The Northern Miner September 30 2019 Issue 20

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Bell Copper chases payoff from Perseverance ARIZONA

| Friedland behind porphyry project passed over by Rio Tinto

BY TRISH SAYWELL

Field crew and a haul truck at Barkerville Gold Mines’ Cariboo gold project in British Columbia.   BARKERVILLE GOLD MINES

tsaywell@northernminer.com

Osisko launches incubator, T bids for Barkerville M&A

| All-share offer undervalues Barkerville, analysts say

BY TRISH SAYWELL tsaywell@northernminer.com

O

sisko Gold Royalties (TSX: OR; NYSE: OR) has created a project development platform called North Spirit Discovery Group, and it hopes the resource development and finance company’s first asset will be Barkerville Gold Mines (TSXV: BGM) and its Cariboo gold project near Wells, British Columbia. The gold-focused royalty company is offering Barkerville shareholders

0.0357 of a common share of Osisko for each share of Barkerville held. The proposed all-share transaction has an implied equity value of $338 million, or 58¢ per share, representing a 44% premium based on both companies’ trailing 20-day, volumeweighted average price. Osisko’s offer includes a $7-million unsecured loan to advance Cariboo, and Barkerville’s board of directors has unanimously accepted the deal — although it still needs approval from the company’s shareholders.

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Osisko Gold Royalties owns 32.6% of Barkerville’s outstanding shares. On a conference call, Osisko’s chairman and CEO, Sean Roosen, said the North Spirit Discovery Group, under which Barkerville would operate if the acquisition is approved, is the next step in the evolution of the company’s accelerator business that Osisko pioneered over the last five years, “whereby we have been incubating projects and companies,” and said North Spirit signals “we are basically taking it to the next level. “We see North Spirit taking on a significant role in the evolution of these assets while we separate the accelerator model from Osisko Gold Royalties, but maintain a direct drive from North Sprit into OR by holding equity within the North Spirit Group,” Roosen explained. “Given the capital markets haven’t been very supportive of late-stage exploration and development projects — especially single-asset companies — lately, we see more access to capital at a lower cost for these projects through this model, and this is really the bridge to shareholders to access the capital at lower cost within the accelerator model.” If everything goes according to plan, Osisko eventually will be somewhere between a 30% and 50% shareholder of North Spirit, Roosen said. Roosen described Barkerville as a highly accretive transaction, and said Cariboo fits nicely into Osisko’s sweet spot — the “value gap” when companies are moving projects through permitting and construction. Osisko allocates 25% of its See OSISKO / 7

im Marsh likes to say that it took 150 drill holes to hit the high-grade core of the massive Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold porphyry deposit that made the Mongolian discovery economic. That’s one of the reasons why the junior exploration company he leads — Bell Copper (TSXV: BCU) — has named its copper-porphyry project Perseverance. Since 2007, the mining executive, who has a PhD in geology from Stanford University, has been pursuing what he believes is the faulted-off top of a major porphyry copper system in northwestern Arizona’s Mohave County. But his interest in the area — 31 km southeast of Kingman and 241 km northwest of Phoenix — originated more than 20 years ago, when he was working on AMT’s Copper Creek copper deposits in southern Arizona. “I wanted to find the next big porphyry copper deposit in Arizona, so in the evenings I would comb the mineral occurrence data, and read old theses in the University of Arizona library,” he says. “There were a lot of good dissertations on copper projects, but I was looking very specifically for one situation — evidence of a decapitated porphyry. “David Lowell found one of the good ones — the chopped-off portion of the Kalamazoo porphyry,” Marsh says of the world-renowned exploration geologist. Lowell found Kalamazoo in Arizona in 1965, and the orebody became a major mine for BHP. (Lowell is famous for discovering other huge copper porphyries, as well, including La Escondida in Chile.) “I wanted to do the same thing,” Marsh says of Lowell’s success at Kalamazoo. “I wanted to find a compelling example, stake it myself, and make a mine out of it.” His thinking was that Arizona — which has produced 10% of the world’s copper, and where faulting has taken big copper deposits and turned them into pieces — would be a good place to find one. In the late 1990s, Marsh came across a 1974 master’s thesis by John Vuich in the University of Arizona’s library about the Wheeler

“ROBERT WOULD CALL ME IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT FROM SINGAPORE AND WANT TO KNOW HOW THE DRILL HOLE WAS GOING.” TIM MARSH PRESIDENT AND CEO, BELL COPPER

Wash porphyry exposure containing molybdenum in the mountains of Kingman, Arizona. “I saw it as the bottom of a copper porphyry deposit,” Marsh says. Marsh’s theory was that the Wheeler Wash exposure had been connected millions of years ago to the Kabba deposit, a molybdenum and vanadium deposit, 8 km away, and that the two pieces of the deposit had been sliced into two by a fault. “The Wheeler Wash porphyry exposure was the same as the Kabba See BELL COPPER / 6 PM40069240

TERANGA GOLD: STARTS UP WAHGNION IN BURKINA FASO / 7

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