(Click image to play video)
The world’s most iconic precious metal has soared back into prominence in 2020 hovering around the USD$1,800 mark at broadcast time.
Yes. Gold is glittering once again. Bald Eagle Gold Corp. (
TSX-V.BIG,
Forum) is focused on the consolidation, exploration, and development of assets in known gold districts throughout the Western Hemisphere with the objective of:
- Reviewing and evaluating historical data to target exploration and development in a new technology and higher gold price environment.
- Using modern techniques in geochemistry, geophysics, and mineralization modeling to expand resources in established properties.
- Focusing on Top Ten mining jurisdictions in the world for resources and operating environment.
In this lively video Q&A, Stockhouse Media’s Dave Jackson was joined by company Chief Financial Officer Darren Collins to bring viewers up-to-date on their Hot Springs Gold Project in Nevada, the company’s different kind of exploration and development business model, and all things Bald Eagle Gold Corp.
TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
SH: So first off, for Stockhouse our metals & mining investor audience new to Bald Eagle Gold, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your company?
DC: Sure. I'll start with a little bit about myself as you mentioned. I have approximately 15 years at capital markets experience and many of those years involved in the, the resource business. I am a Canadian national and being a good Canadian we certainly see a lot of activity across the Toronto Venture and Toronto exchanges. I started my career actually working for a group called Quest Capital that is now Sprott Resource Lending. And that's where I developed a lot of my original relationships in this business and then move forward with those relationships to build companies, finance companies, acquire companies, and then actually did a stint over in the UK as well, working for a UK based investment bank in the city. And now obviously come back to this side of the pond and been an active entrepreneur, investor, executive and director for a good number of years now, as well in the context of our company Bald Eagle is really the culmination of a group of business professionals that have worked together over many years.
Although the company is, you know, newly listed. We have a great asset in the company here to start. The team has certainly been working together for many years and we've raised billions of dollars of capital for early-stage companies, as well as acquired many assets to divested assets, option, joint venture, really the whole spectrum of corporate finance and M&A type activities over the course of our careers. And then on the operational side, we have a substantial amount of experience in permitting, exploring, developing, all the various skillsets that are required to bring a company of this nature to fruition. So, as you outlined at your intro, Bald Eagle is really focused on identifying assets. We initially identified and selected an asset for our listing process, but really, our model is evaluating assets based on historic data, developing a geologic thesis, and then advancing that thesis by completing geophysics, drilling, ultimately looking to build resources and reserves. So that is really the cornerstone of our business model is a team that's worked together for decades and then really utilizing modern exploration and development techniques to enhance properties and ultimately make discoveries.
SH: The company has the technical and financial teams in place to acquire advancing assets in the top mineral and political jurisdictions. Can you explain how this business model, in particular, works?
DC: Well, The Frazier Institute actually came out with an excellent report recently, their 2020 report looking at jurisdictions and ranking jurisdictions based on several key factors, one, geologic prospectively because obviously the metals have to be there in order for it to be an attractive jurisdiction, but two, ease of operating so that relates to permitting, security and comfort around title, things like that. So when we look at that list of jurisdictions, we were obviously quite pleased to see Nevada at the top of that list as the number one jurisdiction for metals and mining globally. Again according to the Fraser Institute. So, what we are really looking at is places again, where we can make discoveries, where we can build resources and reserves, have comfort around our ability to actually operate and monetize on those opportunities, which relates to a favorable overall jurisdiction.
So that is obviously very important to us for us and really guiding us in the context of the assets in which we're evaluating to add into the company, as well as it gives us a great deal of comfort in investing in Northern Nevada, where you have Nevada state accounts for over 80% of the US gold production and accounts for approximately 4% of gold production globally since these records have been tracked by the US geologic society. So, this is a very prolific mining area. Our project is right on the doorstep of Newmont Barrick, the top mining companies in the world. So again, that gives us a lot of confidence operating in that jurisdiction. And certainly the assets that we're evaluating to continue building our portfolio have a similar profile.
SH: Can you give us some details about your cornerstone Hot Springs Gold Project in the prolific mining jurisdiction of Humboldt County, Nevada?
DC: Absolutely. So we are in an absolutely prime location. Our properties span 12,000 acres. We have a 50% interest in that asset and a partner that is a multi-billion dollar US family. I won't name them, but they are very well known and very well capitalized. The US family has a few family members that have an expertise in metal and mining and a specific interest in gold right now, given the current economic environment where it looks like we're going to have a decent amount of inflation coming in here. So the property itself, has a great a contiguous land package. It is a property that has historically been explored, but not explored in our opinion, the way that it frankly should be. It's never been drilled at depth. It has a lot of faults, a lot of structures that we can target.
But ultimately what really attracted us was the epithermal style deposit potential of the property. And when we look at the property, it's directly West to the Osgood mountain range, we're in the hot Springs mountain range. The Osgood mountain range, hosts the world-class Turquoise Ridge mine, which again is joint venture between Barrick and Newmont. And these mountain ranges have very similar geologic age composition, including significant amounts of sandstone across the property. When we look again at the property, there's a lot of fractures and our geophysics work that we've been doing is correlating very well to the sulfites specifically pyrite and chalcopyrite, where hydrothermal fluids have breached the surface from deep penetrating structures known to historically host large amounts of gold. We also have a lot of surface samples that give us significant results of arsenic and mercury, which is a great indication that we have an epithermal style deposit on this property.
Now, when we look at epithermal style deposits, generally they occur at depths greater than 200 meters where this project is not been historically drilled. And they generally occur where you are encountering these types of elements that at surface and in shallow historic drill results. So that gives us a great opportunity in our opinion, when we looked at that data set here we have an opportunity to really follow up on the historic work that's been done that gives us great expectation. Epithermal deposits are known for grade. So we have very high-grade potential here at this this project as well.
SH: Darren, as CFO, you’re in charge of the company’s overall financial operations. What can you tell us about Bald Eagle’s liquidity moving forward and private capital raised to date?
DC: Well, I certainly have a good handle on that. So the principles and by that, I mean, board and management, the insiders of the corporation, we hold approximately 25.5% of the stock in this company even invested obviously for those shares a significant amount of our own capital, because we believe in the company and we believe in ourselves, we believe in the team that we have that has worked together over many, many years. So that is reflective of an alignment shareholders that I think really bodes well for us as a public company they're not working for salaries, we're working for our equity, the vision that this is going to be much more in terms of share price and market cap than it is today.
Our management team and board and key shareholders, we've raised significant amounts of capital. As I previously mentioned, billions of dollars over the course of our careers. We certainly have the right institutional relationships as well as relationships with all the Canadian leading investment banks, many retail brokers, high net worth individuals. So we've sourced capital from groups that we have established relationships with that have done well with us in the past. We have raised two and a half million dollars as part of the go public process. That's a decent amount of capitalization to get us started. We're an exploration and development company, but we have enough money to get us through some significant milestones here. So we have about 2000 meters of drilling results that we'll be coming out with here.
We have another 5,000 meters of drilling plan for this year and, you know, we're financed on that budget with our partners. So that gets us to the next milestone. And obviously we'll take capital as opportune in the context of our market price to answer the liquidity question, we started trading two days ago, we traded 1.3 million shares. It's a decent start we're training in about issue from the go public. So, we think we have obviously a lot of room to build our share price here, but happy from the support that received in the market and continue to advance from here and build volume and appreciation.
SH: I briefly mentioned your new listing in the intro. Can you update us on any further developments of your upcoming listing and anything investors should be keeping an eye out for?
DC: Well, I think it's twofold. It's what we have and what we plan to have. So what we have is a great asset in Nevada that we're going to be coming out with results on. So our drills are turning on the property right now. We have core in the labs the labs in Nevada, no big secret. They're a bit backed up right now. So we're expecting those results in due course, but reasonable guidance. And what we think is an expectation for those results is some initial releases on our geophysics work on some interpretation from the rocks, targeting things like that, where we have a lot of great work done there part of a backup part of the listing process as well, we had some cash in the private company and we said, Hey, when we come to market, we really want to have results in hand.
We want to have news for the market. We don't want to be standing still to starting to run. We want to have we want to have ourselves running rate out of the gate. That's what we've done. So we've put capital to work. Can we have those results in the lab pending depending right now. So we'll have an initial release out here shortly that gives some interpretation of what we're looking for on results. Then we anticipate for kind of middle of may results from the first four holes, kind of mid June, early June for two more holes, and then we'll advance forward with another 12 holes after that. So we'll have about 18 drill holes this year and the way that we're staging those drill holes is we're taking the historic work done, and then we're staging ourselves into depth.
So we're not doing 800-meter holes right out of the gate. We're looking at 300-350-meter holes. And using the geo physics that is tracking the structures at depth and really tying that in with a historic results. And that's guiding our exploration as we feed ourselves or we layer ourselves into the deeper parts of the property. And that's a risk management approach as well in terms of being confident that we're going to hit on what we expect. So that's the news flow relating to what we have and then relating to what we're looking at. We’re certainly of the skillset and mindset that smart acquisitions build value for companies. So we're, we're looking at assets, we've disclosed that as part of our go public as part of the capital that we raised, we are capitalized.
So we have good base and a good team to really advance assets that may be somewhat orphaned on the balance sheet of other kind of mid tier companies that really need a geologic exploration team to come in and focus on that need some work in terms of reinterpreting and historic data, developing new geologic models. So that's really where both our financial and technical expertise on our technical team comes in and really fits together to build value on the basis of what we intend to have and we're making great progress on those discussions and should be able to pull something together here in the foreseeable future.
SH: Can you tell our audience a little bit more about your corporate management team, along with the experience and innovative ideas that they bring to the metals and mining space?
DC: Absolutely. So I'll start with my business partner and fellow director, Sidney Himmel, Sid, and I have known each other for the extent of my career. So about 15 years, he is a wonderful man. I've really enjoyed working with him. He is focused, he is dedicated, he is honest, he is highly intelligent (I am likely making him blush off screen here, but that's okay). I really have the utmost respect for the man, and he is very much heading up our efforts in terms of evaluating the asset that we have right now from a geologic and financial perspective. As well as evaluating opportunities that we have in the pipeline that really is this consuming quite a bit of his time, but his background he's been in mineral exploration and development for over a decade before that was TD securities, institutional sales research banking, Merrill Lynch.
So he's no stranger to public companies. And again, I'm repeating myself, but just a great part of our team and very much respect. Mark Smethurst is our senior geologist and very much a person that has the ability to come onto a property and really rethink what is historically been thought. His previous company went from 10 cents a share to 80 cents a share. And really that was on the basis of the geologic concept that he developed in that key advance where he identified two Breccia pipes on the property, epithermal style deposit and really propelled that company in terms of fundamental value creation in terms of his exploration his exploration success. He came over to join us as he saw that we have a great property.
He's very excited about it. And really thinks that there's some big discoveries to be made here. In addition, he came over to join because he really likes the financial background that we bring to the table as well. He’s seen the track record, he’s seen the capital that we've raised and really thinks that this is a great place for him to align and develop this business with us. So those are really the core members of the management team. Again, I gave you my background at the beginning of the presentation. We also have a group of technical consultants that are advising on the project. Very qualified individuals, decades of experience in metals mining, specifically operate within the jurisdiction that we're discussing in Nevada here. Other jurisdictions as well, of course, but have made significant discoveries, built significant mines, other board of directors three individuals independent I'm on the board and Sid’s on the boards and we do have a majority independent board.
Peter Simeon is a securities lawyer top 40, under 40, a couple of years back just a fantastic lawyer very business-minded and just a pleasure to work with. We've worked with him as legal counsel across multiple companies. For probably about the last 10 or more years. Marc-Andre Lavoie is our chairman. He is capital markets professional, lots of experience in Canada, as well as the UK was the managing director over at BNP in the UK is on the board of directors of BlackRock iron ore, Quebec. That is a very strategic project for the Quebec government. They've raised over a hundred million dollars in the process of raising of construction capital at this point in time. I remember that project from a number of years back when they were putting it together.
And they've certainly taken that that project to fruition as a private company. None the less, the other individual on the board is Ray Harari venture capitalist, investor, a former investment banker comes from a very prominent family in Latin America. Has helped us source some of the capital that we have in the business here. So really rounds out our board of directors. It's a group that has independence, has expertise and is really guiding us as a management team in creation of this company.
SH: And finally, Darren, if there’s anything else that I’ve overlooked and you’d like to add, please feel free to elaborate.
DC: Well, I think, it really comes down to a team structure and assets. So we have we have a great capital structure. 60% of our stock is escrow. We have a float of 40 million shares that has about an average weighted cost on it of 15 cents. So it's trading a little below the weighted average value with float rate now. So, from a technical perspective on that basis, it’s attractive at these levels where we're trading, in terms of the team, again, I think that's one of the big differentiators for us is we have a lot of stock in this company, we've had successes in the past, both in resources and other industries, and we're very focused on building up this company and the assets that we have in the company right now, again, partnered with very prominent US family. They chose us as their partners for a reason. They looked at our background, they looked at our pedigree, they looked at what we've done, and said these are people that we can align with. And really work to develop this asset that we're very excited about. So we've got again, a great asset in Nevada and we'll look to add more great assets into this company as well.
For more information, visit
www.baldeaglegold.com.
FULL DISCLOSURE: This is a paid article produced by Stockhouse Publishing.