Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: General Precious Metals

Nevada Sunrise (TSX-V: NEV)(OTC: NVSGF) CEO Warren Stanyer on Drilling for Lithium, Copper & Gold in Nevada

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the President and CEO of Nevada Sunrise Gold, Mr. Warren Stanyer. Warren, how are you today?

Warren Stanyer: What an introduction, Gerardo. I'm fine thank you, and I hope you are well.

Gerardo Del Real: I am. Thank you for the kind words there. Look, I'm hoping, and I say this as a very biased shareholder, that soon it's Nevada Sunrise Gold and Lithium, or Nevada Sunrise Minerals. And the reason I say that is you just provided an exploration update for the Gemini Lithium Project in Nevada. I of course am a big believer in the Kinsley Mountain Project, the gold project also in Nevada, that is seeing some great exploration and will see some very, very important drilling later in the year, and I want to touch on that in just a bit.

I have to start with Gemini and ask you about this lithium project that I don't believe of many shareholders are even aware was in the portfolio.

Warren Stanyer: Well, it's something that we developed ourselves. We had entered the lithium market in Nevada back in 2015 when gold was just trying to stay above $1,000 an ounce, and it was a very difficult sell. Exploration at Kinsley Mountain was slowing down. I looked around, I thought, "Well, we're in Nevada. I just signed a check for insurance for what we do there. Let's look for other commodities."

So, lithium was starting to do well and it did very well for a couple of years. During that time, we found Gemini from data that had been collected by the University of Texas, by a professor Dr. John Aldo. He and his students went out and did gravity measurements and outlined these gravity lows. Gravity lows are generally where you find lithium brine. So, we had that in our portfolio.

But what really held it back, I guess, at the time; we did a deal with Advantage Lithium where they took an option on several of our lithium properties in Nevada, but Gemini they weren't interested in working on so much because it was 50% owned by another company, by Eureka Resources. It was an associated company that had decided to do a 50/50 with us. So at that point, it just sat and no drilling was carried out.

It's got some really great attributes for potentially lithium brines and for lithium sediments, because they've never been tested for. So when Eureka became Core Resources, which is a gold company in California and also in British Columbia, they divested their 50% interest back to us and I think that was in 2019. So slowly, the lithium market came back from the crash that it was subjected to, I think, in 2018. So, here we are today with a very strong lithium market. We're in Nevada, we drive to the property, there's a drill pad already built, and we signed a contract with a driller. So, pitter patter, let's get at her.

Gerardo Del Real: When do you anticipate starting to receive initial impressions and then obviously the results, right? Which is the proof in the pudding.

Warren Stanyer: Yep. So as far as the sediments down hole as we're drilling towards what could be the brine targets, we expect to be using an XRF, x-ray defraction device that will tell us if there's lithium present. It's not an accurate measure by any means. I mean, sometimes it can be if your device is perfectly calibrated. It looks like a hair dryer. You pointed at the material that you're testing. It's just like a laser beam. Just micrometers and diameter, I guess. So, it tells you what it sees.

If we're looking for the presence of lithium, we're looking for hundreds to a thousand or more PPM lithium in that sediment, because that's what several companies now are promoting as a way to build a lithium mine. If there's brine there, well, even better because it'll be deeper. These brines and these sediments are the result of erosion and accumulation over, I don't know, hundreds of thousands, a million years? I can't point to the era that this all started, but we know that the mountains, the mountain ranges around these valleys, the Clayton Valley and the Lida Valley, contain rhyolite and that contains lithium. So, all of this has been eroding into these basins for a very long time, and this has never been tested. So, we're going for it.

Gerardo Del Real: You're drilling 1,067 meters of RC drilling to test those geophysical anomalies. How many holes would that translate into how deep are these holes going to be?

Warren Stanyer: Well, if the brine targets are where our geophysics tells us, they're about 1,500 feet down. So, we're looking to drill up to two holes as a test of this particular area. This is the best target at Gemini. There's an interpreted fault that this geophysical zone is cuddled up against. And those faults, when we drilled at Clayton Valley and Clayton Northeast, we were right up against the fault. I stood on the ground. You could literally see the fault standing there, and we hit brine in every hole because the fault acts like a wall, an impenetrable wall that will hopefully capture brines and keep them in place. So, all of the attributes are there.

Gerardo Del Real: Very, very interesting. Let's pivot to gold and let's pivot to Kinsley Mountain. We talked a bit off air, I believe. We finally have a turning of the gold market after a painful year and a half long consolidation. Nevada Sunrise Gold, of course, still owns approximately 20% of the Kinsley Mountain Project. And we just received an exploration update on geophysics and some pretty compelling exploration work, which I'm glad to see being carried out prior to drilling this year, because I think it's going to not only greatly enhance the hit rate, but also greatly enhance the potential for real, new discoveries. Can you speak to the information that we just got from Kinsley Mountain here?

Warren Stanyer: Well, I agree with your assessment that... I mean, this geophysical, this interpretation that's coming soon, and we've seen some of it already from what was done in late 2020. We can see that in the Western flank, which is the high grade area, that there's a number of holes that were drilled into a chargeability anomaly in the last few years. No one knew the size or the breadth of that anomaly, but it's obvious that there's some kind of correlation between the high grade drill holes and this chargeability, because there is pyrite. And not a geologist, but I know that pyrite is conductive. So if you see the pyrite and you're drilling into it, you see it and there's gold in it; well, that's the best possible outcome because that's something you can trace with geophysics.

What I found coming into Nevada in 2011, 2012 when we first started working at Kinsley with Pilot Gold is that there was a very strong bias against geophysics in Nevada. And part of it is because a lot of the rock formations, they're not really discernible from each other with magnetics, for example. The shales and the limestones, they just all look the same. So one limestone or one shale might be a gold bearing rock, and another one may not be, but you can't tell which one it is. But the IP resistivity, that is the process that does allow you to see the difference between these sedimentary formations.

And once Pilot Gold, now Liberty saw that, then they started to embrace it. But at first, they would not. 10 years ago, they were completely against it. So, what I like to see now is, they've done this work. That is, New Placer Dome Gold has gone into the Northern part of the property, which has always been a big question mark. You might as well just draw Kinsley North, just put a big question mark on it with the felt pen. What's up there? We don't know. But maybe this IP, because of what we've learned from the southern part of the property where there is an apparent correlation between gold mineralization and chargeability, that if we see the same kind of anomalies in the North, and you have some geochemistry on surface that supports a drill target, then let's go drill it.

Of course, we have to wait for this takeover of new plaster dome to complete right now. I'm thinking that's at least 60 to 90 days away.

Gerardo Del Real: I'm excited for the drilling in the north. Those are targets that you and I have spoken about at length in the past. We've always wanted to see that part of the property explored. Again, I got to command New Placer Dome Gold on the exploration work that they’ve done late last year and early this year and it seems like we have multiple catalysts for 2022 as it relates to Nevada Sunrise Gold. There's also other properties in the portfolio. Can you speak to those a bit?

Warren Stanyer: In our portfolio? Yes. Well, the Coronado property, we're deciding where to drill next. We have an active permit there. We've had not much luck in getting down to the targets because there's an extensive overburdened issue there. So, we're coming up with a new drilling method for that and developing some new targets as well. So, we're still working on that right now between our geologists and the geophysicists, so we should have some new targets figured out here in the next couple of months.

For drilling in that area where it's more hilly, it's better to wait until Cinco de Mayo. That's the traditional start date for that kind of terrain, because the snow is generally completely gone and you don't have slippery slopes and trying to move around. Gemini is different. It's sitting in the basin, it's totally flat. So, it's much easier to move around.

Gerardo Del Real: So, you do anticipate drilling this year at Coronado?

Warren Stanyer: We have an exploration commitment. Yeah. So we need to drill to keep the property. So, it's a question of where and when.

Gerardo Del Real: Where and when. I look forward to having you back on to answer those questions. Warren, you know I'm excited about Coronado as well. Curious to see what you come up with at Gemini. And of course, always looking forward to drilling from Kinsley. Thank you so much for your time today, Warren.

Warren Stanyer: Thank you for having me, Gerardo.