When Stockhouse last caught up with
New Age Metals Inc. (
TSX-V.NAM,
OTCQB: NMTLF,
Forum) back in
April, this forward-thinking exploration company was looking for the green…literally and figuratively. Stockhouse’s Dave Jackson caught up, once again, with company Chairman, CEO, and Director, Harry Barr, to get our investor audience up-to-date on all things New Age Metals.
(Click image to play video)
TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
SH: To start off with, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and the history of the company?
HB: I have been in the exploration/development business since my early twenties and I am 66 now, I have been at it a long time. Over the years I started six public companies and they are all running today, several of them are being run by people that worked for me for years. As a CEO, I raised well over $300 million and we have done, well we will be talking to you about it in this presentation, our 44th deal with a major company that just happened here recently with the fifth largest lithium company in the world. We probably made over 300 deals with juniors and mid tier type companies. We have done a lot of work in the industry, worked in nine different countries. Pretty much focused in Canada and the US these days.
SH: You just reported an updated mineral resource estimate of the River Valley Palladium Project. Can you expand on this initiative for our investor audience?
HB: We have done several 43-101 mineral resource estimates. The River Valley Project is one of the largest, primary palladium projects in North America. According to a PEA that we completed in 2019 about 63.5% of our payable metals are palladium, Dave. In the mineral resource statement, we just put out about 2.3 million ounces palladium + platinum + gold are measured and indicated and 1.6 million are inferred. It is a multimillion-ounce resource with lots of exploration upside still.
SH: You’ve recently announced signing a binding agreement with a major Australian lithium producer. This may be news to many investors. Can you unpack the benefits of it?
HB: Now what makes us unique is that we have two green metal divisions, the Platinum Group Metal division, and the Lithium division. The Lithium division consists of seven properties in Manitoba. Actually, we are working on expanding our land position right now, New Age Metals is one of the largest groups in terms of projects in the Winnipeg River pegmatite field. Virtually all of our properties are road accessible anywhere from about 130 to 160 kilometers Northwest of Winnipeg. In terms of the agreement, first of all, the company that we are dealing with, Mineral Resources Ltd is about a AUS $9 billion market cap. They are a very large iron producer, but they are the fifth largest lithium producer in the world. This is the first time they have come to Canada to do a deal. We are very excited about dealing with them.
Our agreement basically allows us to have $4 million spent, for them to earn 51% on the ground over the next 42 months and we would get $400,000 over and above that for cash payments. We are also the field operator or essentially a manager of the project and we will get a fee for doing that too. Quite excited to have a big company like that with lots of expertise and a company that is looking to not only find new projects but get them to production here in Canada. Both Canada and the US, I think, are two countries that need a lot of new development exploration but more importantly, production of lithium with the onslaught of all the big car companies in the world stating that there that we would be in the electric car business here in the next few years.
SH: For company shareholders and potential investors, what kind of future development and progress can we expect at your Manitoba lithium projects now that drilling has commenced?
HB: Of our seven projects, we did do close to $300,000 of geophysics this spring and summer and that has given us quite a few new areas to go out and check in terms of boots on the ground for the new anomalies that we are looking at. All of our seven projects, three of them are drill ready. We have started drilling on what we call our Lithium Two project. There was an announcement this week. We have mentioned that we are going to be going already in October. That is about a 1500-meter program. It could be more depending on our results and it should be interesting because it had been drilled, but not since the late 1940s, if you can believe that. It is a long time. It had a non 43-101 resource on it at a decent grade. We are expecting to get back into that property and find some of the old results and hopefully, based on the geophysics and some boots on the ground, that we have been out there twice doing some surface work, finding some new areas on what we call Lithium Two.
SH: The Company looks set for strong growth in 2022. How are you placed to expand operations to meet this demand?
HB: Well, our River Valley project, has an ongoing pre-feasibility study on it, it is fully funded, Dave, for about $4 million and we hope to have that study complete by the end of June next year. We have got four engineering and geological/geotechnical companies and an environmental company now helping us build this report. We are out in the field, helping them get through everything from geotechnical drilling, we have a big metallurgical program ongoing right now and all the materials that is SGS. We have environmental studies that are being updated as we speak and every three weeks we meet and go through our objectives and keep the project moving forward. On a weekly basis, we have our people on the field helping the different groups, do whatever they have to do to get this study done. That is going to be a major milestone for the company and that will be coming up, as I said, at the end of June next year.
Hopefully based on that and the new mineral resource we have just done, then we will recommend a feasibility study and then that, we hope to be able to finish within about two years at the end of June coming up here. Over and above that project still has a lot of exploration upside. We haven't put as much money this year into the exploration as we like to but we have done some trenching. We have already drilled four holes of what we hope will be up to 5,000 meters of exploration drilling and we are certainly doing some other things besides a pre-feasibility study but that is the study and the major work that is going to be done there the next few months.
SH: What separates New Age Metals from the competition and makes your business model unique?
HB: I think what makes us very unique is we have both a platinum group metal division and a lithium division. You can certainly check and there are very few companies in the world have those two divisions together in one company. I think that makes us very unique. We have a stated objective on our lithium division to bring in a big partner. We have just done that. We are quite excited about that. We do also have a hundred percent owned, road accessible platinum group metal and base metal property in Alaska. We have been funding it ourselves to date, but we want to bring in a partner too. We have been held back by COVID in terms of last year, you couldn't even get anyone to visit, and it wasn't until about mid year that people didn't have to go into a hotel room for a couple of weeks before they visited the property. We spent about a hundred thousand dollars on our Alaska property we call ‘Genesis’ again, it is all road accessible, at some very good grades on surface and some of the testing and those results will come out in about 60 days, if we can get our assays through the labs. Everything is backed up, as you know.
SH: What’s the long-term strategy for the company moving into 2022 and beyond, and what should retail and institutional investors be looking out for?
HB: I think developing the River Valley PGM deposit, look for the pre-feasibility study and what that states and watch for us moving on to the feasibility study. There are only a handful of projects and I mean a small handful, like under five projects/companies like us, in PGMs in North America. It is an excellent place to have a platinum group metals and again, the primary metal we have here is palladium. It is trading at over $2,000 an ounce. It has been ahead of the price of gold for over two years now. We do have Rhodium in the project, it is trading as high as $13,000 an ounce and it has got platinum, over a million ounces of platinum, and it has got copper and some cobalt. There are some green metals in that project. It has some nickel too.
Watch for the development of River Valley, that is our main thrust. We are quite excited about the lithium division. This will be the first year we drill one of the projects, and we have had properties since 2016 and we have a partner who is well funded and has a lot of knowledge of lithium production, the fifth largest company of their kind in the world. Quite excited to get that division going and eventually we would like to get Alaska moving forward too and our Genesis property, lots of things happening and lots of news coming up.
SH: Can you tell our audience a little bit about your corporate management and board teams, along with the experience and innovative ideas they bring to the green metals and PGM space?
HB: One thing I like to mention is that in August, we got shareholder approval for Mr. Eric Sprott, who is probably the best investor in this industry and has a lot of money in the space, to go over 20% of the company, Dave. He now has about 23.5%. We are very happy to have Mr. Sprott invested to the amount of stock that he does own in the company, and certainly can help us going forward in many ways. In terms of our board, I am very proud to have everyone on the board there, everyone outside of myself are either geologists or engineers and veterans, but I will mention a couple of fellows. Colin Bird is the head chairman of Jubilee Platinum. That is a producer in South Africa. So we have got him and his team's experience on our board. Just as importantly, we have a gentleman called Ron Hieber and Ron spent his whole career and ended as the head of worldwide exploration for Anglo Platinum. They're the biggest platinum producers in world.
Those are just two of the people that we have on the board. Then to go into a day-to-day basis - we have Dr. Bill Stone, who's a well-known Canadian geologist, who is a specialist in PGMs and nickel. We have got Carey Galeschuk who is a well-known lithium and rare earth metal person. We have just hired a company called Axiom, which is a very good size geological company based out of Saskatchewan and they are helping us. In Alaska, we use Curt Freeman, who I always say, is the Wayne Gretzky of mineral expiration of Alaska. He is the best-known consultant in the state. I can go on; I have a lot more people involved on a day-to-day basis that are all veteran people. I'm very proud of the team are working.
SH: And finally, Harry, if there’s anything I’ve overlooked please feel free to elaborate.
HB: I think you have asked all the right questions for the most part. I mean, the only thing I would like to state is that with the ounces in the ground and the gross amount of metal compared to our very tiny market cap - I think if you're looking at investing in say 10 companies, which I probably have 50, but I often tell people if you are going to get into the industry invest in 5 or 10, that this should be one of the companies you take a serious look at based on the fact of our management team, the dollars we have in the treasury going forward and the stages of development our projects are at.
For regular updates, visit
newagemetals.com.
FULL DISCLOSURE: This is a paid article produced by Stockhouse Publishing.