"Paul McGuigan's Vanadiumcorp Resource Inc. (VRB) closed unchanged at six cents on 296,000 shares. The company announced "commencement of ... metallurgical bulk sampling" at its Lac Dore project, southeast of Chibougamau in north-central Quebec. While that was the headline, Mr. McGuigan, president and CEO, retreated a bit in the meat of his news, stating that Vanadiumcorp is announcing "mobilization to excavate vanadiferous titanomagnetite from historical trenches" at the project.
Work on the sample has been awaiting Vanadiumcorp raising cash, but a first tranche of its energetic $4-million placement, revealed in July, is now creaking toward closure. The company is selling 7.4 million regular shares at 10 cents and 4.79 million flow-through shares at 12 cents, for a total of $1.31-million in that first sale. Once the dig gets under way, Vanadiumcorp expects to recover about five tones of high-quality concentrate for testing late this fall and during early 2023.
Vanadiumcorp, which elevated its stock to 25 cents in May through a 1:10 rollback -- but looks like it could use another consolidation today -- fired its former president and CEO, Adriaan Bakker, in March and has been jousting with him in a lawyerly way since then. Nevertheless, the company continues to pursue Lac Dore, half-heartedly worked during Mr. Bakker's eight-year tenure, in a (hopefully) more energetic manner.
The company did advance the project through a resource estimate and preliminary economic assessment in the mid-2010s, but the regulators put the kibosh to both documents after getting around to examining them some time later. Vanadiumcorp rolled out a new resource estimate late in 2020, and this one appears to have stuck: Lac Dore hosts 215 million tonnes of measured and indicated rock that contains 53 million tonnes of magnetite concentrate grading 1.3 per cent vanadium oxide, 8.7 per cent titanium oxide and 62 per cent iron, with another 22.5 million tonnes of magnetite concentrate inferred "