Categories: Precious Metals / Mining Stocks
Topics: Gold Stocks / Copper Stocks

GSP Resource Corp. (TSX-V: GSPR)(OTC: GSRCF) CEO Simon Dyakowski on Unlocking High-Grade Copper-Gold-Silver at the Alwin Mine in BC’s Premier Copper District

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the president & CEO of GSP Resource Corp. — Mr. Simon Dyakowski. Simon, it has been a bit. We were overdue for a catch-up. How are you today, sir?

Simon Dyakowski: I'm great, Gerardo. Thanks for having me on. It’s good to reconnect here on GSPR on the TSX Venture. It's a story that I'm really excited about, and we're looking to introduce it to a broader audience.

Gerardo Del Real: Now, let's get right into why you're excited about it and why I'm happy to start telling the story at this stage. There are assets in the portfolio that you've been working to acquire for years, and you're finally there.

We're hitting record-high copper prices with the announcement of the tariffs today. We’re near record-high gold prices. Silver is starting to break out. So it’s the perfect storm to have a basket of assets with copper, gold, and silver in top-notch jurisdictions with neighbors that are also producing or will be producing and looking to advance projects that they've been working for over a decade to permit.

All of those boxes are getting checked at almost the same time. And yet, you sit here with a tiny C$4 million market cap or something along those lines. I love being able to introduce stories to our audience really early on, especially given the backdrop in the commodity space.

Simon Dyakowski: Yes, and thanks for that intro. I can touch on a little bit of how this all came together and why it has taken so long. We are focused on copper, silver, and gold, and we’re in southwestern British Columbia. No doubt a lot of your audience is familiar with British Columbia as a mining jurisdiction. But BC is a very large province — and even as a jurisdiction, it doesn’t have an equal, I’d say, risk profile.

Gerardo Del Real: Right.

Simon Dyakowski: And what I mean by that is there are some areas that are a little bit more remote, a little more ecologically sensitive — just more remote, with a bit more sensitivity around First Nations and things like that.

Gerardo Del Real: Sure.

Simon Dyakowski: We are in an area, though, that is known as British Columbia's industrial heartland. Think of the Texas of BC, if you will.

Gerardo Del Real: Yeah.

Simon Dyakowski: And that’s around the city of Kamloops. Our property is very well located at a high altitude but at a dry altitude. I say that because in the Golden Triangle of BC, there are some fantastic gold projects but they have a very limited work season due to the heavy precipitation they receive, sometimes 20, 30, 40, 50 feet of snow, and they just have to wait for it to melt.

We’re pretty high up as well — about 5,000 feet — but we’re on a plateau in the interior. It’s arid. You never get more than a foot or two of snow, and it can be worked for a much longer season than other areas of BC.

And I think most important about our property is that it sits as an enclave within Teck Resources’ Highland Valley Copper Operation — the largest open-pit copper mine in Canada — which recently received a 20-year mine life extension permit that took them about 10 years to get.

The reason we actually got involved in our property, the Alwin Mine, five or six years ago is because we assumed at the time that Teck was on the cusp of getting their permit. We figured that would likely create a bit more interest in nearby deposits. It took a little longer than everybody expected.

Gerardo Del Real: Imagine that… in the mining space, Simon, something taking a little bit longer than we expect.

Simon Dyakowski: I know, I know… to be expected, of course. But with all of the goings-on around the world geopolitically — and even today with a tariff, I believe, on copper coming out of the US — the timing is good for us. We’re seeing copper break out over five bucks on the futures. Gold and silver are now well on their way.

And our deposit, which has had a second look taken at it over the past five years as we’ve been acquiring it, looks, I think, a lot more attractive. We’re looking forward to a busy rest of 2025 on a number of exploration fronts where we think we can really add value and a new dimension to the Alwin Mine that potentially makes it an attractive piece of the puzzle in the broader scheme of Highland Valley — which is the biggest copper camp in BC.

Gerardo Del Real: Let’s talk about how you add value from this tiny, minuscule four or five million dollar market cap that the market is granting you right now because there are significant catalysts. And we’re not talking about, just to be absolutely clear, greenfields exploration where we’re hoping for a discovery or discoveries. You have those already.

So really, it’s like you said: taking a second look at what was discovered prior, re-assaying some of that core to include copper, silver, and gold, and then also delineating new drill targets to expand on those historic resources that already exist, right?

Simon Dyakowski: Yes, that’s exactly it. The Alwin Mine is a past-producing, high-grade underground copper mine. It was producing on and off in the early ’70s and early ’80s and really hasn’t seen a lot of work since 1981-82 until we got involved.

What we’ve done is systematically gone through the historic drill hole dataset, which totals over 50,000 meters. And we’ve actually now determined that it can possibly be open-pit mined as opposed to underground mined, which increases the potential tonnage very significantly, especially given that it’s in an area surrounded within five kilometers by five currently producing and past-producing open pits.

Gerardo Del Real: Yep.

Simon Dyakowski: And then I think what’s most significant in our data discovery and our modeling over the past couple of years is that, when the deposit was discovered in the 1960s, gold and silver were not really in play in the mining industry. Silver was maybe $1 per ounce, and gold was 20 or 30 bucks. So they didn’t even bother assaying for gold or silver unless it was massive quartz veining that you obviously had to have a look at.

We discovered that, out of our database of over 3,000 samples, there were only about 30 historically that were sampled for gold and silver. So we went in with a bit of preliminary drilling on our own volition, and we discovered significant grades of gold and silver over meaningful widths. I can list off a couple here, but last year we hit 7 meters of 5 grams of gold paired with 1% copper.

So we believe the entire deposit could carry a significant gold-silver credit. We’re now designing a plan to efficiently confirm that, and we think it could meaningfully increase the copper-equivalent tonnage. That’s something we’re looking to do over the autumn timeframe.

In the interim, we also believe — just given our proximity to Highland Valley’s operation and their nearby exploration targets — that we’re right along strike from some very compelling porphyry or long widths of lower-grade mineralization but consistently mineralized. These are just a few hundred meters off our eastern property line.

So we announced in early July, just last week, that we’ve commenced a deeper-sensing geophysics survey. It’s not a very deep one but it’s designed to look a bit deeper than anything we’ve done before. 

We’re awaiting the results right now as we speak, and we’re hopeful they might uncover what could be a much bigger porphyry-style target, potentially one that drove the high-grade mineralization we’ve been drilling near surface.

It’s very exciting. We hope to get that news out to the market over the next one to two weeks, and that will really drive our exploration efforts through August, September, and October.

Gerardo Del Real: Look, the timing is perfect. I want to touch on the team, because there are some names I’m very familiar with: yourself, obviously. Jordan Trimble I know extremely well. And then, you have a technical advisor I’m also familiar with, Kristopher Raffle. 

I’d love for you to speak on the team because I think the skill set — and a lot of the local experience, especially on the technical side — is going to be really important and critical for you all.

Simon Dyakowski: We really want to have a well-rounded team and, obviously, in our view, in the junior space that has to include technical prowess, legal, financial, and marketing. 

On our team, Kris Raffle is our lead consultant. We went with Kris and his group because they have real expertise in modeling and taking second looks at historic deposits, making sense of them, and then guiding a value-add path to move them forward.

They’ve done an exceptional job with the Alwin Mine. Super efficient. We have bids from a whole bunch of groups, and Kris has really been invaluable here. So he’s a key part of the team.

You mentioned Jordan — he’s involved as well, one of the better capital raisers in Vancouver. We also have an old colleague of mine from Salman Partners, Rodney Stevens. He was an award-winning analyst back when Salman was in its heyday, around the time we worked together in the early 2000s. He’s involved now too, and has deep ties into the industry.

So we’re very happy with the team. And really, we’re firing on all cylinders now with the recently completed 100% acquisition of the project. No more payments — we’ve simplified the royalty structure — and the modeling and recent drill program have given us a clear roadmap to pick off some of that low-hanging fruit.

That includes greatly increasing the open-pit resource through a bit of re-assaying and reanalyzing, and also now looking at some larger, more greenfields-style targets in a brownfield setting, let’s say.

Gerardo Del Real: Tell me about the capital structure, because I know that management and insiders have significant skin in the game — and I always look for that. Share structure is one of the key elements I consider when looking at a company and deciding, yeah, this is a story we can help tell. And yours is structured very well.

Simon Dyakowski: Yes, so there are 46 million shares outstanding right now, and we have about half a million dollars in working capital. About 26% of those shares are held by insiders. Our largest shareholder is actually the vendor of the property. People might know him from a company called GT Gold; he staked what is now the Tatogga Project, which GT Gold made a discovery on and later sold to Goldcorp, now Newmont, for around $500 million.

He’s a very long-term investor. He’s participated in a number of our financings and has even been willing to lock up his shares as an insider. So one out of every four shares is in insider hands.

We haven’t done any cheap rounds below 10 cents, and we think there’s good leverage to a re-rating here. We’ve been a bit of a laggard in the bull market over the last few months but that’s really been a function of getting the work underway.

I mentioned the geophysical survey… and we wanted to make sure we went with the right group that had specific expertise in the Highland Valley. The group we’re working with is based out of Coquitlam and has done a number of surveys in this exact geologic setting. They work with some of the other porphyry copper explorers in the area so we just wanted to wait until they were available rather than rushing in with someone less experienced.

So our patience, I think, will be rewarded over the coming weeks and months as we move forward with that new information.

Gerardo Del Real: You’ve done things the right way. I’m looking forward to the geophysical survey results, and I’m looking forward to seeing what that second look at the core and those samples yields.

And again, the fact that you’ve got a tiny market cap and a lot of runway — I think it’s an excellent time for you to come on. So thank you so much for your time, Simon.

Simon Dyakowski: Gerardo, thanks very much. It was great to speak with you again.

Gerardo Del Real: Let’s do it again soon once those results start trickling in.

Simon Dyakowski: Sounds good.

Gerardo Del Real: Alright. Cheers now.

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