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Scandinavia — particularly countries such as Norway and Sweden — is well known as being Europe’s leader in terms of mining thanks in part to ideal weather conditions, deposit types and, of course, its rich history of mining.
Canadian-based Norden Crown Metals Corp. (TSXV:NOCR, OTCQB:NOCRF, Forum) is one such company focused in the region; Norden Crown is a mineral exploration company focused on the discovery of silver, zinc, copper and gold deposits. The company’s projects include Gumsberg, with high-grade silver VMS targets and a “Broken Hill” type discovery, and Burfjord, an IOCG exploration project joint-ventured with Boliden AB (Sweden’s largest mining company).
The Gumsberg project in Sweden consists of five licenses spanning over 18,300 hectares in the country’s Berglsagen mining district. Mineral exploitation at Gumsberg dates to the 13th century and there are over 30 historical mines on the property. including the notable Östrasilverberg mine — the largest silver mine in Europe between 1300 and 1590.
Stockhouse Editorial recently had the opportunity to speak with Patricio Varas, CEO of Norden Crown Metals, about his company, current developments and what investors can watch out for.
Read the transcript below or watch the video above.
SH: Can we first start off with you telling us a little bit about yourself and an overview of the company?
PV: Yes. my name is Patricio Varas, I am the chairman and CEO of Norden Crown Metals and Norden Crown explores in Scandinavia, particularly, we have a project in Norway and we also have a project in Sweden. We're looking for minerals such as copper and gold in Norway and silver, lead and zinc and a few other metals in Sweden.
In terms of my history, I've been doing this for about 35 years. I am a geoscientist, a geologist and I have worked literally all over the world. I've had, I think, a very fortunate experience in having been involved in many projects that have become mines, world-class projects like the Diavik Diamond Mine, the Santo Domingo Sur Silver Copper Gold deposit, Copper Iron Deposit in Chile and things like the Milestone Project in Saskatchewan. So our company has a very significant group of great geoscientists working with the company, we’re technically driven and we really like the projects we're working on in Scandinavia.
SH: Can you update our investor audience and Norden Crown Metals’ shareholders on any updates to do with the company, especially in the wake of COVID-19?
PV: Yes. we've been busy this year through COVID. We did do a drill program last December and into January where we drilled at our Gumsburg project in Sweden and also we tried to do a drill program [at the Burfjord project] in the winter but because our project is very far north in Norway some unusually tough weather prevented us from really having an effective drill program.
COVID affected us a little bit. It's been tougher because some of the progrmss we've had had to look after getting crews in and we had to have crews on the field for a long time because it took us a long time to get the crews into the country with all the quarantines and regulations. But by and large we've been able to operate without any problems and right now our programs have been sort of a stop and go, particularly in Norway where the access for crews ti come into the country has just recently become a little more difficult because there's an increase in cases obviously.
SH: The company is based in Canada but works primarily in Nordic countries such as Sweden and Norway — what should our investor audience know about these regions and what makes them such great mining jurisdictions?
PV: Yes,we are based in Canada, but our focus is Scandinavia and we really like Scandinavia, Sweden and Norway, and particularly in Sweden and even in Finland. This region, these countries, they're very much mining countries. They have a long history of mining. They've been mining for literally thousands of years. One of our prospects, the Östrasilvberg prospect, it has been mined since literally the 1200‘s. So, it was the largest silver mine between the 1200’s and 1600’s in Europe and it was a very rich silver mine, but the thing about Scandinavia is that the infrastructure is fabulous. It's not remote like here in Canada, you have road systems everywhere.You can drive from Stockholm to our project in Sweden in two and a half hours on basically a major highway and you can take a train there.
There are great railway systems. You've got good water sources. You have lots of power, the cheapest power in Europe in fact and a great regulatory regime. The laws are set and it takes us like six weeks to permit a drill program. Since we've been in Sweden and Norway, we've carried out six, seven drill programs until now. So, I think it's a very good jurisdiction and a very stable jurisdiction to work and do exploration.
SH: In line with this, earlier this month Norden Crown Metals announced it had begun exploration at the Burfjord copper-gold project in Norway. What are some key takeaways or milestones our audience should be watching for?
PV: So, the Burfjord project is what we call an iron-oxide-copper-gold deposit. There are some monster ones around the world like Olympic Dam, Candalaria, those types of deposits and we actually have some experience working those [kinds of] projects because I had the fortune to work at the Santo Domingo Sur discovery in Chile, where we found a significant deposit, a copper, iron and gold deposit. So, we have experience working this type of deposit and that's what we're targeting in Norway. That project is in a joint venture with Boliden and Boliden is one of the largest mining companies in Scandinavia. In fact, they're an integrated company, they have smelters, they have obviously operating mines, and we think we're very fortunate to have them as partners. We are the operators; they are earning a 51% interest over the next four years by spending USD $6 million.
So, in a way we have insulated ourselves, we are going to be busy, we are going to be working, we are going to have programs, but we've insulated ourselves from the funding requirements of these types of projects at least for the time being. So, we're busy, we're working there, we're in the field, we're carrying out quite a bit of groundwork, lots of mapping and sampling. We did start a drone magnetic survey which was interrupted due to not being able to bring in some of the crews because of COVID, recently things have changed a little bit. We are hoping to complete that as soon as we're able to bring in the crews because they come from somewhere else, from Finland actually.
We do have a drill program that is ongoing. We have multiple targets. This is a project that has a very broad mineralization. There are old workings.There are lots of old mines and pits, not very deep but they were mining these veins, these high-grade copper veins. We're trying to see if we have a bulk tonnage type target, something that will be [instead of] a million tonnes, something that's going to have hundreds of millions of tonnes. So, it's basically a project that's going to be a bulk mine if we find such a thing. We did have an intercept there in one of our drill programs where we had about 40 meters of about half a percent copper. So that's the type of mineralization we're going to be looking for.
SH: The company has lots on the go, lots of great partnerships. What makes Norden Crown Metals a great investment?
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PV: Well, I believe that, first of all, we have a great team of people. We have some in-country knowledge. One of our directors (Thomas Söderqvist) used to be the second in command at Boliden and when he retired, we asked him if he would join our board. He's well known in the industry and is well known from his time with Boliden, but one of our chief geoscientists is a fellow named Rodney Allen.Rodney was also the chief geoscientist for Boliden and he's well known in Scandinavia because he's been given the credit, for example, at the Garpenberg mine (which is about 30 kilometres east of us that Boliden runs), with basically bringing the resource from almost being finished to where now it has well over 40 years of mine life and it's a big deposit - 120 million tonnes. We are a technical team and I think that's a real advantage. We have some really good geoscientists and we have experience in these types of deposits.Obviously, Scandinavia as a jurisdiction is a great jurisdiction. So, I think that gives us a lot of advantages over a lot of companies.
SH: Definitely, a good team goes a long way for sure. As we move into the rest of the year, we’ve got a few months left, are there any milestones coming up the rest of this year for Norden Crown Metals that our audience should be watching for?
PV: Yes, one of the projects we're probably most excited about is our Gumsberg project in Sweden. We have a few prospects there. In the past we've concentrated on VMS targets that had very rich silver intercepts, but last January we discovered, or we drilled, a new prospect that we call the Fredriksson. That prospect has some old historical mining, basically, on a small-scale, test mining kind of ideas that were worked on back in the 70’s, mid-seventies.
That project, we came in and we drilled three holes and we ended up hitting what we confirmed to be “Broken Hill” type mineralization and that's important because “Broken Hill” type deposits, they're not that common, but a big percentage of them are world-class deposits.
We're in the field right now and we're doing mapping. We also want to do some drone magnetics there, and I think we will be able to access that property for that drone magnetics.The reason for that is we want to be able to trace some of the mineralization that is formed together with the lead-zinc-silver mineralization and we have a belt that's over 22 kilometres. So, we're going to be going in there likely in the fall probably as early as late September, early October.We're going to be going back in there and ideally, we want to do some step-out drilling and start seeing [and] proving that our thesis [is correct], that this is going to have some continuity and potentially be a large deposit.
So, we're going to need to start to do that kind of work [and] we're very excited about that. So, we're going to have lots of news. We're going to have news obviously on the drilling for the Burfjord project up in Norway. We're going to do some geophysics [and] that geophysics will give us some targeting so that we can continue our work at Gumsburg. So, we'll have news on geophysics,we'll have news on the drilling. So, I think [in] the fall we'll have lots of news into December.We're going to be very busy.
SH: Definitely lots to look forward to and I’m sure we’ll be in touch as those come along. Is there anything else you’d like to add that I might have missed?
PV: No, we did manage to secure funding. We did a private placement back in the summer and we raised $2.6 million and the company's in really good shape. We did do a rollback, three-for-one,[and] we [now] have about 53 million shares outstanding.We're basically debt-free and we're raring to go and do some drilling and continue to expand our projects.
To learn more about the company, visit nordencrownmetals.com.
FULL DISCLOSURE: This is a paid article produced by Stockhouse Publishing.