Categories: Precious Metals
Topics: Gold Stocks

Almadex Minerals (TSX-V: DEX)(OTC: AAMMF) CEO Morgan Poliquin on Drilling for Discoveries in a Bull Market

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the president and CEO of Almadex Minerals (TSX-V: DEX)(OTC: AAMMF), Dr. Morgan Poliquin. Morgan, great to have you on as always. How are you today, sir?

Morgan Poliquin: I'm doing excellent, thank you. Gerado, how about you?

Gerardo Del Real: I am great. We have a market. We have gold at 4,000. We have silver over 50, we have copper at that five level. I think it's going to be a blockbuster couple of years in the resource space. Geopolitical tensions are everywhere seemingly, and look, you have been very busy over the past several years acquiring projects in the US that have gold, copper and silver exposure, and of course, the goal being what you do best, frankly, is to make a discovery. So I want to talk about the Rattlesnake acquisition that you just made and just see where things are at in relation to drilling some of the projects that you've started to do some first pass testing on.

Morgan Poliquin: Well, thank you very much. Yeah, we have rotated into exploring exclusively in the United States the last few years and we had a thesis that evolved out of my research in Mexico that resulted in a few discoveries there, and that thesis is that there's a belt of rocks, a really special, unique event occurred along a belt in the Western United States that is under or even unrecognized you might say, and so we feel that there are copper gold porphyries and related gold deposits to be discovered, and we feel that this exploration program has kind of proven that.

We've yet to make a discovery, but we've identified clearly that this belt is real and we're doing some kind of high science behind it to direct the exploration, but it's boots on the ground exploration and as always, proof in the pudding is drilling and so now we're moving into that phase and we own our own diamond drills and we have quite a war chest, say 20 million in working capital to go and do this work, which is really the next couple of years. As you said, we expect to do first pass drilling on all these properties and it's discovery oriented with our own machines. So it's kind of a really coinciding with all the backdrop of metal prices moving up finally after a decade or more of them having harder backdrop in difficult metal prices. A lot of things are aligning and we're delighted to be also working in the continental United States. We think it's the best jurisdiction to be working in right now, and yeah, it's going to be exciting little while ahead of us.

Gerardo Del Real: What comes next? Again, I know your specialty is making discoveries. I love your approach. You love to test properties by drilling them, right? You taught me that early on. You said the best way to find out if something's there is by drilling it and seeing what's there, right? What comes next with those drill bits?

Morgan Poliquin: Yeah, we've got an ongoing program here where we sort of plan to move from property to property. What we've outlined is we're hopeful that our sort of sister company that optioned a couple of these properties will drill one in the near term, but also we plan to drill our 100% owned New Hope property before Christmas. So we've got quite a plan underway and it'll just move into next year. We are essentially moving all the properties towards being able to target holes for that first pass drill program, and you're right, our view is that you might not make the discovery in the first hole. We've had that experience.

We're very lucky doing that down in Mexico as you well know, but the idea is to test a thesis and you don't want to be wasting time where you shouldn't. So it tells you very early on whether you're doing the right things or not in that particular area, but moreover, it'll hopefully vector you in and you always have that chance of hitting the home run when you're drilling. It's a long shot, but you always have it. You have a zero chance of doing any of the above if you're not drilling. So really, that's our strategy. We found a way to do that by having our own drills, reducing costs, being more flexible that way, and of course, we're fortunate to have the treasury we have to be able to do it. So yeah, it's going to be an exciting time.

Gerardo Del Real: Well said, and listen, it should bear repeating, but can you remind the market how much is in that treasury? Because that's important.

Morgan Poliquin: It is. Working capital is about 20 million Canadian and my dad always says the money in the bank is the only friend you have in these markets, but we're very fortunate to have that, but we want to be aggressive with it. We feel that the work that we put in quietly testing this thesis, proving it, identifying the project, staking them, doing the early stage work. That work is ongoing. We just staked a new property we announced here recently, but on the existing properties, that work is behind us and now we're into, which I think I hope people looking at us will appreciate, now, we're ready to start testing these things and seeing what's there. So it's an exciting time.

Gerardo Del Real: It is a historic bull market, aggressive exploration, fully funded war chest. Cannot wait to see what mother nature has left behind on these projects that you've been so methodically staking over the last several years. Thank you so much, Morgan.

Morgan Poliquin: Thank you for having me.

Gerardo Del Real: Chat again soon.

Morgan Poliquin: Look forward to it.

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