Gold Standard Ventures Corp. (NYSE AMERICAN: GSV, TSX: GSV): Advanced Stage Gold Exploration, Focused on Carlin Trend District Scale Discoveries in Nevada; Interview with William Gehlen, Manager of Corporate Development
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By Dr. Allen Alper, PhD Economic Geology and Petrology, Columbia University, NYC, USA
on 8/20/2019
Gold Standard Ventures Corp. (NYSE AMERICAN: GSV, TSX: GSV) is an advanced stage gold exploration company focused on district scale discoveries on its Railroad-Pinion Project, located within the prolific Carlin Trend in Nevada. We learned from William Gehlen, manager of corporate development of Gold Standard Ventures Corp., that currently they are advancing three high-grade deposits, within the Railroad project: the North Bullion area, the Dark Star area, and the Pinion area. The Pinion Deposit and the Dark Star Deposit host NI 43-101 compliant, near-surface, oxide gold resources, with potential near-term development options. Plans for the remainder of 2019 include upcoming PFS and resource update on the Dark Star and Pinion deposits. According to Mr. Gehlen, the Company's vast exploration package has the geological ability to host multimillion ounce deposit discoveries in the future.
North Dark Star Deposit with Newmont’s Emigrant Mine in the distance.
Dr. Allen Alper: This is Dr. Allen Alper, Editor-in-Chief of Metals News, interviewing William T. Gehlen, who is Manager of Corporate Development for Gold Standard Ventures Corp. Bill, could you give our readers/investors an overview of Gold Standard Ventures Corp.?
William Gehlen: Certainly. Gold Standard Ventures is a junior mining company, with assets in Nevada. Particularly, we have assets in the major gold belts of Nevada. Our most outstanding asset is the Railroad-Pinon project. It's been around for a while, but Gold Standard Ventures became involved about 2009 and pulled together a very large position. It's more like having a regional district of targets.
Over the years, the group has done exploration and made numerous discoveries and upgraded previously known mineral occurrences in the area. Our flagship deposit, which we discovered a few years ago, is the Dark Star Deposit.
Dr. Allen Alper: Could you tell our readers/investors a little more about the Dark Star Deposit?
William Gehlen: Dark Star is a Carlin style system, hosted in younger stratigraphic units up-section from the more traditional host units at our Pinion gold deposit. At Pinion, gold mineralization is hosted in Mississippian and Devonian carbonate rocks, the same units that host much of the gold mineralization at Newmont’s Rain deposit located to the north. These younger Pennsylvanian/Permian age units were not commonly known to host Carlin style gold deposits. Exploration in these younger units was not pursued as widely in the past. Obviously, people looked there, but they didn't recognize the particular depositional environment that lead to favorable carbonate host rock facies. Also, being within the Carlin Trend itself, having similar age Tertiary intrusive and widespread gold mineralization is of key importance. The combination of these host rocks, the right Carlin style hydrothermal fluids, emplacement in specific structural corridors can result in a very high-grade mineral deposit. The trick is to find them.
We have a project that has nearly 50 kilometers of strike length of favorable structural corridors that have been shown locally to have potential to host gold mineralization. It's been a good problem to have, but it’s difficult always to focus correctly. When we finally drilled out the Dark Star deposit and evaluated our discovery, it added to our knowledge base of the district and this lead to us recognizing the expanded opportunities in all dimensions.
The original Railroad discovery back in 2011, was called North Bullion. It's rather deep, but it’s a high-grade sulfide deposit similar to the Rain deposit and other deep high-grade deposits located in the main Carlin trend itself. The Bullion deposit is still there and still open. We're going to drill on it again this year.
At the bottom of Dark Star, we've passed out of the oxide zone, at about 400 meters depth, and into a high-grade sulfide zone. Early on this year, in our exploration program, we're going to try to chase that high-grade sulfide mineralization deeper.
There are quite a few different potential stratigraphic and structural traps in the corridor, under the Dark Star Deposit, that we will be testing. The holes will be rather deep tests to see if high-grade mineralization has been localized in any of them.
Dr. Allen Alper: Do you have any feel for how expensive your projects are? What kind of resources you're dealing with?
William Gehlen: We have three resource areas, the North Bullion, the Dark Star, and the Pinion. Our resource numbers are a little out of date. Pinion was updated in March 2017. Its minimum inventory was 31.61 million tons graded .62 grams, totaling about 630,000 ounces in an indicated category. We have an inferred resource 61.08 million tons graded at .5 grams per ton. That totals a little over 1 million ounces. However, that's before our 2018 infill step out program. We're just in the process of finishing up the resource estimates on the Pinion deposit. It will be coming out in a PSF study probably in late September.
Dark Star is the key deposit. It hosts, as of June 29th, 2016, an indicated resource of 15.38 million tons at .54 pulling 265,000 ounces and an inferred resource of 17.5 million tons, graded 1.31 grams per ton, totaling about 715,000 ounces. That also is a 2017 estimate. We drilled approximately 430 holes last year or 78,000 meters. Only 92 of those holes were exploration holes. The rest were infill and step out holes. A total of about 50,000 meters of close space definition drilling and infill. The results of that will be the basis of our upcoming PFS and resource update. It will be coming out here shortly.
The last deposit is the North Bullion deposit, it's a deep high-grade sulfide, although there is a component of oxide to that. The mineral resource there is 2.92 million tons graded at .96 grams, totaling about 90,000 ounces. In inferred category of 10.97 million tons grading 2.28 grams per ton for about 800,000 ounces. This is an interesting deposit. There's a high-grade core. It's structurally very similar to many of the other underground Carlin deposits located up north. We like to use Rain as an analogy on a nearby and similar structural trend.
Two years ago, we stepped out along the northwest North Bullion trend and hit a significant intercept. This year we're going to be following up that intercept about 300 meters northwest from our known resource area. We are hopeful that the mineralization continues along this structural corridor and our drilling will be a significant stepping out along this trend.
That makes up the basis of our reported resources, but we have several earlier stage targets with developing resources, Jasperoid Wash and Dixie, which have never had estimates conducted and require additional drilling and expansion. This year we're also exploring some other new wildcat targets based on high grade surface gold mineralization that we discovered. It'll be interesting to see what happens with that.
We recently initiated a fundraising. We now have about 21 million in our bank. That will definitely get us through the completion of our PFS and will get us through our current budgeted exploration program. Our drilling program this year is going to be mainly exploration drilling with our total meterage breaking down to be 72% exploration and only 28% for the development program.
Dr. Allen Alper: That sounds excellent. Could you tell our readers/investors a little about your Directors and Officers? Also, your background Bill.
William Gehlen: I'm an exploration geologist. I have over 40 years’ experience in mineral exploration. My first 15-20 years were mostly based out of Nevada, working in the Western US, much of it in and around the Carlin Trend in the 1980s-90s. Later in my career, I stepped out of the US and was involved with copper and gold exploration throughout Latin America. I was with a company called Pacific Rim, which was taken over by OceanaGold. OceanaGold moved me to Canada, to be part of their corporate development group. Being with that group, I recognized Gold Standard Ventures as an opportunity and OceanaGold became the first major corporate investor in Gold Standard Ventures around 2015. Since then I've come to work for Gold Standard Ventures.
Our CEO, John Awde, is an excellent markets guy. He gets full credit for recognizing this opportunity in 2009d, putting all the land together, and getting the project funded year after year. He put high quality people in charge of the project. He's the reason this project exists. He saw the opportunity when no one else did.
Our Chairman is Bruce McLeod. He's also a well-known mining entrepreneur in this industry.
We also have on our Board; Bill Threlkeld, Ron Clayton, Jamie Strauss, Robert McLeod, and last but not least, Alex Morrison and Zara Boldt. All these people have past extensive development and exploration experience, especially Mr. Clayton and Mr. Morrison. We're hoping to utilize their talents in the future, if and when the Railroad-Pinion Project, more specifically the South Railroad Project, as it’s called in the PFS, goes to a production decision.
Dr. Allen Alper: That sounds like you have a very experienced accomplished team and you have a great background. It's a wonderful team. Could you tell our readers/investors a little about your share structure and capital structure?
William Gehlen: Yes, we have approximately, fully diluted, about 286.8 million shares outstanding. There are no warrants on that. We're listed on the New York and TSX. These figures I'm giving you are approximations, at this point, because we just finished a major fundraising and it hasn't closed quite yet. These are the approximations based on our preliminary information. Our major shareholders are, in order, OceanaGold who owns about 14.7%, Goldcorp/Newmont who owns about 12.8%, FCMI who owns about 11.1%, and now we have a long list of retail institutional ownership, including Van Eck associates, Black rock, Ingalls Fidelity, JP Morgan, Tocqueville.....it's a pretty long list. We have a very good following in that regard. Only about 17% of our shareholders are retail investors and Management controls about 5%.
Dr. Allen Alper: Sounds like great support! Very notable strong companies! Could you tell our readers/investors the primary reasons they should consider investing in Gold Standard Ventures?
William Gehlen: First of all, we have an unparalleled future gold deposit located in the Nevada, the Dark Star Deposit. We have already identified additional valuable resources that will someday be developed and potentially mined, I have no doubt about that. We have an exploration property package, which is large and has the geological characteristics to host multi-million ounce deposit discoveries with continued exploration.
Right now we're just scratching the surface, literally! So far we've been exploring based on surface outcrops that contain Carlin style geochemistry and/or gold mineralization. We've been very successful and will probably continue to be so. However, based on the extent of favorable structural corridor, the extent of alteration and geochemistry, the fact that favorable structure and stratigraphy continue at depth and because we are located in the fourth Tertiary intrusive cored window of the Carlin Gold Belt, there is potential to find unique, high-grade, multi-million ounce ore bodies at depth on our property. We often use the Leeville deposit as an example. It was a long time before Newmont drilled to depth beneath their surface operations. Fortunately, some of the people responsible for those discoveries now work for us. Our property, unlike many other carbonate-hosted deposits throughout the western U.S., actually is located on a major, proven deposit trend. It's been identified by Academics and the USGS and proven by discovery. We have a huge land position. Probably one of the best land positions in the western United States. We have a senior team that has been very successful. They're mostly ex Newmont and Barrick folk, who actually made discoveries and operated mines in the Carlin area. We have a significant treasury and shareholder following. We're going to have significant exploration news flow coming out this year. And we obviously have the PFS coming out in the near future, which will be of huge interest to the market.
We have new resource estimates, coming out for Dark Star and Pinion. We didn't talk about this, but we have another property in Nevada, called the Lewis Property. It’s on the Battle Mtn. – Eureka Gold Trend and it adjoins the Nevada JV Phoenix deposit. Our property is actually in the hanging wall of the Phoenix pit proposed expansion. We're going to complete a NI43-101 compliant resource estimate on the Virgin zone, an oxide gold deposit at surface, later this year. The fact is, we have a strong exploration program, and a growing number of good exploration targets. These are outlined and described on our website. We also go to many of the conferences and shows, which gives us more opportunities to talk to people directly. So, I think there's a lot of news flow that's going to come out on Gold Standard Ventures in the near term.
Dr. Allen Alper: Gold Stand Adventures Corp. is an amazing company, amazing opportunity. An amazing and great team! Great support! Sounds like you have everything going for you.
William Gehlen: Yes, we hope so. Only time will tell, but there're many places you could explore and we're in a really good position. We have a lot of things on our side.
Dr. Allen Alper: Sounds excellent. Is there anything else you'd like to add Bill?
William Gehlen: That pretty much covers it. Thank you for interviewing Gold Standard Ventures Corp. for Metals News. Keep your ears and eyes open. You'll be hearing more news from us, assuming a good positive news flow and many new discoveries.
Dr. Allen Alper: That sounds excellent. We’ll publish your press releases as they come out so our readers/investors can follow your progress.
https://www.goldstandardv.com/
Jonathan Awde
President
Tel: 604-669-5702
Email: info@goldstandardv.com
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