Under the Spotlight – Mills, Brewster: Renforth Resources

2022.03.15

Rick Mills: I’m talking to Nicole Brewster, CEO of Renforth Resources (CSE:RFR, OTCQB:RFHRF, FSE:9RR). Nicole in total I see five projects listed on your website, would it be fair to say two are your main focus, Parbec, an open-pit gold deposit, and the Surimeau district battery metals project?

Nicole Brewster: Those two are definitely our focus.

RM: I’ve been watching Parbec, I like gold, I like the environment we’re in right now for gold. Parbec, over the summer, has really come to life in the fact that the assays coming back from Parbec are very good, you had well over 20 meters of +3 grams per tonne in your last news release, could you tell us a little more about Parbec please?

NB: Parbec as it sits has a historic 43-101 resource based on the idea of it being a small open pit next to Canada’s largest open pit the Canadian Malartic mine, however, as you referenced, we did drill two programs, one at the end of 2020 and the other in early 2021. We drilled more than 15,000m.

It took up to November 2021 until we got all those results back, but now that we have them, Parbec is exciting again because some of those results were spectacular.

We drilled the longest interval and the highest grades on the property in that 15,000m program. What we’re doing now is we found a QP group who’s going to produce the next 43-101. They’ve taken all the data and they’ve updated the model. The drill hole twinning that we did validates the historic data which was excluded from the historic 43-101 resource, and then we’ve got our new data.

Also, the new structural geology group just completed their work, we already see some juicy target areas so Parbec is actually quite exciting right now. There will be more to come with Parbec.

RM: Parbec shares an interesting area with some rather well-known mines and operations, correct?

NB: We’ll start with the very top of that statement. Parbec sits on the Cadillac Break, which is Canada’s most productive gold structure. It stretches between Kirkland Lake in Ontario to east of Val d’Or in Quebec.

Now on top of that Parbec is a direct neighbor to the Canadian Malartic mine property which is Canada’s largest open-pit gold mine, specifically Parbec is sitting right on the Cadillac Break as does the Canadian Malartic mine. Right beside us is the former East Amphi mine which is part of the Canadian Malartic mine property, it was mined by a small open pit and then underground operation, which could be the direction that Parbec ultimately goes.

What’s interesting is our setting, while at a smaller scale than Canadian Malartic which is a 4 km-long open pit, we also sit on the Cadillac Break with its associated mineralization, but we have splays or faults coming off the Cadillac Break into the Pontiac sediments, which are associated with gold.

It’s a very similar setting to Canadian Malartic next door which was all started on or around the Sladen fault which is a splay of the Cadillac Break. So we have some similarities to our big brother next door, we’re a much earlier stage but that gives people the opportunity to get involved at the ground floor and follow that story along as we advance Parbec.

RM: It certainly is a nice environment to develop what could be a nice open-pit/high-grade underground gold deposit.

Renforth’s other focus is a project that is near and dear to my heart and that’s Surimeau, which is a district sized battery-metals project, the size of this project is encouraging and the mineralization that you’ve found so far is exactly what we need for electrification & decarbonization, our move from fossil fuels to renewables, can you tell us a little bit about Surimeau?

NB: Surimeau is big it’s just over 330 square km including the former Malartic West property. We incorporated Malartic West into the Surimeau property, simply because they share a border.

I staked five different areas of a historic polymetallic nature, copper-nickel mineralization. In Victoria West we know we have, in the ultramafic, nickel and cobalt. and then in the VMS we have copper-zinc. The ultramafic also carries platinum group elements.

In addition there’s areas of gold on the property, we have historic gold results and our own results, and then because we consolidated Malartic West into Surimeau we have the copper-silver discovery we made at Beaupre, in the northeastern corner of the property.

What’s exciting about Surimeau is the polymetallic nature, but let’s not forget it’s road accessible, it shares a border again with the Canadian Malartic Mine, we’re just outside of the town of Malartic, just south of the town of Cadillac and we have hydroelectric power lines from the Rapide-2 and Rapide-7 power generating stations to the south of us running across the property.

We’re also approximately an hour away from the Horne smelter which is Canada’s only copper-nickel smelter.

RM: You’re currently doing magnetic and electromagnetic surveys?

NB: At Victoria West I want to move as quickly and as efficiently as possible to an initial inferred resource. We just finished those surveys. We’ve seen the initial raw data, it’s going take time to smooth out the data and then do the interpretation in conjunction with the geological information. Then all of that data will go to the QP group which I’m including early on at Victoria West.

They’ll be modelling the data in 3D for us. So we’re now moving into planning, it’s going to take roughly six weeks for the report from the airborne to be in my hands. Our next phase will be targeting drilling, which I’m expecting to be in late April.

RM: The style of mineralization at Surimeau, both styles, should light up quite well with the magnetic surveys?

NB: It does. It already did with the old government data, but with our data using newer instrumentation and lower and tighter flight lines we can better see the magnetic trend.

We can see more about what’s happening along the Victoria West/Colonie trend and between that and the Lalonde trend, 3 or 4 km to the north. So yes, I’m very pleased with how that went and now we’re waiting for the results from our drilling before last Christmas at Victoria West. We’ll be able to incorporate that geological data into the geophysical data set as well. So it worked well, we definitely see the anomaly, we’ve got lots of detail and right now we’re just incorporating our own and the historic data with the geophysical data.

RM: Excellent. To date you’ve basically focused on the polymetallic battery metals package — nickel, cobalt, copper, zinc platinum and palladium.

NB: Yes, Victoria West is a 6-km-long area of mineralization within the western end of a 20-km-long magnetic anomaly that at its eastern end has the Colonie mineralization. About 3 km north of Victoria West is the Lalonde showing which was historically drilled over a strike length of 2 km, it’s on a 30-km magnetic anomaly. We know that the magnetic anomaly is the ultramafic which carries nickel, cobalt and PGEs.

RM: That’s been your focus, Surimeau’s polymetallic battery metals package. But last summer you added another piece to the project, Surimeau holds various pegmatites. It’s interesting that you’re able to add, potentially, lithium to your battery metals package. It kind of makes a complete list.

NB: It certainly does, we’re the complete basket of metals you need for electrification, for the storage of energy.

We know we have pegmatites, in fact we know we have lithium. But we haven’t looked at the lithium as a standalone. Our own geologists have logged the pegmatites, the pegmatites have also been historically logged, and then we have a new director, Ms. Aline Leclerc, who did a lot of the work for the government in the 80s’ on the property and she’s aware of pegmatites, but at the time nobody was looking for lithium.

We have the Decelles batholith in the southern part of the property, the batholith is where there’s a lot of documented pegmatites, it is very prospective ground, it’s where they would typically occur in Quebec, in the margins of batholiths, so once the snow is off the ground we can go down there and prospect those pegmatites and look at other areas where nobody’s bothered to look.

For all the six areas of known historical mineralization and various gold occurrences, there’s a lot of virgin ground at Surimeau specifically in the southern end that has just never been walked on, nobody’s been looking at the rocks on the ground, and if they have they haven’t sampled them.

Our own geologists walked over the pegmatites and didn’t sample them because they weren’t there for lithium. So we will be visiting that area as well as some documented pegmatites in the north and we’ll be revisiting the core that we’ve already drilled at Surimeau because we’re getting lithium numbers in our own drilling, and the guys have noted magnetic occurrences and such. We haven’t looked at the lithium in our own drill core so we’ll go back and see if there’s any substance to that as well, or if it vectors us elsewhere.

RM: Ok, it’s 2022, first week in March, when do you expect to be back on the property and what do you expect to be doing at Parbec and Surimeau? Can you wrap up your exploration plans for 2022?

NB: I’ll give you some broad-brush strokes with Parbec. There’s never been a structural model built for Parbec so we be building a new 3D model inclusive of the recent drilling with the new QP group. I expect that will lead to drill targets.

I could see us drilling towards the latter part of the year at Parbec once the models are built, once the guys have the targets and once we’ve bettered the structural data a little bit. I don’t know if I see stripping at Parbec right now although given that the Cadillac Break bends to the south in the western part of the property and it’s a fairly large expanse of open ground, it’s tempting. And it may aid in the structural data because we haven’t done any comprehensive structural mapping property-wide. So with Parbec, a lot of desktop work, probably leading to drilling towards the end of the year.

At Surimeau we’re still awaiting our drill results from prior to Christmas. We’ve just completed our airborne, we will integrate the airborne with the geological data, build the model and generate targets, our next drilling will probably be starting end of April.

Lithium prospecting will be started in a couple of weeks, we’ll see how that data looks and then we’ll be able to decide the next steps for lithium.

RM: Is there going to be a revised resource estimate out on Parbec this year?

NB: The first priority is our model and bringing the structural data to bear.

RM: So you’re going to have a structural geologist work on Parbec, are you going to do any of the structural work on Surimeau this year?

NB: We don’t have enough data yet on Surimeau to do structural work.

However we might adopt some practices like oriented core for Surimeau. Parbec’s a structurally controlled orogenic gold environment so structure’s going to be key, especially since we have a splay off the Cadillac Break.

Any time the Cadillac Break does splay or fault it’s incredibly interesting and prospective for chutes, which are vertical pipelines that brought the gold into the system. We know we have the splay but we also know we have low-angle and cross-cutting faults, so we’re going to be rejigging the data to look for specific chutes at Parbec.

We have targets on the table that are deeper intercepts but the bulk of the existing historic resource at Parbec is 80% above a depth of 300m, then we have much deeper intercepts and there is nothing in between. We have a couple prospective locations for chutes so we’ll be building that data out in order to target those areas with drill holes. So that’s the story for Parbec.

That’s the better spending of the money than issuing another 43-101 resource.

The 43-101 resource I’m much more interested in issuing, that I feel will bring better value to the table for shareholders, is a resource at Victoria West. Surimeau is a discovery in plain sight and Victoria West has been sitting there for 40 years. So we’re going to pull all those strings together and say ‘hey listen you have to look at this, this is Quebec’s newest nickel-copper discovery. It’s got road access, it’s got processing, it’s got hydroelectric power, it’s flat, open ground with nobody living there. It’s a great location.’ This is the year we put the 43-101 cost in the Surimeau bucket, first step.

RM: The plans for this year are pretty much paid for?

NB: We’re sitting right now at a bit more than $1 million in cash, as you know we do have other financial options. No immediate plans right now to do any sort of financing.

RM: Is there anything you want to add in closing, Nicole?

NB: No, I think you got it, Parbec is a meaningful gold deposit sitting in a spectacular location in an area where, forget the geopolitical effect on the price of gold, all the neighbors are consuming their ounces and will sooner or later have to replace them, there is also contract milling in the area.

And then you’ve got Surimeau which is the new kid on the block, it’s a discovery in plain sight of metals which are critical, in a province that’s placed some emphasis on them so it’s quite exciting.

RM: Thank you very much for your time.

Richard (Rick) Mills
aheadoftheherd.com
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