Categories: Base Metals
Topics: General Base Metals

Surge Copper Corp. (TSX-V: SURG)(OTC: SRGXF) CEO Leif Nilsson on Building a District-Scale Copper Resource by way of the Drill-Bit in British Columbia, Canada

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the CEO of Surge Copper — Mr. Leif Nilsson. How are you today? It's been a bit.

Leif Nilsson: Yeah, doing well, Gerardo. Thanks for the conversation today and I'm doing well. How are you?

Gerardo Del Real: I'm well. Thank you for asking. It's timely. Copper is back at $4.40 a pound. You just intersected 495 meters of 0.54% copper equivalent, including 126 meters of 0.85% copper equivalent at West Seel. 

You've just concluded a nearly 27,000 meter drill program. I'd love to get an update on how that went and how you're feeling about the program in general.

Leif Nilsson: Sure. The release that we put out yesterday had a couple objectives. So one, of course, was to outline the highlights of several drill holes that were in this batch. So that would be the second batch of results from this program that we were conducting at West Seel over the summer. And I'll talk about those highlights in a moment. 

And then, the second purpose of the press release was basically to provide a bit of context around lots of the other work programs that we have on the go. So it's been a very busy summer. Of course, there was a lot of this drilling focused on resource definition activity at West Seel; also have some regional exploration drilling going on.

And then, our second advanced project in the district called Berg… we've been drilling there for the last six weeks or so. So we provided a bit of color on how all of those things are going to come together for the pending news flow over the next couple of months. 

So to answer your question, I'm feeling very good about things. It's been an extremely busy summer. Lots of results starting to come in, as you noted, in terms of the highlighted headline holes. And some great results that I'll provide some context and color on… and more to come in that same vein.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. There were also several intercepts that had higher gold grade intercepts. Can you speak to that a bit?

Leif Nilsson: Yeah, in these types of porphyry environments, the mineralization is typically fluid in nature. That's sort of how it gets in place. So you often have stockwork veining that hosts a lot of our copper, gold, and moly mineralization. But occasionally, you will get these very high gold grade spikes within veins within that stockwork system. 

So there was a couple different holes that we put out that had some of those notable gold grades. Some of them were in the middle of the porphyry copper deposit itself. So there's always the chance that you get these nice precious metal kickers scattered around the deposit.

There was a separate hole that was an exploration hole in the southeast region of the Seel deposits that did hit an anomalous gold vein. It was quite deep — probably not something that we'll plan to follow up on at that depth — but I think speaks to the overall potential in these types of geological environments to find epithermal or hydrothermal vein-style gold deposits. 

There's a lot of showings like this around the district that we probably will have further exploration targeting activities on in the months to come. But yeah, there were a couple nice hits that we included in this batch of results as well.

Gerardo Del Real: You still have assays pending at the Seel breccia zone and you have a pipeline, as you describe it in the release, of regional exploration targets. How do you prioritize that moving forward?

Leif Nilsson: Yeah, so I'd say that was, I think, the second part of the press release was just to provide a bit of color on where all of the activity is happening and how it's going to be brought together in terms of news releases and disclosure to the market. 

So the drilling activity that has taken place at the Ootsa property in the aggregate over the summer has been split between a few different buckets. So one is resource delineation or definition drilling at the West Seel deposit that we just spoke about. 

And then, the next bucket has really been testing some near-deposit, high-priority exploration targets, many of which are prioritized because of the existing data that we have around them as well as ease of access in terms of existing road networks into the areas that we'd like to collar the drill holes.

So we've put a number of batches of meterage into testing a bunch of these targets. And we provided some guidance that we'll be releasing; it’s about 2,000 meters of regional IP target testing that's gone on around the deposit area. And we did tag into this breccia zone north of the Seel deposit. It's an extension to a known body that had resources estimated on it previously. 

But we've now traced this breccia zone a few hundred meters to the west-northwest from that original resource. So there's been about 7,000 meters of drilling that we've accelerated into this zone in order to be able to capture that in our pending resource update that we're working on for later in the year.

So it's a shallow zone. We don't have any assays back yet but we've highlighted some historical results from this area. It's known to carry quite high copper and silver grades. We've visually traced this type of mineralization over a pretty decent strike length, width, and from surface down to 150 meters' depth. 

So lots of shallow holes. So the number of holes that's gone into it is a few dozen but a lot of these are shallow holes. So results from all of that are pending and will be released in batches as we get those in.

Gerardo Del Real: The timing is good. It looks like you'll be on the road. I understand you'll be at the Mines and Money Conference here on October the 19th. I think you're also going to be at the Swiss Mining Institute in November — November the 2nd if I'm not mistaken — and Mines and Money in London on December 1st. Are all three of those accurate there?

Leif Nilsson: Yeah, that's right. So the one next week — which is the Mines and Money event — but it's virtual in nature. I think they refer to it as IMARC in recognition of the original, I think, timing for the IMARC event in Australia. I think that got moved to early next year but they're hosting it as a virtual event. So I'll be there as I have some time in my schedule next week. 

And then, the Swiss Mining Institute is another virtual event in November. And then, there's the original Mines and Money in-person event in London at the end of November/early-December.

Gerardo Del Real: Excellent! Looking forward to the assays. Thank you so much for the update. It's great to catch up. Anything else that you'd like to add to that?

Leif Nilsson: No, I think that's a fair summary. So appreciate the time and the conversation and hope you have a good one.

Gerardo Del Real: Alright, thank you. We'll chat soon. Bye now.

Leif Nilsson: Cheers, bye.