very interesting news 1 hr. agoTORONTO, April 20 (Reuters) - Northern Freegold Resources Ltd (NFR.V) is mulling the sale of its Burro Creek gold-silver asset in Arizona, while it continues to identify increases in its resource base at Freegold Mountain in Canada's Yukon territory, top company officials said on Tuesday.
"With gold prices up, people are looking for small gold systems that they may be able to put into production quickly and Burro kind of fits that description," said President and Chief Executive Sue Craig in an interview with Reuters.
Burro Creek was permitted for mining back in the early 1980s, but the project was shelved due to lackluster gold prices through much of the 1980s and 1990s. The project has a resource of 60,000 ounces of gold and 2 million ounces of silver.
Craig said the company has already signed confidentiality agreements with four companyies that are interested in the asset.
Bill Harris, the company's chairman and chief operating officer, said proceeds from the sale of the project would be reinvested in further exploration at its flagship Freegold Mountain site.
Northern Freegold's flagship asset is also receiving a lot of interest from major gold mining companies that are scouting for new resources to help expand their portfolios.
Last month, gold miner Kinross (K.TO) agreed to acquire exploration company Underworld Resources (UW.V) in a deal worth C$139.2 million ($139 million). Underworld's flagship asset is the White Gold project, located just north of Freegold Mountain. [ID:nN11211443]
Both projects, along with Kinross's Fort Knox gold mine and a host of other projects are a part of the Tintina gold belt that stretches across the Yukon territory into Alaska.
Northern Freegold has so far identified a 1 million ounce gold resource at its Nucleus deposit at Freegold Mountain.
The company is working on expanding the size of this deposit, while doing additional drilling at its adjoining Revenue deposit.
Craig said the company has already signed confidentiality agreements with 10 companies that are interested in the Freegold asset, but these are preliminary in nature and there are no active discussions at this time around a sale of the company or the asset.
"We understand what larger companies are looking for, so a lot of what we are doing at Freegold (right now) is making sure that all those things are in place," Craig said.