Verbatim: Banyan Gold | AMEX Exploration | Western Copper & Gold

Excerpts here from 1-on-1's 
at Beaver Creek Precious Metals Summit: 
Banyan Gold BYN & AMEX Exploration AMX.
Latest: Western Copper & Gold WRN. Below.

Also below: Valaurum's Aurum-gold construct. 
Plus: a 'webinar' purveyor, Adelaide Capital,
whose YouTube approach stands out. -- Thom

This is a crushing week for dollar-linked commodities. Gold‘s live futures contract today-Wednesday is at $1,890, its worst since March 2023.

[Copper is faring a bit better. Uranium‘s historic gains are leveling.]

So:

Banyan Gold BYN BYAGF: Tara Christie‘s Yukon gold explorer-developer holds about $9 million of cash. That is the first thing she tagged in our discussion.

“It’s a chess game,” the geo-CEO says. “No one right now (among explorers) is getting value for their assays except Snowline Gold SGD,” ALSO YUKON.

Those who have endured three or four down-up-down cycles for commodities and their cash-needy developers, explorers and sometimes, producers, realize that cash in the corporate treasury right now, when capital markets for small companies appear strained, prevents disastrous, subterranean share placements = shareholders washed out, diluted.

The now-available Beaver Creek "webcasts," 
the compelling ones, and the Denver Gold Forum exec-verbatims 
the following week, are a time-saving boon 
for all investors who want a look-see 
at the execs and their high and low points. 

They are real-time compendium briefings of oral material.
See here please. And here.

[Neither Precious Metals Summit nor Denver Gold Forum (DGG) 
nor any other trade group compensates me  
or The Calandra Report/TCR.]

TCRs, I will not go through the blow-by-blow of Banyan’s AurMac and Hyland digs. All told, Banyan has built a 6.2 million ounce resource (avg. grade 0.6 grams gold) with a LOT OF EXPLORATION SPENDING.

Two takeaways — and please, seek out her Summit webcast here:

1. Banyan’s local mining district, gold and silver (and larger Tombstone Belt), has among others her husband’s growing producer, Eagle Gold Mine (Victoria Gold VGCX, a Banyan investor); and Hecla’s former Alexco spread. Plenty of power lines and roads; plenty of labor; plenty of provincial and native peoples’ backing. (Although electricity sources for booming Yukon at some point will have to take a hard look at nuclear and other methods. — See our uranium coverage please.)
2. A few persistent sellers of the stock might be concerned that Tara’s team have yet to find the “intrusion” of gold that will turn on the Broadway lights just as Snowline Gold to the east has shown with its consistent showings of 2-gram gold over lengthy intercepts. Tara’s response: “Have we found our intrusion? We have 6 million ounces.” At any rate, I own the shares and have for some time, profitably.
   BYN market cap: sub-$100 million. I have been to AurMac three times.

AMEX Exploration AMX AMXEF: Québec’s northern Abitibi Gold Belt. Another explorer spending LOTS OF CASH ($2 million CAD monthly) drilling what look to me to be superior results.

One thing that Victor Cantore and Kelly Malcolm, CEO and VP of exploration, respectively, told me that I did not realize is that the pesky wildfires in that part of Québec, aside from shuttering camp for 7 weeks, have “paved” the way for provincial government to clear-cut swaths of forest at Perron Gold Project.

“It’s a silver, a gold lining,” Kelly says. New roads and clear-cut spruce and pine that were damaged now mean AMEX’s team, drillers and all, can drive in instead of choppering in.

Here is somthing else that interests me. A newbie to AMEX, Stephen Coates, spent three years at Québec’s Canadian Malartic, the second or third largest gold mine in Canada. Stephen is a mining engineer, and he and three others will toil at project development: resource estimation, mine permitting and project construction.

That means that AMEX finally will see a compliant gold resource, maybe in the next 5 months. When I first invested in Victor’s AMEX, the stock landed me in the green; that was 4 years ago or more. I was fortunate to sell all of it at a profit. Like most explorer shares, the stock is down, down, down from its $3 highs yet still sports a $117 million market value.

As with Banyan above, and in Québec, a few others in my The Calandra Report/TCR roster, (Azimut Exploration AZM for one), cash, some $12 MILLION, places BYN above the fear-of-washout fray.

One more point. (Yes, BYN BYAGF is on my short-list to re-enter, given the year-end tax selling that likely will  cheapen shares of many cash-depleted small miner-explorer-developers.)

Stephen and Kelly and Victor at the 1-on-1 say a plan to go into production could compel a larger buyer among the dozen or so producing mines, working mills and exploration properties that are chock-a-block in the Abitibi. AMEX is right next to the old industrial metals mining town of Normetal.

If a buyer emerges, the actual mine plans will allow for flexibility: part underground to exploit two veins sandwiched in hanging walls; or open pit; or ..?

If no buyer emerges, of course, AMEX must get a rousing reaction for its economic engineering report (PEA) that is expected early next year, with or after the resource statement. That will mean banks, debt, more equity. We’ll see.

(TCRs, I owe us still: 1-1 outtakes, albeit brief, 
from Radisson Mining; Western Copper & Gold. See below.**)

Valaurum: This is one of two privates we own here at home. Adam Trexler makes Aurum — gold-backed, small-denomination bank notes. probably 7 years or more of ownership. Adam, well versed as a gold social scientist with a U.K. doctorate from University of London. Adam knows, and has written treatises, discussing money’s ‘natural’ evolution beyond fiat and into tangible assets such as precious metals, real estate, agriculture and so on. 

“The currency system is broken,” he says here — a solid webcast. Gold believers that we here at TCR are know this. Here is “the next historical moment” regarding governments and paper currencies. See webcast please. 

Adelaide Capital: TCRs, hundreds of webinar presenters emerged from nowhere the past 4 years, If you are swamped with s-p-a-m and other webinar come-ons from webcast organizers, raise your hand or just scream, STOP! FERMARE! ARRÊT! NO MAS!

ADELAIDE CAPITAL is a top one in my limited attention span for the video material out there. It is easy to use what with the Youtube Channel, no span and no constant come-ons. No, the Adelaide team does not pay me for saying this.

I like that Deb Honig and her Adelaide team welcome fund-raisers that are relevant and genuine.

The main thing is that the vid-presentations provide decent context for investors. A few of them tend to be too long; I am a 25-minute consumer these days.

They are, like the Beaver Creek and Denver Gold Group “live” webcasts, a solid compendium of exec-verbatim.

WESTERN COPPER & GOLD WRN: I believe, after discussing with CEO-metallurgist Paul West-Sells (probably our sixth meeting over 5 years), that WRN’s Casino copper-gold project in Yukon eventually will get dealt. Its large-scale, weathered porphyrys will go to a copper miner. Or an accumulator of copper reserves.

Casino: 1.22 billion metric tons of ore at 0.4% a ton copper-equivalent. Not a vast asset, nor spectacular grades, yet this is a porphyry with just enough to tack onto an  international miner’s holdings. I believe, 7.6 billion pounds of copper and almost 15 million ounces of gold — both measured and indicated categories. The gold helps.

Rio Tinto owns 8% and Mitsubishi approx. 5% of WRN.

Not vast but in the world of junior developers, Casino could be the 5th or 4th largest :undeveloped copper project — that is, owned by a junior. That means opportunity for an acquirer.

Yes, the capital required is a BIG number. Some $4.3 billion of sustaining capital with initial cap-ex of $3.6 billion. The payback time at current commodity prices will come in at less than 3 years, if everything fits to a tee in the banker projections.

Yes, roads; potential port at Skagway, Alaska, for shipping concentrate to Asia; gas-turbine generators and LNG fuel (albeit power is getting expensive up there) — they are all there. See the deck please.

The “hair” here, according to an as-usual entirely candid Paul West-Sells, includes meeting environmental guidelines that will take time. Also, the fact that Skagway makes money primarily as a cruise-ship terminal and not as a shipping port. “Having commodities shipping of this type will be a good supplement in off-season periods,” he says. (Let’s see what Skagway has to say about that.)

Plus, power up north increasingly is problematic for the rapidly rising Yukon population. Yukon likely will connect its grid with that of British Columbia — that is one view.

At any rate, the Rio Tinto and Mitsubishi “sharing” pacts that expire in November will be worth watching. Essentially, those two are allowed “in the tent” to cooperate, assist, and sometimes agree and sometimes not, with WRN’s technical strategies, among other things.

If the two equity owners decide to close out the arrangement, well, Paul is not tipping his hand or those of his board (Tara Christie of Banyan sits on it).

The way he looks at it: “Our goal is for Rio to buy the asset. Yes, having them in the tent is helpful. (But) why do you need to buy the cow when you can get the milk? It works both ways.”

I used to own WRN shares and made money. Paul has been at this for more than a decade.

The Calandra Report/TCR subscribers: 
earlier rough notes, direct quotes 
via Beaver Creek Precious Metals Summit.
Earlier TCR caches here. And here please. 

See also: BEAVER CREEK’S Executive verbatim Part I here please

— Thom Calandra