U.S. Gold Corp. (NASDAQ: USAU): Gold-Copper-Silver-Zinc in Wyoming, and Keystone Gold Exploration on the Cortez Trend in Nevada; Interview with Edward Karr, President & CEO
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By Dr. Allen Alper, PhD Economic Geology and Petrology, Columbia University, NYC, USA
on 3/20/2019
U.S. Gold Corp. (NASDAQ: USAU) is a U.S. focused junior gold exploration and development company with two flagship assets: The Copper King gold-copper-silver-zinc project located in Southeast Wyoming, and the early stage Keystone exploration property on the Cortez Trend in Nevada, 10 miles south of Barrick Gold's Cortez Hills Mine. We learned from Edward Karr, President, CEO and Director of U.S. Gold Corp., that Copper King's PEA shows a pretty robust resource with $178 million NPV, and IRR of approximately 33%. According to Mr. Karr, 2018 was a transformative year for their Keystone property, where they are potentially very close to making a discovery.
U.S. Gold Corp. Keystone property, Nevada
Dr. Allen Alper: This is Dr. Allen Alper, Editor-in-Chief of Metals News, interviewing Edward Karr, President, CEO and Director of U.S. Gold Corp. Could you give our readers/investors an update on what's been going on since the last time we interviewed? Also for the benefit of the thousands of new readers/investors, who have joined us since our last interview, could you give us an overview of your Company?
Edward Karr: Sure, I'd be happy to, Allen. Thank you so much for having us back on. We appreciate the interest. U.S. Gold Corp. is a junior exploration company, listed on the NASDAQ, we trade under the symbol USAU. Our focus is on gold exploration in the United States. We have two projects in the Company. Our flagship development stage project is Copper King, located in the state of Wyoming. It is a gold/copper/silver/zinc porphyry deposit. Copper King has a preliminary economic assessment, technical report, that was done on the deposit and it shows a pretty robust resource. The project currently has a 178 million dollar net present value and the internal rate of return is approximately 33 percent, at $1275 gold and $2.80 copper
USAU’s second project is an exploration district in Nevada on the Cortez trend. It is located 10 miles south of Barrick Gold's Cortez Hills Mine. The district is called Keystone. Keystone is very early stage. We have no defined resource there. In fact, we don't even really have a discovery hole yet. However, the project was identified and consolidated by a very well-known Nevada geologist, Dave Mathewson. We've been hard at work at Keystone for the last couple years and we believe we are very close to potentially making a discovery.
Dr. Allen Alper: Well that sounds excellent. Could you tell our readers/investors a bit more of about your latest drilling program?
Edward Karr: Absolutely. We put out a press release, Al, on the sixth of March 2019, where we released our 2018 drilling results at Keystone. Last year was a very transformative year for us at Keystone. We drilled, in two phases, a total of 15 holes. Over the summer we drilled an initial nine hole program. Our Keystone project, is quite large in size; 12 thousand acres, 650 claims, about 20 square miles. It is roughly six and a half miles long by just over three miles wide. It's a good size district. We've been working from an exploration standpoint in the district off five NOI permits. The NOIs are notices of intent and each NOI gave us up to five acres of disturbance. Disturbance is the amount of roads and the drill pads. We have only had 25 acres of disturbance in our 12 thousand acre land package that we've been working on for the last several years.
That historic permitting situation has been very limiting for us at U.S. Gold Corp. At the beginning of 2017, we filed an environmental assessment and applied to the BLM, the Bureau of Land Management, to get approval for our plan of operations. We announced that we received the approval on our plan of operations in September last year, 2018. That was a very transformative event for U.S. Gold Corp. because that approved plan of operations now opens up our entire 12 thousand acre district to us for exploration. We can now get to areas of the property we could never get to before and approach targets we could never get access to previously.
Gold exploration is a process. We have been following this methodical model driven process over the last several years. We have done multiple geophysical surveys. We've done gravity surveys, IP surveys and CSAMT surveys. We've done a lot of geochemistry: soil samples and rock samples. We've drilled multiple scout holes throughout the district. We are now beginning to understand the geology of Keystone. Our team has done a tremendous amount of mapping. We sponsored a master's thesis to date the age of the intrusives at Keystone.
Never before has there been this modern, scientific, model-driven, academic approach to exploration in the Keystone district, and we did all this last year. Now we are starting to understand the property, the district, where the best targets for gold deposits are emerging. Ultimately we need to get out and drill those targets. The plan of operations was a transformative event for U.S. Gold Corp. Once we got that approval at the end of September, we started to build and design our Fall 2018 drilling program. Dave Mathewson, Ken Coleman, and our entire technical team laid out about 10 different targets, we had hoped to get to. By the time we got the archeological sign off it was the end of October 2018, and we didn't get the drill rig out on the property until early November 2018.
We started drilling the target holes at Keystone in November 2018. We are drilling these holes down to an average depth of about 2000 feet, so each hole takes about a week. By right around the end of December, the snows came to Nevada. The Keystone property is at elevation, and we had to demobilize due to the winter snows. We were only able to drill six targeted holes. We didn't get to all the targets in 2018. We have just recently press released the results. Those six target holes were the second phase of the 2018 drilling program.
And what are the results, overall? What does it look like? Well, the goal for us, and I think what all of our shareholders and followers would like to see, is for U.S. Gold Corp. to come up with a real discovery hole. That means to drill into one of the high-grade feeder zones that are very indicative of Carlin-type deposits. We know these high-grade feeder zones are out there. All of the indications that we are seeing from our drill program show us how prospective this property is. Incredible host rocks, pathfinders and all of the associated metals you would see, with a big gold system are there. Brecciation, alteration and some of the strongest alteration that Dave Mathewson has seen in Nevada are present at Keystone. There are multiple intrusives that date to the same age as the Cortez Hills deposit to the north. Our stratigraphy looks very similar to the world class deposits north of us. The limestone host rocks at Keystone are really baked and beat up, and it looks very prospective.
In our drilling in the phase two Fall 2018 drilling, some of our drill holes encountered some nice gold intercepts, small intercepts of significant gold assays, up to potentially economic grade assays. This makes us believe the big deposits are out there, hidden in the shadows at Keystone. Every single hole we have drilled so far in the district has had anomalous gold. Now with these small intercepts of higher grade assays, we strongly believe, from a couple of our holes from last year that we are probably right on the edge of a significant discovery, right in the halo of something. This will be a major focus of our efforts in 2019.
Dr. Allen Alper: Exciting! Very encouraging! What are your plans for 2019?
Edward Karr: In 2019, we are going to follow up on those 2018 drill holes since we had hoped to get to 10 holes, but we only got to six because of permitting and weather constraints. Gold exploration is an iterative process. Every hole you drill provides more information. We will look closely through those assays right now, because it's wintertime in Nevada and we are meticulously studying all the data. We will go back and re-examine, not only to the 15 holes we drilled in 2018, but all the holes we have drilled at Keystone. We look at all the previous drill holes in conjunction with the updated geophysics, the updated geochemistry, the geology, the updated mapping, our master's thesis on dating the intrusives, and we put all those data sets together to synthesize new targets. That is what Dave Mathewson and Ken Coleman are working on right now.
At some point in the future will put out a press release. We will tell the market exactly what we plan to do at Keystone in 2019, with regards to an exploration update. We will provide some maps, with specific drill targets, so everyone can see exactly where we plan to go this year.
Dr. Allen Alper: That sounds excellent. Could you refresh the memory of our readers/investors on your background, Dave's and your Team’s?
Edward Karr: In addition to being President and CEO of U.S. Gold Corp. I have a lot of experience on Boards of publicly traded companies. I've raised a lot of capital for the junior mining and exploration space. I'm on the Board of a couple other publicly traded exploration and mining companies. Dave Mathewson is one of the preeminent Nevada early-stage gold exploration, generative geologists out there. He has a 50-year career. He formerly ran exploration for Newmont Mining in Nevada. Ken Coleman is our project geologist at Keystone. He has a lot of experience. Right before we hired him, he was working for Barrick Gold as a project geologist.
Dr. Allen Alper: That's excellent. That's a great background that you and your team have and a great balance between exploration and finance. That's excellent! Could you tell our readers/investors a little bit about your capital structure?
Edward Karr: We currently have at U.S. Gold Corp. just over 19 million shares currently issued and outstanding. It's all common stock. There are no ratchets or resets or anything like that. We currently have no debt. It's a very plain vanilla capitalization table. Our stock price is somewhere around, the 85 to 90 cent range. We are trading on the NASDAQ with about a 17 million dollar market cap. On our last filing, we showed just over 3 million dollars in cash, which means a 14 million dollar enterprise value on U.S. Gold Corp, with a project like Copper King that has a verifiable, substantial resource there. The last thing I would like to point out on the equity side is that management and insiders are significant shareholders in the company. And we also have a lot of shareholders in the company and following the company.
Dr. Allen Alper: Well that sounds excellent. It is important for insiders in a company to have skin in the game. It gives other investors confidence. Could you tell our readers/investors the primary reasons they should consider investing in your company, in US Gold Corp?
Edward Karr: I think the primary reasons are, number one, we believe, as management in the company, we are undervalued. We believe that our Copper King project alone more than justifies our current market capitalization. Number two, we are traded on the NASDAQ, a major US regulated exchange. We have decent liquidity. Number three, our projects are all in safe, US jurisdictions. We are trying to make mining great again in America. This is not discoveries in Africa or very northern Canada, where there is no infrastructure. This is all in the United States. And we have a very experienced management team. We have done this several times. We believe that we are close to discovery success at Keystone. And we're also quite excited about the upside potential for our Copper King project in Wyoming.
Dr. Allen Alper: Well that sounds excellent. Very strong reasons for our readers/investors to consider investing in U.S. Gold Corp. Ed, is there anything else you'd like to add?
Edward Karr: I would say, Al, if anyone wants to get additional information they can go to our website. That is www.usgoldcorp.gold. On the website you can register for news and for updates. There is a lot of information there. Continue to watch the Company. We really feel strongly that the gold exploration sector in general is getting a lot more notoriety, especially with the Barrick Gold, Newmont joint venture of their Nevada operations. 2019 could be a pretty decent year for the sector and we are trying every day at U.S. Gold Corp. to bring discovery success for our shareholders, so we can create a lot of shareholder value.
Dr. Allen Alper: That sounds excellent. Do you have anything to add?
Edward Karr: Just to thank you for interviewing us for Metals News. I appreciate it.
Dr. Allen Alper: We’ll publish your press releases as they come out so our readers/investors can follow your progress.
https://www.usgoldcorp.gold/
U.S. Gold Corp. Investor Relations:
+1-800-557-4550
ir@usgoldcorp.gold
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