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 Mon Mar 22, 2021
Tracker: Spec Value Rating for P2 Gold Inc (PGLD-V)
    Publisher: Kaiser Research Online
    Author: Copyright 2021 John A. Kaiser

 
P2 Gold Inc (PGLD-V: $0.570)
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Tracker - March 22, 2021: Spec Value Rating for P2 Gold Inc (PGLD-V)

P2 Gold Inc was made a Bottom-Fish Spec Value rated 2021 Favorite at $0.40 on December 31, 2020 based on its new role as the post-Pretium exploration vehicle for Joe Ovsenek and Ken MacNaughton, the former CEO and Exploration VP for Pretium and its high grade Brucejack gold project in the Golden Triangle. On February 23, 2021 P2 Gold expanded the focus with the acquisition of an all-season advanced project in Nevada's Walker Lane called Gabbs which hosts several copper-gold porphry style deposits. This is an expensive acquisition whose closing is contingent on P2 Gold completing a $16 million private placement consisting of 32 million shares at $0.50. Gabbs will become the new flagship project for P2 Gold which in the worst case will function as a copper-gold optionality story with the existing resource, but will initially be the focus of a major system rethink by the Ovsenek/MacNaughton team which will assess the deeper potential of what they believe is a gold dominated alkaline porphyry system different from the copper porphyries at Yerington. The Golden Triangle projects optioned during the summer of 2020 have heavy vesting obligations that kick in after the second year, so these will be subjected to make or break exploration programs over the next year. P2 Gold remains Bottom-Fish Spec Value rated while we wait for the $16 million financing to close, of which USD $5 million will go to close the Gabbs acquisition, and the rest will fund 2021 exploration programs.

Along with several associates Joe Ovsenek and Ken MacNaughton purchased founder stakes through a 10 million share private placement at $0.10 (no warrants) in April 2020 following a 6:1 rollback of Central Timmins Exploration Corp, a mediocre junior which went public by IPO through PI Financial on Oct 16, 2018 with a group of claims on the fringes of the mining town Timmins on the Ontario side the Abitibi Greenstone Belt. They shifted the focus to northern British Columbia, first with a 70% option on the Silver Reef project north of Hazelton where the target is a silver-zinc-lead carbonate replacement system similar to the Silver Standard deposit near Hazelton. Then in early July 2020 P2 Gold optioned up to 70% of the Todd Creek and the BAM properties in the Golden Triangle from separate vendors. And for good measure they brought Silver Standard's mine finders Bud Hillemeyer and Perry Durning back into the fold by leasing on fairly easy terms their Lost Cabin and Stockade epithermal prospects in southeastern Oregon.

P2 Gold can acquire 100% of Gabbs from the Waterton private equity group for USD $5 million and 15 million shares, with another $5 million due by the earlier of a PEA completion or 2 years. The 2,800 hectare Gabbs property adjoins to the north of the former Paradise Peak Mine operated as an open pit by FMC Gold from 1986-1994 which yielded 1.6 million oz gold and 24.1 million oz silver from a high sulphidation epithermal system aged at 22 million years. FMC sold Paradise Peak to Arimetco in 1995 which also owned the Gabbs property that FMC had explored in 1991-92. Arimetco went bankrupt in 1997, Paradise Peak became an abandoned reclamation site, and the Gabbs claims lapsed until Newcrest staked them in 2002 and explored Gabbs until 2008 when it withdrew from North America. Gabbs was acquired in 2011 by St Vincent Minerals Inc whose IPO plans never materialized and was acquired by Colin Bird's AIM listed ich Galileo Resources Plc in 2014 for CAD $4.3 million. Galileo sold Gabbs to Waterton in August 2016 for USD $2.5 million, so this deal with P2 Gold is shaping up as a big score for Waterton.

The Gabbs property hosts three spatially distinct porphyry style deposits called Sullivan, Lucky Strike and Gold Ledge for which 43-101 open-pittable inferred resources have been estimated at 26.2 million tonnes of 0.72 g/t gold and 0.248% copper for oxides and 46.9 million tonnes at 0.43 g/t gold and 0.27% copper for sulphides. Most of the resource is split 54% Sullivan and 46% Lucky Strike which are about 3.5 km apart. The Gold Ledge zone, which sits in between, has a resource of only 100,000 tonnes, but sits above a significant IP chargeability high modeled at a depth of 450 m that has not been tested. The copper-gold mineralization is Cretaceous aged, younger than the middle Jurassic age of the Yerington cluster of substantially larger porphyry deposits 100 km to the west. The Yerington porphyries are of the calc-alkaline type that have low gold values, whereas the porphyries at Gabbs appear to be the high K calc-alkaline variety which have higher gold values. The Sullivan and Lucky Strike zones occur as sill-like monzonite intrusives within a gabbroic complex that has not been age dated. The depositional origin of these "sills" is not understood, and it is speculated that they may have linkage to an intrusive center beneath Gold Ledge. The Car Body zone to the south for which 2.8 million tonnes of 1.39 g/t gold has been estimated appears to be an unrelated, much younger low sulphidation epithermal system.

The Gabbs property has had 494 holes drilled between 1970-2011, though 320 of these holes fail the QA/QC criteria needed for 43-101 resource reporting. The average depth of past drill holes was 94 metres. P2 Gold has proposed a CAD $6 million program for 2021 that will include additional geophysical surveys to cover the entire property and 20,000 m of drilling, the majority of which will be RC. The drilling will consist mainly of infill drilling to support a PEA by Q1 of 2022, but also include chasing the Sullivan and Lucky Strike zones beyond the pit limits that defined the Newcrest drilling in 2002-2008. P2 Gold will also test the deeper IP target to see if higher grade copper-gold mineralization is present that would lend itself to underground mining as can happen with high K calc-alkaline porphyries. Most of the property falls under BLM jurisdiction and P2 Gold will for now rely on 5 acre disturbance notice of intent drill permits.

P2 Gold spent $900,000 on the Silver Reef project in 2020, mainly drilling the Main Zone with spotty results. The work included sampling which highlighted the Northwest Zone, which a magnetic survey that summer while the drilling was underway showed that it is part of a linear magnetic trend called the Northwest Zone trend which P2 Gold intends to drill in early summer so that it has results in hand by late August so that it can decide whether to drill additional holes in September or drop the option. The company's highest Golden Triangle hopes lie with the BAM property optioned from Charlie Greig who staked the claims when the most recent owner let them lapse. BAM is a copper-gold prospect discovered during the 1960s when Galore Creek, 35 km to the west, and Shaft Creek, 20 km to the northwest, were found. P2 Gold conducted sampling and geophysical surveys in 2020 which highlighted the Monarch Gold Zone which P2 Gold plans to drill in July with the hope that it represents a copper-gold porphyry system more like Galore Creek than Shaft Creek. The 32,000 hectare Todd Creek project owned by ArcWest Exploration has also been around for decades and is an expensive option, but Ovsenek and MacNaughton optioned it because they see potential for Brucejack style high grade gold zones which they know how to make or break over the next year. As far as the Oregon properties are concerned, Lost Cabin is a high sulphidation epithermal system which Camino had under lease for a while, and Stockade is a newer low sulphidation epithermal system generated by the Bud and Perry team for Tom Kaplan's Electrum group which was dropped without drilling to the hypothesized boiling zone depth. It is not clear that any money will be allocated to the Oregon prospects in 2021.

If P2 Gold closes its $16 million private placement it will have 76.5 million issued and 87.5 million fully diluted. It will be sufficiently funded to advance the Gabbs project in Nevada while conducting make or break drill programs on the northern BC prospects during 2021. P2 Gold Inc is a Favorite that started as a people bet on Joe Ovsenek and Ken MacNaughton who started during the 1990's with Silver Standard and played key roles during the past decade at the Pretium spinout. It is not a slam dunk because the initial BC properties optioned for P2 Gold are exploration plays that may not deliver discoveries that justify maintaining the earn-in options. Gabbs is a more advanced project in a year-round jurisdiction where money spent on feasibility demonstration could show that Gabbs can be developed as a profitable open-pit, milling-flotation copper-gold mine, but where there is also exploration potential at depth which could lead to a much bigger and possibly richer underlying copper-gold system. The key milestone is closing that $16 million financing.

 
 

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