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Topics: Copper Stocks

Gunnison Copper (TSX: GCU)(OTC: GCUMF) CEO Stephen Twyerould on America's Newest Copper Producer & Advancing the Flagship Gunnison Project

 

Gerardo Del Real: This is Gerardo Del Real with Resource Stock Digest. Joining me today is the President and CEO of Gunnison Copper (TSX: GCU)(OTC: GCUMF), Mr. Stephen Twyerould. Stephen, great to have you back on. How are you today, sir?

Stephen Twyerould: Yeah, look, it's great to be back on, Gerardo. It's been exciting times for us, and there's lots going on. So happy we get a chance to talk about it.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, listen, congratulations are in order. You are America's newest copper producer at a time where it's probably the best time in the history, here in the US anyhow, to be a new copper producer, geopolitical risk continues to increase around the world. The US has made it a point to prioritize securing a domestic source of copper and critical metal supply here, and your timing could not be better.

Can we speak a bit about becoming America's newest copper producer, what that means? And then let's get into some of the details, including the high-value-add program. I want to talk mineral sorting results and what that means because I think a lot of people miss that. But congrats. How's that feel?

Stephen Twyerould: It feels great. I mean, honestly. And look, the real sort of praise goes to the team on site like Rob Winton and the guys that are on site. We started this construction just over 12 months ago. A lot of money spent, a lot of activity, no lost time accidents, no incidents, and here we are, America's newest copper producer just 12 months later. So, very proud of that. Very proud of the team and the effort they've put in.

What it means for us is there's a lot of eyes on us. It's not often you see a new producer come onto the market, and we're doing it in Arizona here, so it's a great jurisdiction, a great place to be operating. So there's a lot of eyes on the stock, and it means we're getting attention as well from the Department of Energy, Department of Defense. We're looking forward to following up on those relationships to see if we can take that further, but exciting times for us.

Gerardo Del Real: Let's talk about Gunnison Projects high-value-add program. You have a number of initiatives that are meant to really unlock a lot more shareholder value here with this commodity bull market that we have. Can you speak to that for those that may not be as familiar?

Stephen Twyerould: Yeah, sure. So the Gunnison flagship project, I mean, that's the big one, and it's only a couple of kilometers south of our operating Johnson Camp Mine. And that project, we're targeting that to do 170 million pounds of annual production per year. It's at the PEA stage. We're rolling that into a PFS next year, but you think about that, 170 million pounds a year, our all-in costs are just under $2. So you can choose a copper price, but even at, say, $4 copper, that's a massive amount of annual operating cash flow from that project. So we're very excited about it. It's a big project.

What came out of that PEA that we did was opportunities to make that even better, and that formed the basis of what we call this high-value-add program. There was a number of those, they're kind of on the website. You can get into the information on them. We're working on all of them. There's going to be news flow coming from all of them. But the first cab off the rank was this mineral sorting that we did, and we’d done some prior tests on it, and they looked successful.

So we drilled three holes. We took the core from that material, from those drill holes, we busted it up into four- to six-inch pieces. And for the highest acid consuming rock that we have in our mine plan, it's called the Martin Formation. We ran that through this optical mineral sorter, and the machine was just trained to see what's good and what's bad. The bad stuff's pretty obvious. It doesn't have any green copper in it. The good stuff has got green copper in it and sort of reddish brown material in it. It's pretty obvious.

So we spent some time training the machine so we could learn what's good and what's bad. And then we ran that program, and the machine processed this half-tonne sample and spat out two buckets at the end: a good bucket and a bad bucket. And what was exciting was in the waste pile, virtually no copper. I think there was less than 1% of the copper that was in the feed grade ended up in the waste bin. So I mean, that's really important because copper at $4.50 a pound, you don't want to leave any in the waste bin.

In the mineralized bin, that had 99% of the copper. But we had extracted out of that about 90% of the internal waste. So when we did our back calculations, that meant that the good pile that came out of the machine had nearly double the head grade and about 75% less acid consumption than if you hadn't run it through the ore sorter or the mineral sorter.

So that's a really significant result. We're excited about it. It's only one test. It's a big test. It's only one. So there's a lot more work to be done, but it's really simple stuff, and we don't see any reason why that's not going to flow in to the pre-feasibility study next year. And in fact, we'll probably update the current PEA with some of these results to show the impact of that. So it's good stuff.

Gerardo Del Real: No, listen, that's absolutely incredible. And I always joke that I'm a simple guy with simple ideas and premises, and some of the best stories sometimes and some of the best value-enhancing processes tend to be, a lot of times, simple ones. You just have to get them right, and it sounds like you're on the right path on that front.

Look, with Johnson Camp producing, you've proven that the team has the technical acumen. And again, you mentioned it, and I want to highlight it, you've done this safely. But you've proven that you have the technical acumen to get to that part. And now with the flagship with Gunnison, I have to believe that the incoming calls from potential partners, potential strategics are increasing in volume as you advance Gunnison. What are next steps? What does that look like?

Stephen Twyerould: So look, it's no secret that we'd like to bring in a strategic partner on this project. So every time we generate positive results from that, it generates a better valuation, and it improves the likelihood that we're going to do a strategic transaction at a valuation that we're happy with. We're not happy with the current valuation of the company or that project. I think that's a holdover from the old in situ days.

We're past that now. At least, the management team is past that. I'm not sure that the market is fully understanding that we're not an in situ mine anymore or a big open-pit project. So the key for this, for the management team, our focus, keep hitting the technical success stories that are going to create value on the project, get the valuation of the project, and therefore our company up. And then we'd like to lock in a strategic transaction with someone, because this is a big project, and we're going to need some support on that. So that's our plan.

Gerardo Del Real: Well, listen, I think with... if I'm right and if we're right, and I think we're like-minded on this, I think copper head's much higher, and I have to believe with every 50 cent to dollar move higher in the copper price, strategics, majors, mid-tiers are going to be a whole heck of a lot more motivated to partner with someone that has a project of scale with great infrastructure in Arizona, again, at a time where there is an absolute priority for security of supply. And I think that's underrated in a lot of speculators' and investors' thesis and approach to writing a check for a company. Anything to add to that, sir?

Stephen Twyerould: Well, I think you hit all the main points, you really did. I think the other thing that maybe differentiates us a bit is our ability to actually get a permit and build a mine. There's a lot of companies out there, there's a lot of teams out there working hard on their projects. We've done it twice now. We permitted the in situ and got it into production, not so successful on the ramp up, transitioned that to an open pit, which is looking really good, and we just got Johnson Camp. All the permit amendments and everything else we needed, we got in a timely manner and got it into production.

What that means when strategics and others are looking at us is this is a mine that we can build, it can be built. It's not going to get held up in all sorts of knots and loops and everything else in that permitting process. We've demonstrated that. That's a big deal in just about any jurisdiction now.

Gerardo Del Real: Couldn't agree with you more. Sir, thank you so much again for your time. Looking forward to having you back on. It should be, I think, a heck of a close to the year in the copper space, in the metal space, and a blockbuster 2026. Thanks again.

Stephen Twyerould: Good on you. Thanks a lot.

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