Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: Gold Stocks

Tiger Gold Corp. (TSX-V: TIGR)(OTCQB: TGRGF) CEO Robert Vallis on Advancing Multimillion-Ounce Resource at Flagship Quinchía Gold Project, Colombia, Via the Drill Bit

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the president & CEO of Tiger Gold Corp. (TSX-V: TIGR)(OTCQB: TGRGF) — Mr. Robert Vallis. Robert, it’s great to have you on. How are you today, sir?

Robert Vallis: I’m well, Gerardo. A pleasure to be here, and thank you for having me.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, listen, we have gold sitting at $4,400/oz. You have a multimillion-ounce gold deposit in a great jurisdiction in Colombia and, obviously, are clearly undervalued relative to your peers just based on that multimillion-ounce gold deposit.

But the thing I’m really excited to share with our audience about Tiger Gold is the exploration upside, which I don’t think you get the credit for that you deserve. I want to get into the Quinchia project, the district-scale play, Colombia.

But before that, I would love for you to provide just a brief overview of your background and your experience because I think that’s material and is going to be really beneficial moving forward.

Robert Vallis: Sure, I’ve been in this industry for well over 30 years. I’m a mining engineer originally. I spent my first 15 years in the industry with Barrick Gold, cut my teeth there for over a decade in operations and engineering in many jurisdictions throughout the world — in fact, all the major operating jurisdictions — before moving into the business side of things and corporate development.

From there, I’ve been part of some major transformative transactions for Barrick — the acquisition of Placer Dome. Then moving into Yamana, the acquisition jointly with Osisko, the company for the Cerro Moro asset, which we fully developed and brought into production with Yamana.

I can go on and on, but it’s a very diverse combination of technical and business that I bring forward. And, of course, working with the majors for so long and having been all over the world so many times, evaluating, finding, acquiring, building, and operating mines of significant value, it comes with a measure of discipline that’s not common.

And it’s something I’ve surrounded myself with, with other similar folks, mostly led by our COO, Rickardo Welyhorsky, who is, as well, a world-known metallurgist, mine builder, operator. He’s just a phenomenal individual. And that trickles right on down through the rest of our team in terms of the ilk and quality that we bring. But again, with emphasis on discipline.

We understand what it takes to deliver operations that are predictable and reliable. And knowing the discipline required to do that, aside from the technical knowledge, is imperative. And that is exactly what we’re doing and have been doing since day one, since I stepped into this well over a year ago. Everything we’re doing is with that high level of discipline and efficiency.

I’m very excited about it. Our team’s very excited about it. And that vast wealth of experience and knowledge that we have as a management team, I think, is second to none in many respects with respect to the stage of project we’re at, where we are, and what we’re doing. So we’re quite excited about it.

Gerardo Del Real: With that background and that pedigree and the team that you have around you, why this project and why Colombia? Given the transactions and the history, you could have had your hand in your pick anywhere in the world, right? You could have worked wherever you wanted to work, and you likely would’ve been able to find projects of merit that could equal this. But why this specific project and why Colombia?

Robert Vallis: It’s a great question, and I’ll unpack it as quickly as I can. When you’re looking around the planet, as I’ve done for years and years, you get really good at finding projects of significant value, extraordinary value, and the potential to have significant scale… and, to your point, those exist throughout the world.

But one thing that’s not really well known, I think, in our industry and even by our peers is that Colombia, over the last two and a half to three years, has been outstripping every other gold jurisdiction around the planet for its rate of discovery on a per-ounce basis. 

I’ve spent many a year in and out of Colombia with Yamana, but more specifically, recognizing the recent escalation of discovery, acknowledging the significant mineral endowment in this jurisdiction is significant.

Now, combine that with all of the other, what I refer to as, enablers for constructability and operability. Most projects around the world lack one or more of those. What is key here, and what really caught my eye in initially reviewing this opportunity, is that it pretty much has every enabler. And that can be and is from the macro level of a solid framework for permitting, for taxation, and forward-looking support for that, which we now have installed in Colombia with the new government.

But beyond that, you’re down into the stabilization of the jurisdiction in terms of a marginalizing of crime and reduction of crime that’s no longer what it used to be in decades past. You’ve got an emergence in its major centers that are bringing competitiveness to all of the other South American peers.

For example, Bogota is now an incredible center of business and a university center. It’s pumping out professionals at a phenomenal rate within the country. So you’ve got the ability to have skilled labor access that is not always easy to get in any jurisdiction. Next to that, you’ve got Medellín, which has really grown into a competitive business center, right up there with Santiago, Buenos Aires, and centers in South America.

Beyond that, you take it down into infrastructure. Power generation is hydro and growing in Colombia. That means low-cost power generation. For the mining industry, and for those of us that are familiar with building and operating mine operations, power is your number one cost. And to have a jurisdiction that not only has it competitively, but is more competitive than even North America for delivering reliable and cheap power, is a huge enabler.

Take that further down into our regional location, where 25 kilometers, or 15 miles, up the road from us, we have two of arguably some of the most valuable gold projects in our entire industry right now, with Aris Mining producing 250,000 ounces, on their way to doubling that by the end of the year to 500,000 ounces a year. That is extraordinary in its own right, but it’s just up the road from us. So geologically, it’s very meaningful. Infrastructure-wise, contractor-wise, it’s extremely enabling for us.

Next door to them, you have Collective Mining with the Guayabales discovery and project — just an extraordinary company and discovery that’s there. Again, geologically, it’s significant for us. So much so, their consulting geologist is now working with us as a consulting geologist, given the upside that we’re beginning to unlock at our project.

So you then layer in paved roads, highways, power, water — everything around us that we need. It really does put the icing on the cake. And I think the cherry on the top is the geographic location as to why we’re in Colombia and why we’re so excited about it. That climate is second to none. It’s temperate, 20-odd degrees Celsius all year round with low swings in wet and dry seasons.

It’s not what you see in northern climates, which I’ve worked in, the southern, more Brazil rainforest-type climates, obviously working with Yamana there as well, and other parts of the world, that you have to schedule in slowdowns, shutdowns, and basically carry losses and inefficiencies just because of your location. Well, we don’t have any of that where we are. It’s 24/7, seven days a week, 365 days a year of efficiency that we have.

So you put all of this together, I think one can begin to formulate a picture that hopefully I’ve conveyed to you as to why this jurisdiction is so fantastic, from geologic endowment all the way down into all of the enablers in hand and present for constructability and operability.

Gerardo Del Real: You’ve already outlined a project that has a PEA attached to it that demonstrates a $534 million NPV at $2,650 gold and over $1.2 billion at $3,700-an-ounce gold. Gold is obviously sitting right around the $4,500, $4,600 mark today. You’re undervalued just based on that.

But the part that really gets me excited, and why I’m excited to present this story to our audience, is the exploration upside. It’s great to have a multimillion-ounce gold deposit, but given the cash position and how aggressive you’re being with the drill bit, can you talk about the exploration upside and what the next several quarters look like?

Robert Vallis: Yes, and this is getting to the heart of what’s attracted me and me attracting our team that we presently have. The upside for what we clearly recognize as, in quotes, “district potential” is off the rails.

We’ve already demonstrated with the first PEA that we’re constructable and operable on our land package, but we’re also beginning to indicate that this is an opportunity where you can have multiple mine feeds into centralized infrastructure, lowering your capital costs, lowering your operating costs, and allowing you to scale — or stage, I should say is a better word — the startup and production ramp-up.

So you start with something that’s more bite-sized, like our initial PEA suggests in terms of scale and costs and so forth. And that becomes self-funding for further expansion. Now, that further expansion requires tonnage. Obviously, at lower grades, you require tonnage. Tonnage is your friend, and that means scale.

Now, it’s also why I say, “Never judge a book by its grade cover,” in our industry to folks within the industry. And that is what I spoke of earlier about enablers also are profit enablers. When you have all of the elements in place that we have, we’re able and afforded to have, I guess you could call, the lowest startup capital and operating cost that you could envisage with a modern conventional facility.

So really what that means is that there’s a profitability in front of us, even with the grade profiles we have, that is rivaling high-grade projects that have so much more cost associated with it. So it’s important to get that out of the way up front.

So you then consider the upside potential we have and why we’re so aggressive about it. We saw this very early in the game, even before we became public late last year. And that’s why I was mobilizing three drills before we were public, to get going on drill programs for 2026 in an aggressive manner. The first stage of that was to do 10,000 meters on two things.

One was to begin infill drilling Tesorito, the one-and-a-half-million-ounce discovery we already have next to the Miraflores small underground project that’s fully permitted for construction and operation. The bulk of the ounces is in Tesorito, but they were Inferred. So we needed to get going to aggressively convert that up into Measured and Indicated and de-risk it, get it ready for the next stage of engineering, which is pre-feasibility.

In doing that, we’ve put out a lot of results that have gone beyond our expectations in terms of finding more mineralization within that orebody than the model identified, higher grades than the model identified, more interesting open mineralization at depth than the model identified.

And so when you consider that first plan of attack, as well as some probing of what’s next door into what is now called Ceibal that we’re aggressively drilling, it became very clear to us after the first 10,000 meters, around May of this year, that we’ve got a huge opportunity to rapidly grow now our resources into what I’ve been conveying as a doubling from two million ounces that we have now, current compliant, into four million-plus.

That is something, obviously, we still need to prove and do and put out the door. But we’re extremely excited about it in terms of the achievement of that and what that will mean for a subsequent PEA update early in Q1, along with new resources, to demonstrate that we’re now taking the next step to demonstrate the scale and scope and profitability and potential of this project.

So we’re talking about working to double our resources within less than 12 months of drilling. That’s with Tesorito expansion and infill drilling. So we’re actually picking up more tonnes, more ounces, and better grade there. So that’ll be a new resource coming out at the end of the year or early Q1 of next year.

And next door to it is Ceibal, which is something that started out, when we got into this, as five to eight drill holes that were huge intercepts; we’re talking over 500 meters of 0.5, 0.6 grams with large higher-grade intercepts over 20, 30 meters at one-and-a-half, two grams per tonne Au. Very indicative of a major extension to the existing known gold system. 

So once we got far enough along, we started to put in a lot more resources and are now committed to getting the drilling completed by the end of October or near there for an initial resource for Ceibal. And we expect at this stage, from what we see, that it would be at least the size of Tesorito. So you combine that with Tesorito’s upgrade of ounces and tonnes, you can see how we’re describing a fairly clear pathway to doubling our resources.

And that’s not even speaking to the other deposit, Dos Quebradas, which is to the northwest of this cluster that I’m referring to, that has just about half a million ounces in historic resources, JORC compliant. We recognized early on that we need to redo that model. We didn’t like how it was done. Our geologists didn’t feel that what was there is representative of the geology that’s there and what we know. And so I said, “Okay, let’s start rebooting that.”

And before we started drilling Ceibal and putting the emphasis there, we started drilling in parallel with Tesorito’s infill drilling at Dos Quebradas. And some of the first holes that we put in there returned and confirmed exactly our thesis from our geologists, that it is a much larger gold system there as well, very similar to Tesorito and Ceibal.

But at this stage, it is now secondary to us advancing on Ceibal first. Why? Well, it’s right next door to Tesorito. It goes back to that clustering of feed sources for a centralized mill. That is the most profitable thing we could be doing to escalate the value and scale of this project. Dos Quebradas represents additional upside that we will be redefining, growing, and capturing and moving into this model.

But through the efforts this year of increasing our resources and then following immediately with an update to that PEA, we’re expecting to see production probably doubling what our initial PEA has presented. So that’s high-two-hundred-thousand ounces at least.

So that really does suggest the cash flow potential of this project, the scale of it, why we’re excited about it, why it’s so doable in such a tight, efficient package in terms of centralization on our property.

So I think you put all that together, that underpins all of our excitement, all of our planning, our budgeting, and our activities that are currently happening and will continue to happen throughout 2026.

Gerardo Del Real: You’re cashed up. You’re in the right jurisdiction. You clearly have a district-scale play on your hands. I’m really looking forward to seeing assays and seeing the growth there and looking forward to having you back on. Thank you so much for your time, Robert. Anything else to add to that?

Robert Vallis: I think very quickly, I didn’t speak about the upside potential on the rest of the property. We’re only drilling 20, 30% right now, and we’re finding massive amounts of ounces on surface clustered — millions of ounces.

We’re excited about what’s beneath all of that to depth and what’s feeding it. That’s another campaign that we’ll be moving into in 2027, along with moving to the north of our property, following this corridor north of Tesorito, where we do believe there’s further potential for higher-grade vein-type discoveries and so forth in the upper quadrants of our property. It speaks to just more and more upside potential.

But we’re excited about getting where we’re going with a massive upgrade to our resources and expansion to the project and eventually moving into pre-feasibility and continuing to de-risk this project in the second half of 2027.

But all along, in parallel with that escalation of engineering and so forth, we will continue to be drilling these exploration targets. So you can see we’re very excited about the rapid growth and delivery of value from Tiger and to our shareholders.

Gerardo Del Real: Exciting times. Looking forward to the next several quarters. Looking forward to having you back on. Thank you again for your time, Robert.

Robert Vallis: Gerardo, thank you. Appreciate it. Look forward to another update.

Gerardo Del Real: Looking forward to it as well. Take care now.

Robert Vallis: You too.

Click here to see more from Tiger Gold