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Metanor Revisited, Or, Still Mad About The Place
Wallace, Idaho – There is nothing quite so restorative to the soul as a return to Val d'Or, Quebec, which next only to the Silver Valley is the greatest hard-rock mining district in all of North America. And the only thing more restorative than a return visit to Val d'Or is running in to a couple of mining guys who made promises to us a year ago that they've not only kept, but kept ahead of schedule even while amping up the action.
So we're bent over a serious plate of locally-grown caviar and steak from nearby Sturgeon Falls at the Hotel Forestel – whence may be obtained the finest groceries and wine and accommodations in all of the Quebec Friveria and at McDonald's prices across the street from this giant open-pit mine of Cygna's – with Metanor Resources' president Serge Roy and Metanor's sparkplug development adviser, long-time partner and mine-builder Ghislain “Jesse” Morin, who are grinning like Cheshire cats. They're months ahead of the objectives they'd put before themselves a year ago, when we first visited their Bachelor Lake gold mine two hours north of Val d'Or in the lovely little burgh of Desmaraisville. Quite to the surprise of even people who've known Serge and Jessy all their lives, much more to the surprise of a Wallace skeptic like yours truly, Metanor will be in serious gold production by mid-summer 2007, not the entirely rational forecast of late 2007 they'd anticipated one year ago.
Mid-summer 2007. Why, that's a a few months from now. In the context of what is normally accepted in mining terms as “near-term,” mid-summer this year is damn near yesterday. The 600 t.p.d. Bachelor Lake's ball mill will turn its first revolutions in May while Roy and Morin and their crew shake down the mothballed concentrator, and by late June they'll be pouring dore bars at the start-up rate of 20,000 ounces of Au per year. Not bad, not bad indeed.
Promises notwithstanding, what we liked about Metanor a year ago in our original 11th July 2006 rant, “Mad About Metanor”, we still like: here is a company with a fully-diluted market cap of $15-20 million that owns a fully functional 600 tpd mill with a depreciated value of $27 million and a replacement value of $60 million, sitting out in the middle of a section of the Cadillac Fault with no competitors within 200 km, in a proven gold-rich district of underground and opencast mines, and with itself a gold resource in excess of 2 million ounces.
What jump-started Metanor's schedule was its purchase of 100% of the Barry gold deposit 65 km southeast of the Bachelor Lake mine and mill. The 500,000-ton, 60,000-ounce open-pit gold deposit is located in the Urban-Barry greenstone belt and, lacking much in the way of overburden, gives Metanor instant access to ore for their mill. Primary crushing will be done on-site, with secondary crushing and refining at the Bachelor Lake facility. The Barry property boasts an ore-to-waste ratio of a mere 1:1, meaning half of every bucket load they scoop up will be ore.
“Production from the Barry property will give us immediate cash flow to further develop the huge underground potential at Bachelor Lake,” Morin told us. Metanor acquired the property for a mere C$450k cash, 416,700 shares and a 4.5% NSR.
Late last week, Metanor advanced its mop-up of gold properties contiguous to Bachelor Lake by acquiring another 63 adjacent claims covering 2,787 hectares. The mining claims purchased cover the rock horizon which hosts the Coniagas Mine which produced, until 1967, more than 700,000 tonnes of ore averaging 10.7% Zn, 1.0% Pb and 5.3 oz/t Ag. Details of the transaction may be read on MTO's website here.
The upside and the downside of Metanor is that absolutely nobody knows about them and, at C$0.68, they are priced accordingly. (Well, nobody outside of the Abitibi mining district of northwestern Quebec, that is. It's salutary that a goodly share of MTO's shares are held by local residents who have faith in Roy and Morin and in fellow director and Val d'Or denizen Yves Gagnon. Directors and institutions hold more than 50% of the stock, so there ain't much float.) But that “nobody knows about 'em” part is about to change. Roy told us that this year, with their land position now in place and the mill ready to fire up, MTO's principals will be out on the stump, in Europe and in North America, hitting the gold shows and spreading the word.
So the table is set and the meal is cooked. Only now, then, will the sign out front of that little mill in Desmaraisville, Quebec, advertise that they're open for business. Which, in our way of thinking, is the right order of doing things. MTO has rock in the box. Watch 'em rock.
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