Fireside chat

Dec 12, 2024

Welcome to those tuning in to Assay TV, where today I'm delighted to be joined by Bryan Hall, the Executive Chairman of Great Western Mining. Welcome, Bryan. Hi, Katie. Thank you very much for having us on, and great to be with you. You are quite new to the Assay TV. I don't believe we've done an interview before. Can you give us a bit of background to Great Western Mining? Yeah, sure. Great Western's been around quite a long time. We are based entirely in the Walker Lane belt of Nevada, where we have copper, gold, and silver projects. We have about 60 sq km of land. We have an existing resource of copper which we established about three or four, five years ago now. Not enormous, but it's a resource. Since then, we've done a lot more work on it, and so we're building the copper story. We have some interesting gold and silver intercepts and lots of prospects, some of which we've drilled successfully. We also have a mill, which has been a long time coming, but which is close to starting trial production, which will produce gold and silver concentrates from mining waste, which is a first for us and rather unusual for a small exploration company. Excellent. Well, we definitely will get into that in a moment. Before we do get into the nitty-gritty of your projects, can you just share some of the expertise you have on board there? Yeah, sure. We're a small team. We have a geologist called Dr James Blight, did his PhD on the copper porphyries in Mongolia. He's an experienced person. He's probably 20 years into the industry now. Excellent guy, and he heads our exploration efforts. We have Max Williams, who is our Finance Director, and I've been working with him now for many years in other companies, and a really experienced and top person. The other member of the team is Robert O'Connell, who is one of the founders of the company, who's our Operations Director, and Robert staked the original claims. He is the man that knows Nevada. He's a trained driller, and so he's the operations side of the business. Okay. Moving on, let's look at your projects. Great Western has a number of claims on each side of the N.S. Huntoon Valley, which you collectively call the Huntoon Copper Project. That's right. Can you tell us what's happening there? Yeah, sure. Now, this is our copper story. Not the only story, but our copper story centers around the Huntoon Valley. The Huntoon Valley is a huge open space where nobody lives at all. People ask, "Why has nobody found anything there before?" And the answer is, well, it's just a very remote place. Even the next valley only had one person living in there, and he recently died. So you get from one uninhabited valley to the next. So this is really not remote in terms of infrastructure because it's America and you have highways and so forth not very far away. But in terms of people living there's no population. Now, we started drilling for copper back in about 2017, '18. We drilled on the northeast side of the valley in an area we call Black Mountain, and the prospect is called M2. We drilled about 5,000 ft of hole up there, and we established a resource, an Inferred Resource of around 19,000 tons of contained copper. It's not enormous, not big enough to be commercial, but we established it. The point there is that we really stopped drilling it because we couldn't go on drilling forever. We didn't reach any closing points. It's open in three directions. This is still more to be drilled. This is interesting. The grades were quite good, 0.45% of copper, which is reasonable. We then didn't do much on that for a while because at that stage, the price of copper was very low and nobody seemed very interested in copper. We had lots of gold and silver prospects. We then went chasing some gold and silver in about 2019, which was roughly when I started running the company. We've done quite a lot of gold and silver drilling. We've had reasonable success on that. We're quite pleased with that. Also we identified that we had a huge amount of mining waste, which we thought we really can do something with this. We went off to concentrate on actually producing some precious metals from this mining waste. We've only really come back to copper recently in the last two years. In 2023, James, who recently joined us, took a much harder look at what we had in the Huntoon Valley. He went to the other side of the valley to West Huntoon, where we drilled one hole, and he looked at that, and then he did an extensive soil sampling exercise. In 2023, he concluded that we were likely to have the makings of a copper porphyry because he'd found an outcrop of granite which had never previously been identified. The U.S. Geological Survey had it down as something completely different, and it was wrong. It was actually a large granite outcrop. At that stage, we brought in an expert, Dr Laurence Carter, who was associated with the Camborne School of Mines and is well-known for porphyry work, and we brought him in for a week, and he looked at the area, and he came back and said, "You have the setting for a copper porphyry here," which of course changed everything. Now, if I can put this in the context of the resource we already have. If you put a pin in the center of the Huntoon Valley and did a radius of six kilometers all the way around, the M2 copper resource we already have is on the northeast fringe of that. The potential copper porphyry, the other side of the valley at West Huntoon is about six kilometers in the other direction. And in that general area, we now have five indications of a copper porphyry, and the original discovery, the original resource looks like a scar on the edge of this. So we're looking at a classic porphyry setting. Now, there's lots of work to do. It's drill-ready at the moment. We're a tiny company. We don't have the resources to drill it on a big scale. What we're looking at is outcrops of granite, which look like a copper porphyry, and there's a lot covered by Tertiary cover and so forth, which we don't see. That needs to be drilling. We have a drill-ready program which is ready to go whenever we're in a position to drill it. It's very exciting. It's potentially a large, new copper mine. It may not happen, of course. It's not guaranteed until you've actually drilled it, but it really does look very promising, and we're busy showing it to other companies, bigger companies, to see if we can attract partners to come in and realize its potential. That's our most exciting story at the moment, and we're really very fired up about it, and we're working on it all the time. It's a great time to be a copper miner, particularly at the moment, of course. Your copper story also extends to your Eastside copper prospect, and whilst it isn't the main focus at the moment, it's still pretty interesting as you've entered a pooling agreement with Bronco Creek Exploration. Well, this is a completely separate prospect. It's about 11 km away from that circle I described just now, down to the southeast. Eastside is a prospect which had been drilled by various people in the past. Conoco of all people, oil company, drilled it in the 1970s, but they didn't drill it very deep. We shot an IP survey over it about two years ago, and we thought there were some very nice prospects here. We haven't frankly done much more about it because we can't be everywhere. We're a very small team. Bronco Creek approached us because they now have stake claims all around us, in fact, not all around us, but on two or three sides of us. They like the area. They see it as a potential copper porphyry. They're part of EMX Royalty Corporation, which is quite a big player. They joined us and said, "Listen, why don't we just form a pooling agreement for this and we will try and market it to a bigger company." This is much less advanced in terms of work than the Huntoon Valley, but it's very interesting. What appeals to us about this is that we have another company working with us because we've been very much a lone voice in the wilderness out in the Huntoon Valley. We're small, we're from across the Atlantic, we're all on our own. Whereas with the Eastside Mine, we've got a partner with some more resources and better contacts and a better Rolodex than us, frankly. We're hoping they'll take that forward. It's at a less advanced stage than the Huntoon prospect, which is our main focus of operational concentration. Excellent. You did mention in your introduction, for a small company, it's actually very interesting you have the Western Mill project in Nevada. Yeah. It is for the purpose of production of precious metals and concentrates. How close are we there to production? This is the key question which everyone's been asking. This project is a little bit late. Let me tell you how it works. We have considerable volumes of tailings, stockpiles. We have lots of concessions where there's been mining going back to the late 19th century. All over the place, we have these stockpiles of material and so forth. Particularly, we have one tailings heap, which is recorded independently as being 40,000 tons. We think it's actually quite a lot more than that. If you look at it physically on the ground, you can see more of it. That has that potential to produce several million dollars worth of gold and silver from processing it. We formed a joint venture with a local contractor who has an old mill site. He has water rights. He has land. He also has a big inventory of material. He's a collector of material from mines that have moved on. He has a huge inventory of material, pretty much everything we need. We, on a very low cost, low scale basis, have built a new mill for processing gold and silver, really from our tailings and waste heaps, but also from some he has, and also there are plenty of other people in the area who have nothing to do, no place to put these, which we hope to be able to service on their behalf in one form or another. Now, it's taken a little while. It's actually only two years since we signed the original joint venture agreement, so it's not that long by project standards. It took us about 18 months to get a permit to do a gravity survey, which was longer than we anticipated, longer than we told our shareholders, because basically we told them what we had been told and which we believed to be the case. It's all taken longer, and now having got the permits, it's been fairly slow getting it to the stage of getting to trial production. There are all sorts of limiting things, but you have to remember that we're doing this very much on the cheap. We haven't brought in some big firm to do it. Well, no doubt we could have been doing this a long time ago, but it would have cost 10 times as much money. We're doing this on very small rations indeed, shareholders' money, and so we're very careful with that. It's due to start trial production in the next few weeks. We're hoping it's going to be producing this month. This is what we have told our shareholders that we expect first pilot production this month. It will start small and build up, but it has the potential to turn into something really quite a lot bigger over time. We need to learn how to do it, need how to learn to get the results from it, and this is all taking time and causing a lot of frustration with our patient shareholders, causing frustration with me as well because I'm also a shareholder. We are getting there. The key thing is to stay with it and get it done. We're not very far from getting this thing up and running. It's going to be exciting. It's unusual for a small mining company to have this sort of project and actually produce some gold and silver, which will be exciting. It's certainly mining. If one thing it does, it takes time. It's no surprise there. Oh, yes. That's right. Okay, just looking at the broader picture now as we're rounding up this interview. You're operating in Nevada. You're obviously very proud to do so. What is the upside to working in that jurisdiction? You did mention there's no one around. That's always an upside. What else is there? That's an upside and a downside, of course, because when there's no one around, it's actually quite hard to get people to do things. Give work. The initial upside of working in Nevada is, well, one, it's the United States, which is a lot easier than some parts of the world. Two, it's Nevada, which is very welcoming to the mining community. A few miles away in California, it would not be the case. Nevada is a miner-friendly area, and that's really a key thing. We can get most things we want in Nevada. It's not as if we were in Houston, Texas, with everything totally available. It's still a remote area, so things take time. Basically, everything we need is there as long as you're prepared to wait. The beauty of the Walker Lane belt is that in a way it's been eclipsed by the Carlin Trend for gold over the years, which is obviously so much bigger. The Walker Lane is an area that has minerals jumping out at you all over the place. We're looking at tungsten possibilities at the moment, which will be very interesting. There's a whole array of minerals you can work with. James, our Chief Geologist, after his first trip, said, "I've never been to an area where minerals jump out at you all over the place." It is extraordinary that we operate in a place called Mineral County, and they've really named it well because Mineral County has a population of about 4,000 people, and it's about as big as Norfolk and Suffolk, and it's just incredible for minerals. People have been mining it for a long time. Modern technology can improve techniques and so forth, and it's just a great place to be. We have no plans to be anywhere else. We are not about to depart into Africa or Asia or somewhere else. We're very happy. We have 60 square kilometers of ground, which is a lot for a small company, a lot to work on. We've got plenty to do. We're very happy to be in Nevada, great place. Excellent. Well, finally, to round things up, our investors quite like a summary of some of the major upcoming milestones. Obviously, you've got lots going on. Yeah To highlight? We're trying to get the mill up and running as soon as we can now. It really is in the final stages for phase one. So that's the first thing. We are very keen to find a partner or a project-level investor to come into the Huntoon Valley. We're a small cap company. We can't raise the sort of money we need through our existing retail shareholder base. It's quite unreasonable to expect that. We need to find a third party. We don't mind. We have 100% of it at the moment. I would rather have a serious percentage of something than 100% of nothing. So we really need a partner to come in. We will dilute interest in the project when we do, but we will keep what we hope would be a big interest for a small company. So, those are our two main things. We also hope, of course, that we can move forward on the Eastside Mine with Bronco Creek. They're a very active company, and I expect they will be moving that forward fairly quickly now. Of course, we've still got to build the silver prospects. We would be drilling them now if we had more people and more money, frankly. We have lots of prospects to drill and lots of prospects to farm out to interested parties. We have a lot going on. In spite of a fairly dire market at the moment, we're very pleased with the prospects we have and the way it's all going. Wonderful. Well, it certainly sounds like Great Western has a unique story to it, I do have to say. It's very interesting, and we can't wait to hear more in the coming months. Thank you so much for spending some time with us today. Katie, thank you so much for your time. Thank you.