Categories: Base Metals / Precious Metals
Topics: General Base Metals / General Precious Metals

Millrock Resources (TSX-V: MRO)(OTC: MLRKF) CEO Greg Beischer on Multiple Near-Term Catalysts to Capitalize on Exceptional Commodity Fundamentals

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the President and CEO of Millrock Resources, Mr. Greg Beischer. Greg, great to have you back on. How are you?

Greg Beischer: I'm doing pretty well, Gerardo. Thanks for the call.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, let's get right into it. You had some news out providing an exploration update on the Fairbanks Gold District Projects in Alaska. I wanted you to provide the context there, and then of course, I wanted to get a brief overview on the multiple properties that are seeing exploration in the portfolio. A lot of irons in the fire. It's been a tough market, the share price has pulled back with tax-loss selling season and overall consolidation in the gold space. But you and I have been in this business long enough to know that all it takes is one hole and a discovery and things can change rather quickly. So with that being said, Greg, give us an exploration update here on the Fairbanks District.

Greg Beischer: Sure thing. Well, I'll start with Fairbanks where, as you know, we sold our projects into a company called Felix Gold, which successfully IPOed in January on the Australian Stock Exchange, raised 12 million, and they spent a lot of that raise exploring in the Fairbanks District this summer and finally now the results are rolling in steadily. And the most recent ones that they've sent out over the last few weeks we consolidated into one of our own press releases this morning, and what they've come up with so far is pretty darn interesting. The highlight hole was close to 90 meters of one gram gold per tonne, and in this part of the world, that's an ore-grade intersection. But taken all together, they've defined an area that's 700 meters long by 450 meters wide so far that has gold mineralization in it.

It doesn't take very high grade here. The Fort Knox Gold Mine operated by Kinross is nearby, and I think, as you know, they mine and make a lot of money at a very low-grade gold ore. And so I know Kinross is on the hunt for more feed sources, I know that Felix would much prefer to find a big enough deposit to build their own mill, but the fallback plan I imagine would be for Kinross to purchase ore from Felix. And when you've got something that's 400 by 750 plus half a gram, you're talking about ore-grade material in the Fairbanks District, and it's open, could get a lot bigger in all directions, deeper and to the north, east and south. So, good results and lots more to come. They drilled a lot of holes, over 150 holes on the property on the overall Fairbanks projects this summer, and there's results still to come from 90 of those holes. So those will roll out over the next six weeks I would imagine, and so still lots of hope that we're going to get some good numbers coming.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. There's other projects in the portfolio that are definitely of interest to me and to the market. Can we get an update on 64North and what's going on there? And then we have to talk nickel, then we have to talk a project that you brought in recently that I know you really, really like and have been contemplating what the next appropriate steps are there.

Greg Beischer: Yeah, so the Pogo area 64North Project, different ASX listed junior company, Resolution Minerals, earning their way into our project. They drilled another five core holes this summer, and they've said recently they expect their results now in December. So, again, more potential good news coming. I haven't seen the results yet, so I don't know what they are, and they'll compile all five holes before they make that press release. But we're looking forward to hopefully some good results.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. Elsewhere in the portfolio, you know what I'm going to ask you, Greg.

Greg Beischer: You bet, yeah. We've made some great advancements on the Nikolai Project over the last couple months with bench-scale testing on historic cores, core samples, that shows that the nickel that was intersected in those historic holes is mostly in the form of sulfides and therefore can be recovered quite easily by standard milling methods. And even though the concentration of nickel in those historic holes is not high, we know that it'll come out of the rock easily and we know, we can see from those historic holes that the mineralization is quite continuous from section to section, from hole to hole, and we suspect it holds together into a very large deposit that could really be kilometers long. We know that it's hundreds of meters thick. And so the total metal endowment of nickel plus copper, cobalt, and platinum group elements could be a truly remarkable size of deposit.

In addition, there's still a great potential to find high-grade massive sulfides on the project, but we think we can outline a resource very quickly that would, should result in a complete rerate of Millrock's share price. We look at other companies exploring similar deposits in North America, and once they've got that resource, their share price increased dramatically. So it'd be a bit of a departure for Millrock to go ahead and drill a project like this on its own before making a partnership, but we're seriously looking at that possibility.

Gerardo Del Real: A lot to like for a stock that, frankly, it's trading below 5 cents Canadian. Where's the market cap today there, Greg?

Greg Beischer: Yeah, it's only around 5 million, so seems like we do have a lot in our portfolio for that valuation. The market is what it is, but we're doing everything in our power to make that share price go up.

Gerardo Del Real: Looking forward to the multiple results that are pending from multiple properties. I suspect 2023 will be much kinder to Millrock shareholders than 2022 was. A lot of year left as far as news goes, so I'm looking forward to having you back on. Greg, thanks for that update.

Greg Beischer: Yeah, thank you, Gerardo. I'm really looking forward to 2023 too. I can't help but having the feeling that we're in for one of the greatest, if not the greatest bull market in metal mining. And so we're just going to get through and really take advantage as that market shift comes.

Gerardo Del Real: Looking forward to it. Thanks again, Greg.

Greg Beischer: Okay. All the best, Gerardo. Bye now.