Tim Termuende CEO of Eagle Plains Resources (TSXV: EPL) and Rob Goodman of Stockpulse.com discuss the large potential at the Sullivan-style SEDEX exploration target and their extensive portfolio of mineral royalties. Watch the interview from the Vancouver Resource Investor Conference.
Rob Goodman: Stockpulse.com, we are on location, the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference 2023. Joining me, I’ve got Tim Termuende, he runs Eagle Plains Resources, that’s EPL in Toronto Venture Exchange. Tim, good to see you.
Tim Termuende: Good to see you again, Rob.
Rob Goodman: Yeah.
Tim Termuende: Yep.
Rob Goodman: So exciting times here for Eagle Plains. You guys have gone through a lot this year in a bad market, but yet here you are still standing and thriving, talk about it.
Tim Termuende: Yeah, we’ve got a lot going on right now. We’re kind of hitting our stride right now. We’ve got a very healthy treasury, we’ve got $9.5 million in the bank cash, got some real estate investments, some shares in other companies. So we’re financially very stable. But at the same time, we’re about to launch our next spin-out. As you know, in the past we’ve spun out a number of companies, which have effectively resulted as a $100 million dividend to our shareholders. This is a company that has a market cap now at $25 million.
So there’s that kind of leverage. But we’re doing another spin-out of all our royalties. The company’s been around for 30 years, a lot of deals with a lot of other companies over the years, and every time we’ve done one of those deals we’ve kept a royalty interest. We’ve just sort of put it on the back burner, back shelf. Didn’t really pay much attention to them. But we’re seeing now that we’ve got such a portfolio, them-
Rob Goodman: They add up quick.
Tim Termuende: They’re adding up quickly. And actually one in particular, one of the royalties we have on a project in the Yukon, the AurMac Project by Banyan Gold, they announced a four-million ounce inferred resource on a number of the claims that are subject to these royalties. So these things have really taken on a value, and that’s where we’ve been working on the royalty spin-out for a while, but this is where the trigger that, “Okay, let’s do it, let’s push it all together.”
And so we’re putting roughly 50 royalties into this royalty company. The royalties are focused in Western Canada, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Yukon, but a very broad spectrum of commodities. We’ve got the basic critical metals, silver, lead zinc, copper. We’ve got uranium projects, we’ve got silica projects, we’ve got copper projects. We’ve got actually even diamonds, we’ve got some claims in the diamond camp at Fort à la Corne.
Rob Goodman: You just trying to check all the boxes here?
Tim Termuende: We’re trying to check all the boxes. Yeah, we’re not a flavor of the month, we’re the opposite. We’re every flavor, but at the same time as we’re doing that, as you know, we concluded that Taiga Gold sale last year, and that was a windfall for not only our shareholders, but for Eagle Plains directly because we had a large number of Taiga shares that Eagle Plains owned. So we ended up getting roughly$3.5 million cash for those shares when we concluded the deal with SSR mining.
So that cash went into an already healthy treasury, gave us the confidence in our own risk modeling to take a big swing at a project that I’ve been involved with for 30 years, the Vulcan Project in Southeastern British Columbia. So we did a $1.1 million drill program, as you know, that’s almost unheard of for us to spend our own money like that, but we’re really glad we did because one of the holes intersected mineralization that we are interpreting to show very close proximity to a mineralized vent.
Now with the Sullivan, our target there is a Sullivan-style SEDEX target, can’t be overstated the value of those kind of targets. The Sullivan itself was the biggest mine in the world for 60 years until other deposits were found in Australia and elsewhere. But the biggest mine in the world for 60 years, it ran for 100 years where the workforce of averaging four to 500 people for 100 years. So this thing is big. The in situ value of Sullivan is 40 billion dollars. So we’ve always been kind of targeting Sullivan-type targets in our area.
Vulcan I’ve been involved with for 30 years. Eagle Plains has owned Vulcan for 20 years when we staked it way back when, but again, we put this three-drill hole program in. One of the holes shows that we’re very close to a vent somewhere nearby. So we are, again, budgeting our own money up to $1.5 million this next summer. We’re going to drill, basically vector drilling to try and zero in on where this vent is. We know it’s somewhere near our hole we drilled.
We’ve got some geophysical evidence that suggests it’s to the southeast, so that’ll be our first hole. If that doesn’t pan out, we’ll drill to the northeast, and then we’ll spin the drill until we find out where the mineralization is getting stronger. The alteration is getting more indicative of event proximity. And so we hope to at least get on the fringes of a vent. And if that’s the case, I think the whole world will pay attention.
Rob Goodman: Yeah, I’ll say. I think the royalty thing is pretty exciting too. We were talking about you usually option off projects and now you’ve got one here. So makes me think as an investor myself, “Is this treasure hunter onto something?”
Tim Termuende: Maybe, I hope so. It’s been long enough. It’s been long enough. But yeah, so stay tuned, we’re going to drill Vulcan on June 15th. That’s the first day we’re permitted to do that. For me, that’s 136 sleeps away so I’m on it.
Rob Goodman: He knows what he’s doing here, folks. All right, Tim, appreciate the time there. That’s Tim Termuende, he runs Eagle Plains Resources, EPL, Toronto Venture Exchange. Tim, really appreciate the time.
Tim Termuende: Thanks, Rob, always a pleasure.
Rob Goodman: Yeah.
