The Northern Miner July 20 2020 Issue 15

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79North taps into Suriname’s Guiana Shield SURINAME

| Junior gold explorer focused on concessions in the Nassau plateau

KoBold Metals employs big data, geoscientists in pursuit of battery metals EXPLORATION

| Company’s primary focus is hunting for cobalt

BY TRISH SAYWELL

K

Jon North (far right) at the Nassau project in Suriname.  79NORTH

BY TRISH SAYWELL

E

tsaywell@northernminer.com

xploration geologist Jon North was attending Mille Miglia – the annual re-enactment of the classic car race from Brescia in the foothills of the Italian Alps to Rome and back – when he met Oscar Louzada. Louzada, a Dutch mining investor who had worked in Canaccord Genuity’s London office for several years, bonded with North over their mutual appreciation for “sexy European cars” and the two attended the event for many years as part of a larger group of friends from Holland, Switzerland and Italy. “I grew up in Windsor so I have gasoline in my veins,” jokes North, who drives a 2007 Ducati S2R 100 and a 2015 Ducati MS 1200, noting that the motorcycles give him “street cred” with his Italian friends. But North and Louzada had more in common than spring vacations in Italy and vintage car rallies. Louzada had started looking for gold deposits in Suriname and started a company with a group of friends – picking up the Nassau project – a 200 sq. km

“THE ONLY CONCLUSION YOU CAN ARRIVE AT IS THAT THE PLATEAU IS THE SOURCE OF THE GOLD IN THE PLACERS.” JON NORTH CEO AND CHAIRMAN 79NORTH

property adjacent to Newmont’s (TSX: NGT; NYSE: NEM) Merian mine and about 50 km from Iamgold’s (TSX: IMG) Rosebel mine. “Oscar had been bugging me to go to Suriname for years,” North recalls, “but I said, ‘I’m too busy, I’m drilling off an ore deposit.’” At the time, the company he had founded, Northquest, was advancing the Pistol Bay project on the west coast of Hudson Bay in eastern Nunavut, 80 km south of Agnico Eagle Mines’ (TSX: AEM; NYSE: AEM) Meliadine mine. Inco Gold had discovered the property in the 1980s, and when North acquired it in 2010, he hired

out of retirement Inco Gold’s former geologist, Dwayne Carr, to manage Northquest’s exploration program. “Inco’s diamond drill hole in the 1980s was something like 120 metres at 2.5 parts per million (ppm) gold, and the property sat there open for staking for 25 years, even though it was across the bay from Meliadine,” North says. “It was Dwayne’s favourite project of his entire career at Inco, and our first drill hole there intersected something like 150 metres of 5 ppm gold. The stock traded from 10¢ to $1.00 in a single session.” The timing didn’t work in Northquest’s favour, however. “It was 2012 and the beginning of the market from hell, and even with results like that I couldn’t raise any money. That’s when I realized that the market was the most powerful force in the universe,” North says. Ultimately, Northquest completed an inferred resource on Pistol Bay’s Vickers zone of 7.79 million tonnes averaging 2.95 grams gold per tonne for 739,000 contained oz. in April 2016. The company was then Se e SURINAME / 3

tsaywell@northernminer.com

oBold Metals is investing in battery metal projects using big data and scientific computing with capital from billionaires including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. The privately held Californiabased company has also lured David Broughton, the world-renowned expert in sediment-hosted copper deposits, to lead its hydrothermal systems team, and hired a number of other very high-profile geoscientists. “David is very substantially involved,” Josh Goldman, KoBold Metals’ chief financial and technical officer, says of Broughton in a telephone interview. Broughton worked for Ivanplats, now Ivanhoe Mines (TSX: IVN; NYSE: IVN), from January 2008 through October 2016, and was coawarded the PDAC’s Thayer Lindsley and AME’s Colin Spence awards for world-class discoveries at Kamoa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Platreef in South Africa. Goldman, who holds a PhD in physics from Harvard University, explains that the exploration company is a “little bit unusual in that more than half of the staff are data scientists and engineers.” On the technology side of the house, he says, “they are folks with deep backgrounds in the physical sciences, people with PhDs in physics, geophysics, and experimental quantum computing.” “It’s fantastic because we have these amazing data scientists who get to work with very well-esteemed geological scientists and can understand the interplay and apply all manner of statistical methodologies, and lots of experience in the field. A lot of this is difficult to quantify, but that combined is what makes this program so potent.” Among the team are Jake Edman, director of machine learning, a data scientist and atmospheric physicist who has a PhD in earth and planetary science, and Murray Hitzman, who has a PhD in geology and is a world-leading economic geologist. Jessica Kirkpatrick, who earned a PhD in astrophysics, and Elizabeth Main, who has a PhD in physics, are directors of data science. Other luminaries include John Thompson, a technical and business

COVID-19 IMPACTING COPPER INDUSTRY IN CHILE / 5

advisor, who has a PhD in geology and has spent more than 35 years in the mining industry, and KoBold’s VP Exploration, Patrick Redmond, who has a PhD in geological and environmental sciences. Peter Lightfoot, the company’s magmatic systems lead, has a PhD in geology and spent 20 years with Inco and Vale. He was a member of the team that made major discoveries in every one of the cobalt-producing nickelcopper sulphide deposits in Canada. “What it comes down to is having a system that allows us to aggregate and work with an extra amount of data and then apply machine learning as well as expert geological insight, based on an ore body, and apply the best of both approaches to guide our exploration program,” says Goldman. It also comes down to patient capital. The exploration startup is backed by California venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz, as well as Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a fund set up by Bill Gates in 2015 with Se e EXPLORATION / 2 P M 4 0 0 6 9 2 4 0


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