Corporate Update from Western Copper & Gold: Looking beyond Casino

Trevor Hall [00:00:06] Everybody, welcome back to Mining Stock Daily in a corporate update with one of our sponsors, that's Western Copper and Gold. And today, the CEO of Western Copper and Gold, Mr. Paul West-Sells is joining us to discuss finally the much anticipated drill assay results that have been coming out through the drill. Drilling has gone on through the summer and into the fall, and now it's finalized an out and published earlier this morning. Paul, great to speak with you once again. How are you this holiday season?

Paul West-Sells [00:00:39] Very good Trevor. So always a pleasure to talk to you and your listeners. And I'm glad that we could squeeze this in before the holiday season gets too busy for everyone.

Trevor Hall [00:00:50] Yeah. See you. Oh, you're not the only ones that published your results out until last week before Christmas. But I know this was much anticipated in the simple WRN on both the TSX and your NYSE American actually saw some really good gains this week leading up to this. So we're going to talk about that in just a few minutes. But give us a rundown here of exactly what these results that we're seeing. I mean, there was over 13000 meters of diamond drilling and 69 holes. So we're not just talking just a couple of holes here, but there is a number of step out drilling targets closer to that Canadian Creek property you acquired earlier this year. That shows some pretty good results, too. So from all these, what do you want investors to know, Paul?

Paul West-Sells [00:01:36] Yeah, I know. And it was it was a great drilling program. And, you know, there's a lot of stuff to unpack. And so I'll just sort of start with the step of drilling. So that we did two step out drilling campaigns. One was to the to the west on the Canadian Creek property and one was to the north. And so I'm going to start with one the west to the Canadian Creek property. And, you know, we're we're sort of excited about that. If you look at what the Canadian Creek property has been, they've got a good drill results that they have historically. They've got sort of 50 meters of point, seven gold. And so we were looking over there to sort of see two things. One. We knew that are the big casino deposit continued on over into that area. And also when we would move out of that casino and into sort of more of that sort of higher gold. And so really what we saw is a better both. So we saw the extension of the Casino that. High grade gold intercepts that we're pretty excited about then moving north. And you know, the headline on the news release was that, you know, that we added a significant extension to the deposit on the door. And this is really where I think, you know, we're the most excited. This is an area to the north of the deposit where we thought that the casino, as it was, was ending. And so we were expecting to close it off. And we did exactly the opposite. We actually opened it up. And every one of those holes was pretty much top to bottom mineralization. You know, ended in mineralization. We put it on the order of sort of 300 meters, a three to 400 meters of additional linear distance on that. And everything is still mineralized. And, you know, we actually the geologists are starting to pour into that. And what's exciting to me is this. And we'll see how it all comes together. But the leading theory right now is that this actually isn't the Casino porphyry. But it's another poor free. That's right next to it. That's actually we're on the edge of that. So as we go north, we might actually get into more of that porphyry and potentially into better grades. But everything we're seeing is minable grades. And so we're we're certainly really excited about that. And then that sort of the last thing is the intel telling and the infill drilling was exactly what we thought it was going to be. You know, you look at the infill drilling and this is on the very outskirts of our deposits. So we sort of expected about 50 percent of the holes to basically actually not be mineralized because it's actually defining the outside edge as the opposite happened. We actually had mineralization in our all, but I think sets of three or four of our holes. So, you know, nice definition of the edge and really still slightly open on those edges. I mean, we thought we're going to close it off, but still a little bit open on that. But, you know, importantly, and I think this is the important takeaway that I want your investors to take away is that, you know, the drill results or the drill results, this is going to go into an updated resource. And that's where I really think is where the excitement is going to happen, because, you know, it's a bunch of drill results, a bunch of it is infill. But when that turns into a resource, we certainly expect that it's going to increase.

Trevor Hall [00:05:20] Paul, I mean, the idea of going into this drill program was to increase those resources, but now it almost sounds like you have more drilling to do. So how are you going to kind of balance putting the resource together with the possibility of even adding more to the north there?

Paul West-Sells [00:05:36] Yeah, I mean, I you know, we're all overdue for a resource update on this and we really need to at least define the infield drilling. So, you know, we are going to do an updated of the resource. But yeah, we're going to do an update to the resource. And then this well, I guess next year, certainly more drilling is on the plan. And you know, the one thing I didn't mention, of course, is, is the high grade gold. And that's going to be absolutely the first focus. And so we had the 55 grams per ton intercept that went in concert with some historical 55 and another one in the 70s, 73 grams per tonne intercept. And then if you look at even in this last drilling campaign, we had, you know, a foreground ground return and a three and a half gram per ton and those that sort of gold intercept you know, you have to keep in mind that for us, the average reserve grade is .24 gold. This is a big low grade perforate. So when you see these really nice high grade gold intercepts and they're all in the south of the deposit, they're all sort of the same level of focus of the drill campaign is going to be pulling those those high big gold there and defining that zone. And then, you know, we define that zone. It's an absolute game changer for us for the Casino project. So that's part of the drilling campaign. We've got all of care. But I mean, to be honest, the. And and, you know, we're going to certainly two thousand and twenty is going to be dominated by drilling.

Trevor Hall [00:07:22] Yeah. Yeah. Well, the last time you and I chatted and we did discuss those high grade returns, the 55 grams over just under three meters. And we brought up the idea about is there an opportunity potentially down the road to begin some sort of smaller starter pit? And so with these other higher grades that you reported this morning, which were, you know, four point seven grams per ton going over one meter, you hold 10 and then it looks like three and a half grams per ton over two meters, 13. Or are those two intercepts relatively close to that original 55 grams that you reported a couple of months ago?

Paul West-Sells [00:08:01] Well, you know, keep in mind that between there is the 55 gram per ton and then those two historical high grade gold intercepts were about 500 meters apart. So, you know, they're not close in terms of what you would traditionally think, of course.

Paul West-Sells [00:08:22] But for this large deposit, they're sort of close to that. They're on the southern side of the deposit. They're all sort of actually on the edge to a certain extent, the southern edge of the main periphery deposit. And so, certainly so those two intercepts and you know, I mean, we're not talking a all the historical drilling that's been done. And, you know, there's 100,000 meters and drilling in this. And we've gone back and looked at that. And we've had a little bit of time to look at that. And there is a bunch of these sort of little high grade little blips. And they're all in the south of the deposit. They're all on the edge of the pophyry. So, you know, we need to do some more drilling. We need to delineate that. It is looking like we're seeing some consistency there. You know, if this you know, you've got to keep in mind because people say, well, you know, Paul, you know, a lot of drill holes in there. And this you really have this high grade gold. So why wouldn't you hit it? Well, this is a vertical structure. Knowing you're just sort of necking the edges of it with the drilling that you're doing, you're not going to see it. So we're going to go in. We're going to do probably some more angle drilling to further define it next year. And yeah, I mean, we're all pretty positive that we can pull something together. But as you said, I mean, why that's exciting is that it brings in this sort of high grade, lower capital sort of starting project out at Casino. And it just gives some optionality because optionality for us. You know, if the main project, you know, a multibillion dollar project is too big for a junior to take on by itself, as this is, you know, a high grade starter pit for, you know, heap leach project. This is certainly something that we can do and pull off on our own. And so that's why we're excited that we're starting to see that high grade come come through.

Trevor Hall [00:10:15] Western has a very strong shareholder base, especially, you know, within the top shareholders of the company after these results. And this morning, you know, what are some of the encouragement that you are receiving from those shareholders? I mean, is it an understanding that there needs to be more drilling or, you know, when that wind is casino gets to the point to where, you know, we go, we have to further start developing this thing and actually de-risking more and maybe even start mining?

Paul West-Sells [00:10:42] Yeah. Well, I mean, back to sort of one of your earlier comments beginning of the year, the plan was to do some infill drilling and, you know, roll into an updated feasibility study. And and, you know, that certainly is the plan. But, you know, along that road, we had a bunch of high grade gold and we found out that the edges of the deposit that we thought were edges are attaches, particularly on the north. So we've taken a bit of a detour on that path. And I think that our shareholders are I mean, that are pretty overwhelmingly in support of further delineation of the high grade called. And and, you know, I talk about exploration, you know, the high grade gold, the exploration of the north. But they don't even talk about what we have on Canadian Creek and Canadian Creek. We target on the outer zone. That hasn't been gold looking, you know, geophysics and surface geo chem. So sampling mix, it looks exactly like casino. And you know, if you find another casino next to casino, I mean, this thing just, you know, it blows up. Right. So there's certainly and again, and that's an acquisition we made this summer. So. Yeah, I mean I I on the road to to doing some fairly simple things on the project. We found a lot of excitement and it's our shareholders are. Certainly in full support of US students for doing over this summer coming up and further delineating all those opportunities.

Trevor Hall [00:12:21] So a couple of things that we haven't chatted about today that needs to be brought up is, well, there was a movement in the copper prices, weak copper price looking strong. The ticker symbol W R N had a really good week. I mean, it was up almost I think it was up more than 10 percent one day this week on the NYSE. So it looks like those copper bugs may be coming back again. But we haven't we haven't talked a whole lot of copper in this project. So given with the share price movement upward, with the copper price and the results with copper, you know, copper within the drill results, I mean, what what are these two tangibles telling you right now? You know, more shirt, general shareholders looking at it, at Casino more of a copper play now where schools still prevalent as the go to metal.

Paul West-Sells [00:13:13] Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting. It it plays I've seen it play out like this, you know, three or four times over the past 15 years. You know, it's led by a rally of gold. And then the rally in gold is followed by a rally in base metals. And it's interesting because there's all sorts of geopolitical reasons why copper is up. Of course, number one being the U.S. China trade war. You know, a bit of an initial agreement on that. But but that fact still, still seems to happen. But, yeah, no, I mean, I'm really finally this trade war is off of page one. That's down it back to page five. And so people now are looking at copper and they're saying, oh, my God, we're going to run into some significant supply constraints. And, you know, I've been telling you this traveler and your listeners for for a number of years here now. And we knew that behind this, this this really this this wall of concern around the U.S. China trade war on the demand side with copper was these little fundamental issues on the supply. No one's been building mines way knowing they're building mines because copper prices have been too low. So now that that wall is veil has been lifted, people are focusing in on what does that line supply look like? And it looks horrible. I mean, copper stocks are at the lowest that they've been in close to a decade. I mean, you've got you know, again, this year there's going to be a deficit of supply. And, you know, there's that there's a very limited number of new mines coming online. And so, you know, having casino, which is a very economic mine, lots. I mean, we always say it's copper, gold and certainly no one gold. Fifteen hundred and copper is two bucks. It's a gold mine. But most sort of healthy commodity environments were mostly a copper mine. And, you know, having an asset like Casino in a location like northern Canada. It's a rare beast. It's it's a great asset and it's a very valuable thing. And certainly as copper comes up, I think we're gonna see a lot of attention around that. Like you said, we've seen it even pre the Israel results just on left of copper. You want to invest in copper. You like the junior mining space. You've got a very limited number of names. And I would argue we're at the top of that list.

Trevor Hall [00:15:42] Paul, thank you so much for your time. I look forward to seeing you and chatting with you again next month when I'm in Vancouver for the AME Roundup conference. I look forward to that. But until then. Happy holidays to you and your family. Happy New Year. And thank you so much for your update.

Paul West-Sells [00:15:59] Well, thank you. And the same to you. And I look forward to to seeing you at the end of January.

Trevor Hall [00:16:06] That's Paul West-Sells. He's the CEO of Western Copper and Gold, which trades on the TSX and the NYSE American with the symbol WRN.