Lahontan Gold has started drilling recently at the Santa Fe mine. What are some of the early results that you’ve had so far? How does this support your overall exploration goals?
We did a small drill programme in late summer, covering seven holes. They were targeted specifically in three areas where we wanted to add more ounces to see how thick the intervals are and how deep we can go to expand our pits even lower. It was a very successful program, demonstrating good grade and good thicknesses.
So, now, I’m excited that in the next couple of weeks we’ll have a drill rig on site again, and we’ll be going after a larger program because now we’re pretty confident what we think is going to be there.
So, it’s just adding more ounces in all the different areas to continue to expand the resource numbers with the goal of being able to update a resource estimate and put out new studies in Q1. It’s really a great program for us.
You’ve received approval from the Bureau of Land Management to work further on the drilling expansion. How important is this permit for the project, and what does it allow you to do next?
Our land package is about 28.9km2 and keeps continuing to grow. The plan of operation permit is to allow us to drill project-wide, which means we’ve sterilized the land packages for all the various studies needed. It’s also the same footprint that the mine plan is in as well, so it fast-tracks both permits at the same time. We will have that plan of operations drilling permit in-hand within the next four to six weeks so we won’t have to go back to the BLM for that information. And, given that we just put out news on expanding our land package even more, it’s really important.
We’re heading into production in 2027. So all these ounces we’re adding right now are focused on mine expansion, mine life, etc., but really we’re targeting how many tons per day capacity we should be doing, because we do feel confident that the mine life is going to continue to grow over time. Just hitting that sweet spot is really important for the company now before we build it.
You’ve just had news come out about the purchase of the York Claims from Emergent Metals Corp. Can you talk about this expansion potential? What does this bring to the project?
There are 27 York Expansion claims and they are very important for us because we do have an existing pit at York. However, we’ve never been able to report to the public the entire ounces there because we didn’t own the land. So now we own the land, and now not only can we report to the market about them, but we can actually grow our resource in that area. And in our last drill program over the summer, we did drill over in that area and had tremendous success, so we’re looking to go back to the York area quite soon.
So the Santa Fe project already has a strong PEA. What are the next steps that you’re working on now to move it closer to production?
The next step for the PEA is to continue to check off the boxes that were shown to us on the very last page of the PEA, which means upping the ante of recoveries. We’re doing a lot of studies on the metallurgical side, getting the ounces up for mine production, mine life, etc. It’s a roadmap to the future of the project. So we have a very clear path, and we’ve been very focused on that from permitting to drilling and metallurgical work.
You started metallurgical testing at Santa Fe. What are you hoping to learn from this work and what is it going to bring to the project?
We have four deposits on our project, so it’s not one thing that hits all here. We have to do different metallurgical work at different areas. That being said, we know what happened in the historical mining days, but we’re not reporting those numbers to the public right now because the metallurgical work is outdated. Now, we’re simply going back in and verifying the metallurgical work to match the historic numbers and hopefully upgrade it from there. Right now, it’s being discounted by over 12% in some areas and it’s really important to get those numbers higher.
How is Lahontan positioned financially to keep advancing Santa Fe? Are there any key milestones that investors should be on the lookout for in the coming months?
We’ve done a lot of interesting things lately because our share price has grown tremendously over the past few months. Our stock is up over 1000% since January, we have massive liquidity, so it’s been very good for shareholders to come in and out of the stock. The movement in share price has resulted in the excercise of a lot of warrants, from this we have received over C4.3M to date. We are cashed up and we don’t need to raise funds because of those warrants coming in, which is fantastic. It not only cleans up our balance sheet, but it puts money in our account without having to go back to the market.
Catalysts for the rest of the year is drilling, permitting, drilling, permitting, and then on to all of our studies in Q1.
