Categories: Energy / Mining Stocks
Topics: General Energy / Uranium Stocks

Standard Uranium (TSX-V: STND)(OTC: STTDF) CEO Jon Bey on Drilling, Drilling and More Drilling for Discoveries in 2024

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the chairman and CEO of Standard Uranium, Mr. Jon Bey. Jon, it's great to have you on. How are you today, sir?

Jon Bey: I'm doing quite well, Gerardo. Great to be on. Nice to talk to you again, it's been a little bit.

Gerardo Del Real: It's been a little bit. And listen, the last time that you and I spoke, and actually prior to that, we met at a conference and we had a conversation. This was prior to me being a Standard shareholder, but you had a really clear vision for what you wanted 2024 to look like for Standard. And true to your word, you and the team thus far have executed exactly as you said you would execute. And so it gets me really excited because I know that 2024 is a catalyst rich year for you all, which by default makes it a catalyst rich year for me because I'm a shareholder. So I like the fact that you've done exactly what you said you were going to do up until now, and I'm really hoping you're able to deliver on the second part of it. You just announced the Davidson River Drill Program. You also announced a share consolidation and a private placement for up to $3 million. So I thought it would be a perfect time to have you on to just explain the approach moving forward for Standard.

Jon Bey: Perfect. Thanks, Gerardo for keying that up for me. So yeah, going back into 2023, the game plan was really simple. We wanted to change our business strategy, look to become part of a project generator, as well as an exploration company. We laid out our milestones and we executed on those beautifully, doing deals on four of our projects in four months rapidly with that turnkey model, which I think Sean Hillacre's talked about multiple times on your show. For 2024, the next stage was get those deals executed, get the drills turning, run very smooth, efficient, on budget and on time drill programs. We're one for one already. And then also on the back end of that, we wanted to clear up our share structure and make it more attractive to get new investors in and keep our current investors investing with us. So that's what we're doing. We're doing that right now, announcing a small raise, $3 million, which probably 85% of that's going to go into the Davidson River Drill Program and get those drills turning towards the end of August.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. Listen, the share consolidation is something, and again, I always shoot straight with my listeners and with people just in life, right? It's the way to be. But if there was one criticism of the company when you and I first met, I said, "Listen, I love the projects, I love the technical team, I love the success that you've had, and I really love uranium. I would love to see a share consolidation." It's music to my ears that you're going from 230 million shares outstanding to approximately 46 million shares outstanding. Just because of the way that I was taught you should approach a share structure. So I'm loving to seeing that cleared up. Can you speak to that a bit? You touched on it a little bit, but I know there was a lot of consideration that into making the decision between you and the board and the team.

Jon Bey: Yeah, it's a tough decision to make because we have multiple shareholders who've got very differing opinions on it. Some of them don't care about it, some want to keep the current share structure, and other ones have been pushing us for a while now to clean things up and bring the share count down. So it's kind of interesting. You look at some of our peers in Australia with a billion shares out, and some of our peers in the Athabasca Basin with 500 million shares out. But for us, look, we understand the junior market where we are. We're not 100 million or 200 million company, we're 10 to $20 million company. And investors looking at that model, the lower share consolidation numbers make a lot more sense to them. They see that as a better opportunity. So look, we listened to the shareholders and the investors that wanted to come into this current capital race, and that's the direction we've taken it.

Gerardo Del Real: Perfect. You mentioned being one for one with on budget, or in this case even under budget, and on time drill programs. You were of course referencing the Atlantic Program, which Atco Mining has the option to earn up to 75% of. Give me your thoughts on that program. When I had Sean on here, he gave us the technical breakdown. I'd love a Jon Bey's take on how that program went, and then let's talk Davidson River.

Jon Bey: Yeah. So look, when you are executing on a drill program anywhere in the world, but specifically where we are on the Athabasca Basin, you're facing a lot of challenges. So number one, if you don't have good vendors, things can go sideways pretty quickly. So we've been working on growing our relationships and building the drill company which are now working on most of our drill programs for us, Base Drilling. And these guys are awesome. So when we tell them the timelines we need and how many drill holes we want to get, and we really work with them to make that happen, and they execute it. So hats off to our technical team of geos and Base Drilling for making that happen.

Got 3,300 meters instead of between two and 3000, and they did it under time and under budget. So how amazing is that? So now, that's first one of four. So now we're heading up to start drilling our Canary Project this week, same drill company, heading right to our ... Canary Project was just down the road in that same eastern Athabasca area. Staying at Points North again. And I'm actually flying to Saskatoon next week and driving up with Sean and the CEO of Mamba Exploration, our partner on that. And we're going to spend two or three days there filming some videos and giving some feedback and sharing that with our audience as well.

Gerardo Del Real: No, really looking forward to that. Really looking forward to Davidson River. Tell me about the timeline there and the targets, because this isn't blind drilling, you have a lot of data that you've been able to put together. And prior drilling, I believe, that kind of lends itself to this being a more advanced target.

Jon Bey: Yeah, it's kind of bizarre when you think about this. A junior exploration company talking about drilling four programs in one year. When a year ago we were pushing to get one program done a year. So it's pretty exciting for us and for our geos. But at the same time, making the schedules work is a bit of a challenge. So we know we did Atlantic on time, we're starting Canary on time. Right after Canary, we've got a couple weeks' break and then we're going to go to our Sundog Project near Uranium City. We hope to get there into the middle of July and have that wrapping up probably in the first week of August. And then we get to Davidson River right around the middle of August and go probably to middle to the end of September. So beautiful time to be at Davidson River. It's a great area. The weather's going to be beautiful for us and it's going to be an awesome program.

Now let's talk about the targets we're going after, as you mentioned. I mean, we haven't gotten 100% locked in yet, but we've been analyzing the data for two years there. And as Sean Hillacre has mentioned, we work with GoldSpot Discoveries with some little AI technology to help us refine our targeting. I'll let Sean dig into those when we talk about Davidson in our next conversation. But look, we added more land onto Davidson River to the southeast that's closer to the Clearwater domain, which is analogous to F3’s JR zone. Which is to the north of us, so we're going to be drilling some holes in that area. We're going to be going along our Warrior Trend, which we've had success on over the years. And we're probably going to do about 10 holes, probably around five to 6,000 meters is a rough estimate. So looking forward to getting there. As we get closer to that date, our geos will really define what those targets will be, and then we'll go from there.

Gerardo Del Real: Music to my ears. I'm excited for the rest of the year. It's great to get an update, looking forward to having you and Sean back on here soon. Anything else to add to that, Jon?

Jon Bey: I think it's just an exciting time for the company. Great time for new shareholders to hear our story and learn what we're doing. Sean and I have been doing multiple interviews and multiple conferences and sharing our story, so there'll be a lot more information coming out. And if your listeners want to follow us on social media, our Twitter account, we're going to be doing a lot of on the ground videos, talking to our investors, showing you what actually goes on at a drill program at the Canary Program starting next week. So look forward to that.

Gerardo Del Real: Exciting stuff. Thank you, sir.

Jon Bey: All right, we'll talk again soon, Gerardo. Have a great day.

Gerardo Del Real: All right, cheers.