PEAK ASSET: MORNING WRAP 12 February: ASX 200 futures are pointing up 4 points or 0.04 per cent to 8962 | Northern Star’s net profit jumps 41pc, pays 25¢ dividend | New explorer 49 Metals is joining the modern-day gold rush in Nevada |

New explorer 49 Metals is joining the modern-day gold rush in Nevada

• 49 Metals brings 92 Energy team back to explore for gold and silver in Nevada
• Drilling to start at Gold Mountain project after completion of $10 million IPO
• CEO Phil Carter sees high-grade potential beyond historic drilling at underexplored US gold projects

Two years back, Dr Ollie Kreuzer and Matt Gauci successfully rode the uranium wave with the sale of 92 Energy to Atha Uranium Corp, turning a high-grade position in Canada’s world class Athabasca Basin into a takeover worth more than 3x the company’s 20c per share listing price.

After that major win, the geoscientist and corporate expert are back with a new play in the junior resources space targeting another world class jurisdiction and major commodity trend.

The new game is 49 Metals, a fresh $10 million IPO chasing high-grade gold discoveries in Nevada, voted the world’s second best mining jurisdiction in the world in the latest Fraser Institute survey, home to 185Moz of known gold and 1.2Boz of world silver production as well as three of the world’s 10 largest gold mines.

A nod to the original 49ers of the California gold rush, it’s the perfect vehicle for a group of Aussies aiming to capture the opportunity in Donald Trump’s commodities mad America.

With gold running past US$5000/oz and silver above US$80/oz, the timing could not be better to tackle three projects in the tier-1 Walker Lane Trend running between Reno and Las Vegas.

One of those, the aptly named Gold Mountain, sits just 7km south of the historic mining town of Tonopah in an area which produced over 36,000oz of gold and 3.7Moz of silver between 1902 and 1984.

Modern exploration isn’t limited, but it’s incomplete. Some 30,852m of drilling has tunnelled under the claims, more than half of it by Canadian mid-tier Centerra Gold between 2008 and 2010.

Work back in 2011 showed it could contain a foreign resource estimate of 14-44Mt at 100,000-460,000oz of gold equivalent in oxidised material at prices of just US$1450/oz gold and US$40/oz silver.

That may seem like low-hanging fruit, but 49 Metals is thinking much bigger.

High-grade focus

With CPS Capital on board to raise the $10m slated in the firm’s recently launched prospectus, the plan is to focus initially on drilling at Gold Mountain, which sits in a district where mineralisation has been compared to Kinross Gold’s 21Moz Round Mountain mine.

Validating the historic resource to JORC standards is not the first port of call, according to CEO Phil Carter, a former analyst at PAC Partners and Patersons Securities taking a leap into the world of public company management.

“We believe there’s a high-grade gold resource at Gold Mountain to be found,” Carter told Stockhead.

“We know at Gold Mountain that gold is associated with pyrite. Pyrite is obviously a sulphide.

“Geophysics has identified this really large IP (induced polarisation) anomaly, which is really good at picking up sulphides.

“So we believe this IP anomaly is indicative of a large disseminated sulphide body.

“And because we know that gold on our project is associated with sulphides, we believe this IP anomaly is a really good targeting vector for high-grade gold.”

The IP anomaly is a key target for drilling after listing, with another four targets identified in historical drilling and rock chip sampling also expected to be tested.

Source: SmallCaps