Interview with Mark Trevisiol, president, CEO, and chair of McFarlane Lake Mining (USOTC:MLMLF) (CSE:MLM).
Ricki: Hello, I’m Ricki Lee and this is The Capital Compass. Today we are looking at McFarlane Lake Mining.
The Canadian gold exploration company is advancing one of Ontario’s largest undeveloped gold projects, the Juby Gold Project in Abitibi Greenstone Belt near Gowganda, Ontario with strong infrastructure, a large land position, and a pipeline of a hundred percent owned Ontario assets.
McFarlane is now advancing drilling and technical studies as it moves Juby toward potential development. Joining me to walk us through the latest updates is Mark Trevisiol, president, CEO, and chair of McFarlane Lake Mining. Mark, welcome to the Capital Compass.
Mark: Thank you, Ricki. It’s a pleasure to share our story with you today.
Ricki: It’s a pleasure to have you with us, Mark. But for the viewers who are new to McFarlane Lake Mining, can you start us with a quick introduction to the company and the significance of the Juby Gold Project within the Abitibi Greenstone Belt?
Mark: Sure. Well, McFarlane is a publicly traded company. We trade on the Canadian Securities Exchange under the symbol MLM. We also trade on the over-the-counter exchange in the United States under the similar MLML.
We’ve just recently acquired the Juby Gold Project from Aris Mining. We closed the acquisition the end of September and paid 22 million US in cash and securities for it. The significance of this property is, it is one of significant size.
We’ve already identified over 4 million ounces of gold on it, and it’s got a huge potential to grow, and it’s in, as you say, the Abitibi Greenstone Belt, which over the last 150 years has produced over 200 million ounces of coal. So we’re in the right place.
Ricki: Nice. And you recently also announced a new NI 43-101 Mineral Resource estimate for Juby. So what does this updated resource tell you about the scale and potential of the Gold system?
Mark: Yeah, it really highlights a number of things on the gold system there. Number one at $2,500 gold, we’ve got about 4.2 million ounces of gold between inferred and indicated resource, and it’s running between 0.9 grams per ton and one gram per ton.
It also really highlighted with the geological modeling that we did as part of the resource estimate, it highlighted several key high-grade zones, and three of them are very close to surface. Why is that an advantage?
It provides us the opportunity to potentially extract very high value ore, and generate cash flow early on in the project.
There’s a number of things that have to get done before we actually start shipping ore, but the ore is in the right place, you want it near surface, that’s exactly where you’re going to get it, and we’re going to be able to take advantage of that as well in the report it also highlights the potential expansion of the resource, and we are going to capitalize on those findings.
And in fact, we’re very near to issue a contract for about 10 to 15,000 meters of drilling, which we believe is going to add another million ounces of gold to the overall resource.
Ricki: Wow, that’s a lot of gold, Mark. But there are a lot of gold developers operating in Ontario and across Canada. So what differentiates McFarlane from other property developers in the gold exploration space?
Mark: Well, number one, as I mentioned, we’re kind of in elephant country. There’s lots of gold that’s been found there, lots of gold that has been produced out of there. So that’s one positive. The other big positive is that we’re near infrastructure.
We have provincial Highway that actually traverses the northern part of our claims. So we have access to road systems, and then we have a 500 kilovolt power line that actually crosses the western part of our claim system.
So we have the electricity, we have the power to be able to develop the site. And not all mining properties have those virtues. I mean, a lot of times you’re in the middle nowhere and you’ve got to build all that stuff.
So we’re going to leverage that as we develop the property. And the other big thing is that being in mining country, you have access to skills. You have people who have been trained as miners, you have people who have been trained as mill operators.
And we’re in the vicinity within an hour’s drive of a lot of these skill sets. So there’s a lot of pluses to where the property is positioned, and of course, the property itself.
Ricki: Amazing. And as we mentioned earlier as well, Juby is often highlighted as one of Ontario’s largest undeveloped gold projects located in a region with strong infrastructure and existing mining activity, as you just alluded to there. So how does that support your long-term development strategy?
Mark: Well, yeah, I mean, we’re taking advantage of that right now. For example where the drilling that’s being done is being done by a drilling company that is an hour and a half away from site. So they have the people close to site.
And, you know, we are looking at potentially shipping ore to generate cash. There’s over 11 mills within the vicinity processing facilities within 150 kilometers that could potentially take this.
I’m not saying they’re all lining up to do that, but that gives us optionality in terms of generating early cash flow. And then as I touched on although Juby is probably the premier property in that district, there’s gold around us.
And Juby could be the champion to make it a real district play and consolidate the camp. And that becomes attractive to some of the more strategic investors in the gold business.
Ricki: Great. So you mentioned a, a purchase earlier, but you’ve also completed the sale of the High Lake and West Hook, lake properties and closed the final tranche of a $9.34 million equity financing. So how do these transactions support the next phase of work at Juby?
Mark: Yeah, and we’re pretty proud of having those transactions behind us and, and obviously the cash in the bank right now it really helps support the kind of development that needs to be done over the next 12 to 18 months to get to where we want to be.
Between drilling environmental baseline studies and scoping studies. It gives us the presence within the business to conduct this work without having to worry about where’s the money going to come from to pay for it all.
So we’re pretty healthy there. And I think that selling those properties was a key part of getting our balance sheet really nice and healthy.
Ricki: So we’ve spoken a lot now about the kind of future looking ahead, but what should investors be watching out for, specifically as you advance drilling, expand the resource and continue technical studies at Juby?
Mark: Well, we’ll be announcing assays in our drilling results. We expect those to be coming very shortly. Part of the program is actually sampling some of the drill core that was done historically, that we’ve identified over 10,000 meters of drill core that wasn’t sampled.
It was drilled in a different era, different price regime, different reasons for not sampling this ore, so that’s going to be an opportunity for, so those assays are going to be coming out, there’s going to be drilling assays coming out will be commencing environmental studies, engaging the First Nations all along with these efforts.
So those are the key value add and of course adding resources, adding gold resources. Once we get all the drilling done, we’ll update a technical report.
And if we hit anywhere near our target based on the comparables that are in the market, we should add $40 to $50 million to our market cap.
Ricki: Well, thank you so much, Mark. You’ve given us a goldmine of information, if you will and I’m sure our investors will love to hear it. So thank you again.
Mark: Thank you, Ricki, for having me on the show today.
Ricki: So one more time. That was Mark Trevisiol, CEO, and president of McFarlane Lake Mining. For more information, you can visit McFarlanelakemining.com. I’m Ricky Lee, and this has been the Capital Compass. Thank you for watching, and I’ll see you next time.
This article is disseminated in partnership with McFarlane Lake Mining (USOTC:MLMLF) (CSE:MLM). It is intended to inform investors and should not be taken as a recommendation or financial advice.
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