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Collin Kettell and Denis Laviolette's perpetual drilling promotion, New Found Gold Inc. (NFG), rose one cent to $2.62 on 511,000 shares. The company has rolled out a spiffy new technical report for its Queensway gold project in north-central Newfoundland. There is little that is arguably new and exciting in the hefty document -- New Found being an eager promoter of its news -- but the recommendations section near the end of the report can elevate even the bushiest of eyebrows.
The company's consultants, you see, recommend a $33.4-million first phase of work, of which the meatiest items are a $6-million trenching, mapping and sampling program at the Iceberg, Keats West and Lotto discoveries. Also included is $25-million of new drilling -- 70,000 metres spread across both stepout and exploratory testing at the Queensway North, Queensway South and Twin Ponds blocks of ground. The additional work proposed calls for $1.2-million of metallurgical testing and $1-million of regional prospecting, till sampling and channel sampling.
And then would come a $32.2-million second phase. The bulk of that cash would go to an 85,000-metre drill program -- more infill and stepout holes at the two Queensway blocks, as well as exploratory drilling along the Appleton and JBP fault zones. Another $1.5-million would be devoted to metallurgical work, including flowsheet optimization studies.
Speaking of studies, the recommendations wind down with $300,000 -- essentially within the rounding error of the proposed $72-million recommended program -- allocated to technical reporting, including resource estimation and preliminary economic assessments. This, one presumes, is the resource estimation and study that New Found Gold touted two weeks ago, and promised, broadly speaking, to have completed by mid-2025.
And so, New Found Gold's weary shareholders, some of whom spent as much as $13.50 for a share in 2021, can expect their company to go trooping back to the market for more cash. (At the end of September, New Found had about $36-million in working capital available -- about $30-million today, given the corporate burn rate.) And so, for the cash in hand and the over $40-million more still in the bush, New Found's backers can expect, at least as recommended by the consultants, a mineral resource estimate and -- watch the weasel -- "potentially, [a] preliminary economic assessment."