dollars, actually, if you can believe that. And a good client of mine was a company called Semafo Gold Company based in West Africa, a banker there for 10 years, and then I joined them in the corporate development strategy role. And again, two years ago, we sold the company for $1.6 billion to Endeavor Finance. Endeavor, people know that name.

Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely. Well listen, that brings us to Labrador, right? We've seen a consolidation in the uranium sector. I think there is a huge disconnect right now between the quality equities, like Labrador, and the uranium spot price, which has actually had a pretty good week and a half or two and actually has had a pretty decent year thus far, especially if we're looking the last 12 months. Give me your thoughts, with your capital markets experience, give me your thoughts on Labrador and unlocking the value that I see, I know a lot of long-term shareholders see.

John Jentz: Yeah, I think the big thing with Labrador these days is the original properties were based in Labrador, hence the name Labrador Uranium, and those are exciting properties. It may be even more exciting, the properties that we were just recently acquiring. It should close the end of next month, about a month from now, finally, even though the financing's closed, called Angilak, and it is a high grade structurally controlled uranium deposit in a territory in Canada called Nunavat. And for those that don't know Nunavat, that's where Agnico's two or three big mines are, called Meliadine and Meadowbank. So, although it is in the Arctic North, you can build lines, you can operate there, it’s a place you can do business, and the local Inuit are very receptive and pro-mining and pro-uranium.

Gerardo Del Real: So let's talk 2023 catalysts, what do you envision here? You obviously have a treasury that, as I mentioned, is robust with the closing of that financing. So what's next?

John Jentz: In Labrador, we're going to be spending approximately seven million dollars, and that's going to be spent, about half of that is going to be on an airborne and radiometric survey. We just finally acquired a few more properties on the belt, now the belt stretches approximately 125 kilometers, and that belt has never been under the same ownership group and therefore the survey has not been flown over the entire property with different landowners. So what we'll be looking for there is two things, one is, seeing where our existing uranium resources are, and looking for new ones, obviously. And secondly, internally we've come to the conclusion that the gravity part of the survey should light up if it's there in the area, and IOCG potential, iron, oxide, copper, gold potential, because that's the area and that should show up great in mag. We're sort of looking for that. We're excited, that should start in June. So we'll have that in the summer sometime.

And otherwise we're going to continue to expand our existing resources in the area. That's in Labrador, and in Nunavat we are going to spend around $8 million, approximately. Again, we have all the money in the bank. And what we're doing there, again, we're doing a survey. And the real goal of the survey, this is a really low survey, they fire this thing about 10 meters to the ground, it's really to compliment the exploration techniques. And the good thing about the property, as I said, in terms of being structurally controlled, how you find the uranium is, first of all, you fly a survey, electromagnetics, it lights up these conductors. And the conductors are radioactive, so they light up on a graph, but they don't necessarily contain uranium. So what you have to do is you have to follow up where you think those conductors are from the map, do it with uranium and soil, some soil enzyme leaching. You have to do that on the ground by hand. You can't fly it in a plane or a helicopter, so it's a little bit manual, a little bit time-consuming.

The hope of our new survey is we can avoid that second part and we can do it from a plane. So if we can, it's just going to speed everything up a lot. And what we're looking for there is the existing resource is on a trend they call the Lac 50 trend. It's about five kilometers, existing resources about five kilometers up to 12 kilometers, and it's a pretty simple plan we have. We're just going to try and expand along strike. The deposit goes from surface down 300 meters, we're not too deep at this point. It goes deeper, but we're not going there yet. Basically, just to expand along strike and build the resource and demonstrate to people the greatest 0.69, that's world class for anyone that knows uranium, and our challenge where people will see the value is if we can expand the resource from its existing 43 million pounds, start growing it, and eventually grow it towards a hundred million pounds, that's when everyone's going to take notice.

Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely. Multiple projects, multiple jurisdictions. It sounds like we have a shot at discoveries with exposure to multiple commodities. Did I hear that correct, John?

John Jentz: Yeah. Yeah. That's one of the exciting things. I mean, I know we're uranium, and we've got some interesting byproducts on that. We've got some molybdenum, and some vanadium, which are exciting. The molybdenum is about 10 million pounds, it's not insignificant, it's a decent kicker. But we are excited to see about this IOCG potential, because these things are big. I mean, Olympic Dam in Australia would be a great example. That's an IOCG, and they tend to be big, and in that part of the world we've got a lot of land, but it is remote, so you need the size and the grade similar to Voisey's Bay. Voisey's Bay is in Labrador, we'd be looking for something on a very fairly large scale, which if we found it, it wouldn't necessarily be a project for us because it would be very big, but it would be a super exciting discovery that we're going to be looking for.

Gerardo Del Real: If you're going to drill for discoveries, you may as well drill for big ones, right? John, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. Anything to add to that?

John Jentz: Nope. No, that covers it. Again, we're fully funded, we're super excited, and we know we're going to walk the ridge this summer and going into Q3, Q4.

Gerardo Del Real: Looking forward to a busy year. Thanks again for your time.

John Jentz: Gerardo, thanks so much. 

Click here to see more from Atha Energy