A new Canadian gold explorer is on the upward track since acquiring two Australian gold projects, situated within the same geological province and in a similar geological setting to the Fosterville gold deposit.
The President and CEO of E79 Resources (CSE: ESNR) Rory Quinn was most recently with Wheaton Precious Metals (TSX/NYSE/LSE: WPM) as Director, Investor Relations. Wheaton is not a miner per se but Mr. Quinn’s experience in reviewing countless precious metal projects for one of the largest precious metals streaming companies in the world has sharpened his skills for identifying high quality mining investment opportunities.
The technical team at E79 Resources is experienced in the Victorian Goldfields and is not mucking around with plans for 20,000 plus metres of drilling.
Introducing Rory Quinn, President and CEO of E79 Resources
We had the opportunity to catch up with Rory Quinn to ask about the recently completed acquisition and aggressive exploration plans in the top-tier mineral district of the Victorian Goldfields, Australia. E79 trades on the Canadian Securities Exchange under the symbol ESNR.
Please welcome our special guest, President and CEO of E79 Resources, Rory Quinn.
Rory Quinn:
Hello, Jack. Thanks for having me.
Jack Graham:
Rory, it’s great to have you on. Let’s start off with telling our listeners a little bit about yourself, and this new venture. What differentiates you and your company from other junior mining companies?
Rory Quinn:
Yeah, so we’re in the Victoria Goldfields, in Australia, it’s a modern day gold rush and we’re seeing a real land grab there now. An important differentiator of our company, E79 Resources, even within the Victoria Goldfields, is that our properties are priority ground that was secured in 2016, 2017 during the downturn at a time that were was an awareness of exploration work being done at Fosterville down plunge, really proving that mine out to be the world-class ore body we know it is today by Kirkland Lake. The property was secured before we saw Fosterville South and the great job they’ve done of creating shareholder value as a junior. These are very high quality projects, target ready, and we’re going to be able to advance an aggressive exploration program on them quite quickly.
Jack Graham:
It’s good to hear that you were looking for properties during the downturn, obviously that’s the best time to be leveraging that, looking for opportunities. Could you tell me a little bit more about your two new properties?
Rory Quinn:
The Beaufort property is probably the more advanced, I guess we could probably call it the flagship at this stage. Beaufort has been worked on by Rio Tinto, BHP, in fact, our partner, who brought in the asset, first came into contact with it when he was at BHP in the 90s. BHP, you may know, is I think the world’s largest mining company. They were in gold initially and then exited gold, and he recalled this property from his time at BHP, and then when it became available in 2016, he worked to secure the property. Placer Dome has also worked on the property, and in the early 2000s, they did a very shallow, what’s called a RAB drilling program. We’re talking 20, 30 meters deep and really wide spacing, 250 meters by 500 meters. So definitely not an efficient targeted approach to find the kind of Fosterville type mineralization that we’re looking for. They were looking for something shallow, cheap, and really like a 10 million ounce open pit-able deposit. That was in the context of sub $300 an ounce gold. So they found a pretty sizable anomaly, a two and a half kilometer long anomaly, and recommended going forward with a 150 meter fence program. But ultimately in the context of that gold pricing, I think it was about $280 an ounce gold, they chose not to move forward with the program and that’s taken us to where we are today. Really, I think the key opportunity there is that there’s a million ounces of alluvial gold production that has never been sourced to host rock. And that’s very unique in the region, almost all of the sizeable, meaningful gold deposits, of which there are many in the region, are associated with alluvial gold. So that’s what really interests us about this property, sourcing all of that alluvial gold.
We’re attractively priced and in a position to be able to come in with a high quality team, with high quality assets secured in the downturn before the current area play developed around Fosterville. The opportunity exists to have a lot of news flow and potential catalysts moving forward on both properties – President & CEO Rory Quinn
Jack Graham:
You know you’re in the right place when you see the old miners there.
Rory Quinn:
Yes, there’s obviously something going on there and folks have worked to understand it and even before them, it was the old timers sinking shafts. If you look at our presentation, you can see all the shafts sunk there, that they know that there’s a system there, they know there’s a large anomaly and they’re trying to find the source for it. So we just have this beautiful target waiting for us to get to work on. At Myrtleford, really the opportunity there is that this is a consolidation of an entire historical gold mining camp with over 70 historic gold mines on the property. Really it’s an opportunity to look at it holistically and be able to run an entire systematic program over the whole property. It’s quite a large property at Beaufort at about 120 square kilometers, but Myrtleford’s about 420 square kilometers, so it’s a really large property!
It might take a little bit longer there as far as the targeting due to its size, but what we also see there is the opportunity to do some rock sampling, some rock chip sampling, and some shallow drilling underneath what we know were the high-grade mines in the relatively short term. The opportunity there is that, generally the way that was mined in Myrtleford was that old timers or small syndicates would follow these narrow quartz veins down to the water table. They would end up stopping at the water table because of a lack of pumping capacity, generally just the lack of capital to de-water and to be able to explore and mine safely below the water table. So that’s the opportunity and there just has not been modern exploration brought to bear on this property and the region. During my experience with marketing this ( doing a $6 million capital raise, which I’m happy to say is oversubscribed and we’ll look forward to announcing that), is I’ve talked to Australian funds and Australian people that are in the mining industry and this area, not only has it been overlooked internationally, it’s been overlooked even within Australia. Because in the Outback for instance, if you want to secure 500 square kilometers of property to do work on, it’s relatively easy. You might have one or two property owners you’re dealing with. But in this area of Victoria, you’re tending to deal with 10 to 20 owners, so it’s harder to put a meaningful land package together, it’s more difficult. And so the Australians have really been spoiled with just having this vast territory and Outback where they can tie up property pretty easily and this area has just been ignored. They tended to go to the path of least resistance. You have this tremendously prospective gold exploration and mining area that is so underexplored. That’s what’s attractive and that’s why we’re seeing so much interest in the Victoria Goldfields.
[image source] https://earthresources.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0004/498847/Gold-map2.jpg
Image: Map of Victoria State gold production
Jack Graham:
Obviously Fosterville put the area on the map. You said there’s quite a few other deposits in the area, but I’m surprised. You’d think the land grab would make it a lot harder to consolidate and get this property. The acquired projects are really large properties, so I can understand why the step-outs were so large in the past. Why was Beaufort selected as the first place to do your initial work?
Rory Quinn:
We’ve already done some targeting at Beaufort and we found your classic gold-arsenic-antimony chemical signature, which is what we see at the Fosterville mine, which is one of the very best gold mines in the world. The term world-class and tier one gets overused, but if we don’t call the Fosterville gold mine world-class, then the term has no meaning. Globally it’s just one of the very highest grade gold mines with a reserve grade of an ounce per tonne. Initially at Beaufort, we’re going to be following up on this anomaly, this gold-arsenic-antimony anomaly, which is that classic gold bearing chemical signature that we see in the Victoria Goldfields.
Early on, we’ll be doing some infill soil sampling, we have this section about two and a half kilometers wide on the anomaly that was initially found in the Placer days and we’ll be doing some infill on that with a mind to then having a targeted drill program.
We’ll likely be able to drill earlier at Myrtleford because we already have the high-grade underground targets that we can work on there. We’ll do some rock chip sampling there and that could be quite interesting.
Jack Graham:
Right, that’s good. You are a little bit more advanced on both projects than I thought, so good to know.
Rory Quinn:
Yes, I think the nice thing with having both properties and the Australian summer in front of us is we ought to be able to be quite newsy. What’s important to understand too is that we have a highly qualified Australian team on the ground in both Brisbane and in Victoria. Victoria’s where we have our technical team, and Brisbane is where we have a regional office.. We’re very well-placed to run detailed exploration programs in Australia.
Jack Graham:
Excellent Rory, you have the right people for the job. I’m sure our high net worth listeners are going to be sorry that they missed out on the financing, but maybe you could tell us a little bit more about your background. They are going to want to learn a little bit about you and your team and the board.
Rory Quinn:
Really, my background was in junior mining, the last company that I really got my teeth sunk into was called Castle Gold. I worked in Toronto for a handful of years, and we had this gold deposit down in Mexico, in Durango, roughly about a million, million and a half ounces. It was low grade but low strip ratio, and ended up being quite low cost. We ended up getting that into commercial production in the context of a thousand dollars an ounce gold, so substantially below where we are today. We sold that to the ex-team from Meridian Gold, they’d sold their company to Yamana, and they started a new venture called Argonaut Gold, and the El Castillo gold mine, which was ours, ended up being their flagship. I worked on that transaction, it was very, very profitable for everyone involved and I was the last person working on that and managing the transition with Argonaut.
After wrapping that up, I moved back to Vancouver, which is home, and started working with, at the time Silver Wheaton, which is now Wheaton Precious Metals since they built out their gold business. So I’ve spent the last seven years with Wheaton as we did roughly $6 billion US in precious metals transactions, a lot of gold transactions and marketed the company around North America and Europe. I also sat in on the corporate development committee looking at hundreds of opportunities in the mining space around the world. Traveling to Peru, Brazil, we tended to be focused in the Americas, but Peru, Brazil, Mexico, the US, to lead teams to review mining opportunities. After Wheaton, that experience led me to be interested in taking a CEO role. This is a good market to explore and the trick of course is just finding the right asset. So I’ve been reviewing, I don’t know if it’s hundreds, but a lot of mining assets and entering CAs, reviewing technical reports and it was this opportunity at E79 in the Victoria Goldfields that really jumped out at me from my experience with reviewing these types of opportunities. It really jumped out at me as something that investors were going to want to take a look at.
Jack Graham:
Right. So during this time there was a lot of competition out there with people looking for projects, you got the timing right, definitely as gold prices are near record highs. I’d like to maybe go into that a little bit more on another call on how you found these projects, because, like you said, you’re weeding through a lot of different potentials and you’ve found something really great here. But before we go, I’ll follow up with that in another call, if you could tell our listeners the primary reasons why they should consider investing in your company.
Rory Quinn:
Well, I would suggest perhaps that we are in the most important and exciting gold exploration play in the world in the Victoria Goldfields. If you look at a suite of comparable companies operating in the space, I think you generally see companies at around a $50 million market cap, and all the way up to, we see Fosterville South at over $200 million. We’re pre money at a $19 million market cap, so I think attractively priced at a very attractive position to be able to come in and have a high quality team like we have with high quality assets secured in the downturn before what we’re currently seeing. There’s an opportunity to have a lot of news flow and potential catalysts moving forward on both properties. That’s really the up-shoot here. There’s a lot of work that’s going to happen on the ground, on the properties, a lot of money dedicated there, but also this is a company that’s going to be well-promoted, it’s going to be well-marketed by a team that has a lot of experience in marketing companies.
Jack Graham:
Excellent. We’re all just excited to get this started. I want to thank you for coming on the show. Is there anything else you want to add before we go?
Rory Quinn:
No, that’s great. Thank you for having me, Jack. I look forward to following up and I appreciate the opportunity. All right, keep watching us, E79, ESNR.
Jack Graham:
Thank you very much, Rory. That was Rory Quinn from E79 Resources, and we will be watching closely with all the upcoming news.
For more information about this new investment opportunity, visit the E79 Resources Corp. website https://e79resources.com/
Image https://e79resources.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/victoria-map@3x-1.png
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