Transcript
Automated transcript · Written by software from the replay's audio. It can mishear names and figures; the replay is the record.
0:10 Thanks everybody for coming out. And for ringing the bell for the visitors. That's true. Well, they haven't rang the bell yet. But so first off, I have to make a confession. When Kai invited me to the conference here, I had planned to do a different talk than I'm doing today. And those of you that follow the company will have saw about 2 weeks ago that we sold our Kingsway project to New Farm Gold. So I'm going to talk about a different project today, our Hopedale project. But for those of you that have any questions about the sale of Kingsway, I hope that I'll go through this presentation quick enough so that we can address some of those questions at the end of the talk.
1:06 So this is the disclaimer and as you know these kinds of presentations make forward looking statements so just be aware of that. The Hopedale Project is the project that really started Labrador Gold Off. It is located in Labrador and it is a gold project, so hence the name Labrador Gold. And we started working up there in Labrador in 2017. And what the Hoopdale project is, it's a district-scale project of an Archean greenstone belt. And I'll talk a little bit more about Archean greenstone belts in a minute. And the jurisdiction of Newfoundland and Labrador is an excellent jurisdiction, very supportive government in terms of permitting, in terms of access to financial support for mineral exploration and in terms of getting mines through the permitting stage up to production. So excellent jurisdiction to work in.
2:14 We have a very strong team and obviously our shareholders are the most important part of the whole package because without you, without our shareholders, then we wouldn't be able to do anything. Right now, we have about $6.5 million in the bank and so we're cashed up and have more than enough money to go forward with what we plan to do. This is just a breakdown of the share structure. The April 26th share price is 12 cents so we have a market capitalization around 20 million. It's actually come down a little bit from there. As I mentioned, cash of about 6.5 million Canadian, and we have some very large and very supportive shareholders.
3:02 Eric Sprott, who many of you would probably know, is our largest shareholder at just under 11%. And then Newfound Gold, who are the company immediately to the south of us, and the ones to whom we've agreed to sell Kingsway as a large shareholder, as our Palisades Gold Corp and Crescat Capital.
3:25 So this is basically just a timeline of what we've done over at Hopedale. We started, as I mentioned, in 2017, And we've done a little bit of work every year, except for the COVID years, 2020 and 2021. And we've advanced this project along. And right now, we've got this Greenstone Belt. It covers most of the Florence Lake Greenstone Belt, our Hopedale project. It's in a good jurisdiction, as I mentioned. And even though it sounds remote, we are actually on tidewater because there's a bay that comes in from the Atlantic Ocean all the way along the east side of the property and there's obviously there's daily air service from the little airport at Happy Valley Goose Bay up to the Hopedale community on the Atlantic coast.
4:18 So this is the Greenstone Belt. And you can see the claim package there outlined in red. We have about 43 kilometers of this Greenstone Belt. And it's underexplored. It's had intermittent exploration for gold and also for nickel. After the discovery of Voisey's Bay, a large nickel deposit that you may be familiar with in Canada in the 1990s, the Falcon Bridge went through this area looking for nickel associated with the ultramafic rocks in the belt. But other than that, there hasn't been much done at all, which is surprising because we know from greenstone belts elsewhere in the world that they're very prolific hosts of gold mineralization.
5:03 And this is just an example from Eastern Canada, and Ontario in particular, of 4 greenstone belts, or 4 gold camps, the Timmins Gold Camp, the Red Lake Gold Camp, Larder Lake, and Kirkland Lake. And the shapes and the dimensions of these diagrams are all to the same scale. So when you look at the Florence Lake Greenstone Belt In the lower right, you can see that it's at least as big as many of these other greenstone belts that have produced a lot of gold. And yet, no gold has been produced from Florence Lake, and we are only just starting to understand the potential.
5:49 So these are the mineral occurrences that we have outlined. Right now we have 5 mineral occurrences or gold occurrences spread across the belt, mostly up in the north. We have 4 of them are up in the north and one way down in the south that we discovered last year that ran just over 100 grams a ton in a grab sample. We have a copper showing called CAPAC, very high-grade copper. We have nickel showings down in the south of the belt, which we've just really begun to explore, and we'll be doing more work on that this year. And there's also a zinc-rich, volcanogenic, massive sulfide prospect on the property as well. And this is typical of greenstone belts all over the world.
6:37 You get gold, you get copper, you get nickel, all kinds of different commodities in these greenstone belts. So this is just honing in on the gold-rich part of the belt, if you like, up in the north where we have significant gold occurrences. The best one right now is TD500, which we've done some channel sampling on. We've got grades up to 22 grams a ton and there are 3 others around it over this 3 kilometer strike length of gold occurrences. So significant gold up in the northern part of the Greenstone belt. There's also this copper occurrence, CAPAC, very high grades, up to 10.2% copper in grab samples and quite a bit of silver associated with it as well.
7:30 This is the channel sampling that we did at the TD500. You can see here some of the intersections or some of the widths of the channels and the grades that we got out of them. So significant widths to some degree and pretty good grades up to 7, 7, 8 grams a ton over sort of 1 to 2 meters. And catback, high copper grades over up to about a meter and a half at surface there. And this was the latest gold occurrence that we found down in the south of the belt. As I mentioned, over 100 grams a ton, significant silver associated with it. And we really haven't had a chance to follow this up.
8:16 We will be following it up this year. Probably in, we're hoping to get on the ground there in June once the ice is off the bay and we can land our float plane. This is going to be an interesting area because this is also down in the south of the belt, where we see a lot of the nickel as well. And this is the nickel, the nickel showings that we're looking at. 2 of them. One is called Rusty Ridge, and you'll see why in a moment. Some really good nickel grades of low grades, but it's early stage, first indications of nickel, both in rock samples and in soil samples.
9:02 In fact, the nickel in the soil samples almost as high as the nickel that we see in the rock samples over these occurrences. And last resort, the one down in the bottom there, the large pink blob, that's a magnetic high. It's associated with the, often associated with massive sulfide type deposits, especially in nickel deposits that may have been altered, ultramafic rocks that have been altered. And these are the kinds of rocks that host nickel. And lots of nickel are associated with that, as you can see. All the pink dots there are high-grade nickel in soils and nickel in rock samples.
9:54 And this is just a shot of Rusty Ridge, and you can see why we call it Rusty Ridge. It's very glossiness. It's lots of iron oxide associated with the ultramafic rocks here that host the nickel occurrence.
10:14 So what are we going to do? I mentioned that we're hoping to get up there this year in June and we've got we've got some geophysics to do. We've got, so electromagnetics is a typical way of looking for massive nickel-copper deposits so that's what we're going to be doing down at the bottom end of the property at Rusty Ridge and Last Resort. We're also going to be doing some geophysics up at the gold area at TD 500. And the goal of this work is essentially to define drill targets. It might seem incredulous, but there hasn't been a drill hole drilled on this greenstone belt.
11:00 There's been a lot of work, different times as I mentioned, but nobody has drilled anything in the Greenstone belt. So it's wide open for exploration, especially for testing by drilling. We're going to do a lot of prospecting and mapping as well at Rusty Ridge and Lost Resort down at the nickel occurrences because we don't really understand yet where this nickel is coming from and we're not sure which area of which part of those 2 areas are going to be the best place to focus our drilling. Lastly, drilling possibly late this summer. The problem with Labrador is that there's a fairly short season.
11:48 So we can go in, as I mentioned, in June. When we get through to October, it starts to get a little bit iffy in terms of flying. And one of the things that
12:03 we have to do up here, everything is supported by helicopter. So there are no roads. So wherever we work, wherever we plan to drill, that has to be done by helicopter. So this is a basic timeline. As I mentioned, right now we're looking at doing geophysics, so we're doing some interpretation of historical geophysics over these areas. We're hoping to get on the ground in mid-June, once the weather is good and the ice is gone. And we'll do our geophysics, our prospecting and mapping and of those gold and nickel anomalous areas, and then interpretation from July, August, and then
12:51 potentially drilling a first stage drill program in September and October. And that drill program will focus on both the nickel and the gold mineralization in the belt. So these are the main takeaways. It's a district-scale greenstone belt. We own most of that greenstone belt, 100%. And as I mentioned, those greenstone belts are typically very prolific hosts of gold mineralization, but also other metals like nickel and copper and zinc. We found several of these kinds of occurrences. And we believe that there's significant potential for further discovery in the 3 kilometer gold trend, where we've already outlined 4 different occurrences, down at Rusty Ridge and Last Resort, big anomalous nickel areas.
13:51 We think that there's potential there for some significant nickel to be found. And I think with The money that we have on hand, 6.5 million, we're well financed to carry out the work that we have planned for this year. So just some acknowledgments to the people that do all the work out in the field. We have a great field crew. And also I mentioned Newfoundland and Labrador being an excellent jurisdiction in which to work, and we have received funding for some of our exploration over the
14:28 years, and that's been really welcome. So with that, I'll stop talking about Hopedale, and I'm open for questions on Hopedale or Kingsway or anything else you'd like to know about. Any questions? I have a question, Roger. Thank you for the presentation. You're welcome. What are you going to do with the money if and when you close this transaction? Well, yeah, that's a good question. And I think one of the things that, I mean, it's not money, it's shares. So first of all, the deal is that we get $20 million worth of newfound gold shares, and there's a four-month hold period on that. So we can't do anything with them for 4 months after the deal closes. So we expect the deal
15:19 to close in early July, assuming the shareholders vote to approve it. And then so 4 months after that is the earliest that we'd be able to monetize those shares. At that point, we may or may not need to do it. If we don't need to do it, and gold is looking strong, and Newfound Gold are having success on their Queensway project, or on taking on our Kingsway project and finding more gold up there, we'd probably hold them until we actually need the money. I don't expect to need any cash in the immediate term because as I mentioned, we have 6 and a half million in the bank. But there is the optionality of, if we look at a, and one of the things that we are doing, obviously, is to look at an advanced project to replace Kingsway.
16:14 And that gives that 20 million in shares would give us the optionality of using some of that and monetizing that to either make an acquisition or to do some advanced stage exploration on an acquisition. What are the criteria? What kind of projects are you looking for?
16:38 My personal criteria, and I think the board is behind it, Gold project, number 1, possibly copper, possibly nickel. Eastern Canada, the jurisdiction that we're happy with. And by Eastern Canada, I would mean Ontario, Quebec, New Finland, Labrador, Nova Francia, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, but they're not quite as easy to work in, but the other 3 jurisdictions are great. So, and I think that's what we're looking at, and you know, if, obviously, our shareholders, I don't think, would be happy if we sold Kingsway and then started from scratch with a grassroots exploration play, like Hopedale, for example. So we want to kind of try and level up and I think now is a good time.
17:35 A lot of companies out there are struggling, struggling for cash and we might be able to help a company with an advanced project take it further. So, I would like to see a project that has a resource of some kind that we could help take further. When you say take further, what do you mean? Bring a PEA stage project into production or are we talking MRE to PE, PFS?
18:03 Yeah, that latter. I'm not a production person. I'm an exploration geologist. But having a company that has a resource of some kind, even if it's a small resource, being able to advance it with more drilling, more understanding of the geology, and being able to actually put the money into the ground, I think That's where we're at. Grow the resource, do a PEA, and take it along that route. Usually when engineers get involved, I want to get out. That's my, that's my. Unlike engineers? Engineers are great. They're a necessary evil, right? But they always tell the geologists that they don't know what they're talking about.
18:55 So it's just one of those things. Right, Garrett?
19:01 Have you seen a lot of inflation in the last 3 years in personnel or drilling costs? Well, it's come down, but yes. Certainly in Newfoundland in 2021, you couldn't get a geologist no matter how much you're willing to pay. You couldn't rent a vehicle. You couldn't rent accommodation. But that has slowed down. I think when companies run out of money, then they have to let go people. And it's just one of those things. So now you can pick up a geologist and maybe even an engineer if you really need one.
20:08 Yes, excuse me, it's the the the pricing of the shares is done the day before closing. So it'll be 20 million whatever the price is the day before Thanks, thank you everybody
