WisGuy1 wrote: Goldfinger: Perfect. Let’s segue from there, and let’s talk about the market. You went to visit Novo Resources in Australia. What did you learn?
Bob Moriarty: Two things were very important. They’ve got machines that you could feed gravel or rock through that are extremely efficient in separating the gold from everything else. I was absolutely shocked. I saw a demonstration of a machine that’s literally able to pick up pinhead sized gold. There’s going to be a dramatic change in how we mine in the future, because these sorting machines are going to become a lot more valuable. That was the first thing I learned. Second, and this was a barn burner to me, we know that Egina is gold and gravel, and we know that Karratha, Comet Well and Purdies is gold in hard rock, but the distribution, the size of the gold, and the grade of the gold was remarkably similar between the two areas. That was an absolute shock to me.
Karratha has to be 2.5 billion years old, or so, and Egina is probably 50 million years old, but the distribution of the gold, the size of the gold, and the grade of the gold was very similar. That was shocking to me. At Egina that has about a meter or a meter and half of gravel, Keith Barron, who’s one of the most experienced alluvial miners in the world, he’s the guy that found Fruta del Norte, is one of the top alluvial miners in the world. Nobody knows this, but he owns the largest sapphire mine in the western hemisphere. He and I believe that they could process a cubic meter of gravel at Egina for about five dollars a cubic meter. We believe the grade will be one gram or so plus per cubic meter. You’re talking about the lowest cost gold production in the world.
Goldfinger: We’ve seen really difficult for companies to get past the market cap level that Novo is at right now. The C$400 million market cap level is a very sticky level. We saw Great Bear recently reach, at its peak, it was C$450 million fully diluted market cap, and then it had a sharp C$200 million dollar drop in valuation over the next few weeks. How does Novo get past this level, this C$2.50 a share to C$3.00 per share area that it seems to get stuck at over and over again? What are the catalysts that need to happen for Novo to break out, so to speak?
Bob Moriarty: There’s two of them, and one of them is going to happen, and the other one looks a little skeptical. Millennium has a 100 million dollar mill and they are failing. The guys that own 45% of the shares have had to dump money into them. Sooner or later, they’re going to figure out, “Hey, wait a minute. This isn’t going to work.” The only salvation for Millennium shareholders is going to be to do a deal with Novo. However, they’re at so much debt that Novo is absolutely not going to walk in and take over the debt and pay anything for the company. Period. That would be a game changer, because Novo could literally go with production at Millennium in a month or two. It’s almost certainly not going to happen unless something dramatic changes on the part of the lien holders.
The other thing is getting into production at Egina. I believe that’ll take place in May or June of next year. We absolutely spent a lot of time talking about getting into production and what equipment you would need, and how you do it. Egina is very difficult, because you don’t have access to water. You have to have some way of mining without using water. If the area around Egina, if there were rivers or lakes there, if there was access to water, it would’ve been mined out 120 years ago. Because there’s no water, nobody realized. It looks like the entire area is mineralized, which is giant.
Goldfinger: It’s just this sort of barren earth with … It’s extremely parched earth, and there’s a steady level of gold mineralization that is relatively continuous?
Bob Moriarty: It appears to be .8 grams per yard or higher. Novo will be announcing a lot more testing. They’ve got something strange in Australia that your readers need to understand. You cannot simply … If you pick up a mining lease, you cannot simply go out and start testing. There’s a lot of procedures you have to go through and government permits and agreements with the natives before you can disturb any earth. What they have been able to do is use ground penetrating radar. The ground penetrating radar certainly appears to identify the high grade areas. I’m convinced there’s going to be a lot of areas above two grams to the yard material.
https://energyandgold.com/2019/11/17/bob-moriarty-the-cure-for-dishonest-money-is-honest-money/