High-grade gold intercepts and NZX listing: An interview with Santana Minerals' Sam Smith

High-grade gold intercepts and NZX listing: An interview with Santana Minerals’ Sam Smith

Santana Minerals Limited (ASX:SMI) Executive Director Sam Smith provides an update on the company, discussing the latest high-grade drill results from the Rise and Shine deposit and commenting on the company's recent listing on the New Zealand Stock Exchange.

Paul Sanger: I'm Paul Sanger for the Finance News Network, and today I'm talking to Santana Minerals (ASX:SMI). Santana Minerals, trading under the ASX Code "SMI' with a market cap of $250m, is a precious metal explorer focusing on the Bendigo-Ophir Project in New Zealand. Their vision is to develop the Bendigo-Ophir Project into a world-class long-life environmentally sustainable mining project that will bring generational employment and prosperity to the Bendigo region. Joining me today is Santana Executive Director, Sam Smith. Welcome back to the network, Sam.

Sam Smith: Hi, Paul. Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Paul Sanger: Now, Sam, you just released some drill results from your Rise and Shine deposit. Can you walk us through the assays, and what did they reveal?

Sam Smith: Yeah, sure. Yeah, we've just completed what we're calling a resource validation program at our Rise and Shine deposit. And just for a refresher, the Rise and Shine deposit is the main deposit at the Bendigo-Ophir project by far. There's 2.2 million ounces there in terms of a total resource at about 2.2g, 2.3g per tonne. So down the middle of the Rise and Shine, we call it "RAS", shortened it with an acronym, down the middle of RAS is a high-grade core, and it's about 40m thick on average, and it's about 150m wide. And it plunges down, well, so far it's tested to about 1.7km. The amount of resource that's drilled to an indicated higher definition quality is about 1.45 million ounces, and that's what we'll wrap our study around.

But this program that we just drilled was validating some of the sections inside that high-grade core. And it's always great that when you test your orebody where some of the best grades are, you drill a hole next to it, and it's continuous. So it was really testing the continuity. So some of the grades that came out of this program were around 35m at around 8g per tonne. And because our orebody dips quite flatly, these are close to true widths as well, so we don't have any kind of obscurity around drilling down a dip where the true width is a lot narrower than the actual intercept. So, more thick, juicy, high-grade intercepts.

And we actually released a couple more holes from this validation program a few weeks ago that had 40m at nearly 6g per tonne in this same zone as well. So what we're seeing now is almost an even higher-grade core within the high-grade core at RAS. So, again, that's what we'll focus on in our prefeasibility study that we're doing right now. So, you know, our initial starter pit, if you like, will plunge down on that zone that is shaping up to be a really, really high-grade, thick area of the deposit.

Paul Sanger: Fantastic. And I think you also announced that the campaign of infill drilling has also been completed at Shreks, and what's the update on this project?

Sam Smith: Yeah, so Shreks is a low-grade resource that has about 170,000 ounces, and it's about a kilometre away, one-and-a-half kilometres away from Rise and Shine. And while RAS is certainly the main event and what makes this project commercial scale, this little deposit outcrops on surface. So, even though it's lower grade, it has a very low strip ratio. And we just wanted to drill that deposit from inferred… It's currently in the inferred resource category, so we can't attribute it to any production forecasts in any sort of study. So we wanted to get it into the indicated category, so that's what we're doing at the moment. So a lot of that drilling has been done now, ready for the resource geologists to re-estimate it into an indicated category. But it's just shaping up to be what we thought it could be, and that's a complementary ore feed to Rise and Shine, particularly in the early stages of the project.

Paul Sanger: Fantastic. And Santana listed on the New Zealand Stock Exchange last week. I believe you were in Auckland for that. How did this go, and what's the rationale again? Remind us what the rationale is for the listing on the New Zealand exchange.

Sam Smith: Well, there's a couple of things happening there, Paul. One is that 40 per cent of our register are domiciled in New Zealand. So, we've got a lot of Kiwis on the register already, and we wanted to give them an opportunity to trade their stock in their own time zone, in their own currency, so we listed in New Zealand. It's also good to have a New Zealand-based project with the perception of New Zealand-based ownership, and that access to being able to trade Santana stock at home, if you like.

So, yeah, they gave us a really warm welcome. We rang the bell last Thursday. It was very exciting. We were worried about having liquidity on the exchange on day one, but we traded big volumes on day one over there, which is just testament to the appetite that New Zealanders have to participate in investing in a project in their own country. And this project has been touted as the single biggest discovery, or the most significant single discovery, should I say, in New Zealand in 40 years. And it's come along right at the right time. Again, we've drilled a lot of this deposit into indicated category, 1.4 million ounces, and we'll be completing this prefeasibility study at a time where the New Zealand government has changed and have introduced a fast track approvals bill, as I think I spoke about last time I was on here, Paul.

Paul Sanger: I'll ask a question about that in a second. And I guess the current gold price has not gone amiss with it, with New Zealand investors, and timing-wise, the stars aligned for that listing, and that's probably why you saw the volume.

Sam Smith: Yeah, that's right. Everything's aligned for us at this stage. I mean, this time last year, this project was undoubtedly a major discovery and was shaping up to go in the right direction. The gold price was continuing to climb. Again, the government changed, and now they're a pro-development government. And it was at a time where we had completed a lot of drilling to get our project to a maturity and a stage where it was ready to move into a development plan through the PFS and then DFS process. But, look, if we were just discovering this now, we'd have a long way to go to fit in under the government's new… I should say, potential, because the new fast track approvals bill has not been passed into legislation yet. That's slated for the end of this year, which is the exact same time that we're looking at finishing this PFS. So, when you say the stars aligned, all of that work happening in this political landscape at a time where the gold price is at an all-time high.

Paul Sanger: And Sam, you were obviously talking about the fast track bill that's under consideration by the New Zealand government at the moment. I also know that the Honourable Shane Jones, who's pushing this bill, was actually in Australia a few weeks ago. What do you make of that, and did you meet with him?

Sam Smith: We did meet with him. And what I make of that is that he is on the front line, encouraging and giving confidence to investors who potentially would provide the international capital required to build projects like this, giving them confidence that New Zealand is open for business again. And they're his words. I mean, of course the bill needs to be ratified, but all of the language that I'm hearing from Minister Jones, and he's supported by Chris Luxon, the Prime Minister in the coalition parliament over there, all of the language, and you can go online and see it, is that this thing, this fast track approvals bill, is highly supported and they'd like to get this ratified by the end of the year. And then they're looking at projects of national significance. We think that we're one of them. The engagement we've had with the minister would suggest nothing otherwise. And yes, we met with him when he was here in Perth, just early July, assisted him with meeting some of the investment community over here.

Paul Sanger: Yeah, I can see you were pretty shrewd now, getting that listing on the New Zealand stock exchange. Very clever.

Sam Smith: I guess you're implying that there might have been some political reasons for that, and that's just good optics, but genuinely, we have a lot of New Zealand shareholders who want to participate in the investment and growth of this project, and why wouldn't they? It's a very meaningful project for the country. And even on the ASX, what we're seeing is there's a lot of attention on this project right now. There's a lot of interest. We'll be at Diggers and Dealers next week with a speaking spot. Our CEO, Damian Spring, will be speaking and presenting to that forum. And it is the iconic conference in probably not just Australia, but globally, as I sit here in Perth, the epicentre of mining in Australia.

So, that's a really, really exciting opportunity for us. But yeah, we've just got a lot of eyeballs on this stock at the moment, and behind the scenes, yeah, it's just worth sharing that we have an active study team. And I was in a meeting this morning at 7am dialling into New Zealand, and the team, you know, is working really hard to get all of our environmental baseline studies completed by the end of the year for the permitting, and our mining engineers, study managers, working with all the consultants to get the mine plan in order to wrap up our PFS just in time for the fast track approvals bill, should it be ratified.

Paul Sanger: Got you. And just to finish off with, so what can we expect news flows-wise from both Rise and Shine and Shreks over the coming months?

Sam Smith: The guys are still completing a program at Shreks and Shreks East. They'll also be moving to another deposit called Come In Time, and that's another low grade, although low strip ratio deposit, only a kay and a half from Rise and Shine as well. So really it's about getting those satellite deposits into the indicated category as quickly as possible. Hopefully they all make it in time for the prefeasibility study to be included in the potential mill feed, but in many ways it's probably not going to matter anyway, because Rise and Shine is such a stellar project. And we suggested, if you like, in our scoping study, with the numbers associated with mining, just a half of the Rise and Shine deposit, the indicated proportion, which was 1.3 million ounces back then… Now it's 1.45, it's been upgraded. But the numbers are just so attractive mining that alone. So, the satellite, the low-grade satellite deposits are really just about having a complementary lower-grade feed that we can blend in at the right time with some of the higher-grade RAS materials. So, you'll see news flow coming out in relation to ongoing drilling and exploration around those satellite deposits, and then really the PFS later this year.

Paul Sanger: Fantastic. Sam, absolute pleasure, and thank you for sharing your insights on Santana Minerals today.

Sam Smith: Thank you. Thanks, Paul. See you next time.