Great Western Mining Corporation Plc (LON:GWMO) Executive Chairman Brian Hall caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss the start of drilling at West Huntoon and Rhyolite Dome, copper and gold prospects in Nevada, and work on tungsten targets.
Q1: Brian, with drilling about to begin at the West Huntoon porphyry prospect, how do you see this project positioning Great Western Mining to capitalise on the growing strategic importance and demand for critical minerals?
A1: Well, I think our timing is good because the whole EV revolution is going to create a demand for copper, which outstrips anything that’s happened in the past. In addition, copper has become a critical metal in the US, where of course we operate, so that’s pretty much the perfect place to be.
This critical metal thing is something which keeps changing with the politics, in fact, the politics are confusing for all of us. I think that the reality is that we have, I believe, a very good copper asset with a lot of potential. The politics seem to be moving in our favour, so we are in a good position actually to extract more value from it than we would in different circumstances.
Just to add to the copper story, an interesting development in the last few days, which may or may not happen, but press reports say that the town of Hawthorne, which is where we are based, has been chosen as the home for a strategic metals reserve for the United States, which of course affects us because copper is a strategic metal, and we couldn’t be much closer than Hawthorne. We must be the closest copper prospect to the US government’s strategic copper reserve, which is a really interesting situation.
We’ll see how that plays out, these things don’t always work out as you think and things change very rapidly in politics at the moment.
Q2: Now, the Rhyolite Dome prospect has never been drilled, despite its proximity to the Omco mine. What makes this target particularly exciting compared to other gold prospects in Nevada?
A2: Well, of course, we’re moving here from copper to gold. Rhyolite Dome is at the meeting point of two trends, which is really interesting. It has all the features for a classic epithermal deposit, so we’re looking forward to drilling this, we have drilled around it and close to it, but we have never drilled this dome before. I can’t exactly tell you why. I think in our previous drilling, we’ve tended to stay closer to the Omco mine.
To give you an idea of the scope of this concession, we have about 800 acres of claims there. The Rhyolite Dome sits in the far south, the other prospects, which we’ve drilled, and which have produced gold in the past, are a little farther away. To us, this has always been something that we should address, and we’re now doing it and with a high gold price, we think this is the perfect moment to try it.
Now, we’ve just shot an IP survey, so we’ve done some geophysics, we finished that in August and we expect to have the rig on site there in about a month’s time. So, everything is going fine, and we’re really looking forward to seeing if we can develop something exciting out of Rhyolite Dome.
Q3: Now, you’ve expanded your footprint with claims at Yellow Peak and are analysing historical data. How does this kind of strategic ground staking in use of legacy exploration data accelerate value creation for shareholders?
A3: This is all part of a disciplined approach to exploration, which we’ve been taking to try and develop a proper copper prospect around the Huntoon Valley.
Think of the Huntoon Valley as an inverted U-shape. On the top right-hand side, we have a copper resource we’ve already established and on the other side of the valley, at West Huntoon, we have all the makings of a copper porphyry system, which we’re going to drill this season.
To the north is an area called Yellow Peak, which has been drilled before by others and spent quite a lot of money up there. We staked these claims back at the beginning of this year, we’ve done some soil sample work, and we’ve also been able to analyse core from previous drilling operations.
What we think we’re seeing is a continuation of a prospect which begins at West Huntoon, and to revert to my inverted U, we’re trying to join all the dots on this and Yellow Peak is one of the ingredients in this. This lies at the top of the U, on the right-hand side, we have the M2 resource, which we’ve drilled and on the left-hand side, we have the West Huntoon.
So, it’s all part of a picture which we’re trying to build to create a copper story on a large scale.
Q4: Finally, you recently completed soil sampling at the Defender Pine Crow Tungsten prospect. Tungsten doesn’t always get as much attention as gold or copper so why is this work important? How does tungsten fit into Great Western Mining’s broader strategy?
A4: Tungsten, like copper, is a critical mineral. In fact, it’s already been designated a critical mineral by the US government, it has defence implications as well as industrial implications.
One of the interesting pieces of tungsten is that roughly 90% of the world’s tungsten at the moment is produced in China so there are opportunities for other countries and other areas to develop tungsten and to replace Chinese production in this complicated world we live in.
The Defender and Pine Crow mines both produced tungsten in World War II. They’re fairly shallow workings; they’re about 1200 metres apart. What we’ve done is we’ve done a lot of work around the two and we are in the process of trying to join up the two workings to create one larger tungsten working. We think this is something we can do and we’re soon going to get some soil sample results from a lab in Reno, which we’ll announce.
The interesting thing to us is that tungsten has become strategically important in the United States and everywhere else, so it fits into us as an exploration company looking for materials with value. We can see there’s a future for tungsten if we can take this to the next stage.
We’re at an early stage with the tungsten so far. Geologically, it relates to our M2 copper resources, it’s very close to it, up to the northeast of that inverted U I keep talking about. So, it’s a logical development for us and it’s a material that’s in demand, it’s as simple as that.
