Idaho Copper (OTC: COPR) is focused on copper exploration and development in Idaho, USA. The Company owns the CuMo Project, a copper-molybdenum-silver deposit with a significant resource. The deposit is considered one of the top five undeveloped copper projects in the Americas and the largest undeveloped molybdenum project globally. The project is located in a mining-friendly state with good infrastructure and no significant environmental issues.
Idaho Copper is currently conducting technical studies, including ore sorting tests, to optimize the project’s economics and reduce capital expenditure. The Company plans to prepare an updated preliminary economic assessment (PEA) report in the first half of 2024 and proceed to a pre-feasibility study (PFS) thereafter. The ultimate goal is to obtain project financing and begin construction before the end of the decade.
Podcast Transcript
Paul Harris (00:16): Hello and welcome back to Mining Stock Daily with me, Paul Harris. Today we’re talking about copper exploration and development in the United States,] in Idaho specifically, and I have great pleasure to be joined by Andrew Brodkey, who is COO of Idaho Copper. Andrew, good morning.
Andrew Brodkey (COO, Idaho Copper) (00:33): Good afternoon to you, Paul.
Paul Harris (00:35): Well, let’s start off at the beginning. Tell us a little bit about Idaho Copper. It’s a relatively recently created company. Tell us how that company came about and its recent history.
Andrew Brodkey (COO, Idaho Copper) (00:48): Well, the Company itself until January or February this year was a wholly owned subsidiary of a parent company, traded on the Toronto Venture Exchange, and that company went through several iterations. Today it’s called Multi Metals Development Corporation. We were created as Idaho CuMo Mining Corporation, actually International CuMo, and in February of this year, we split off from that Canadian parent and merged with a reverse takeover on the OTC exchange with an existing shell company. That company then became Idaho Copper Corporation, which is the entity today. So we’re traded under the symbol COPR for copper on the OTC pink sheets, hopefully very soon graduating to the OTC QB plan. Next year is to access the more senior exchanges in the United States, either the NASDAQ or the NYSE AMEX. But the Company itself has really, I think was created as an Idaho Corporation back about the year 2005 or 2006. I’m not exactly sure, and that company owns the actual project, which we’re going to talk about in a couple of minutes.
Paul Harris (02:03): Thank you for that potted summary. Andrew did a much better job than I could have done there. Now the project is, as you said, is CuMo, and that’s a copper-molybdenum-gold deposit in Idaho in the USA. Now, on your corporate presentation, you’ve talked about the very modest aspects there that it’s a massive project, outstanding economics. So let’s focus first on the deposit. You, you’ve got an existing resource. You’ve got a 2020 preliminary economic assessment on that, and that talks about a base case of 2.3 billion tons containing what, 3.8 billion pounds of copper, 1.6 billion pounds of molybdenum, and about, let’s say 166 million ounces of silver. So face value, it sounds like you’ve got a very sizeable resource there.
Andrew Brodkey (COO, Idaho Copper) (02:51): It is huge, and massive is the word that I always use, Paul, when I’m talking about the project. This is among copper projects, among the top five undeveloped projects in the Americas in terms of contained copper that we’ve identified so far. But I’m lumping in copper that’s in the measured and indicated resource category, the numbers you just expressed along with the indicated. Hopefully, all the indicated numbers, which are basically double what you talked about on the M&I, will come into being ultimately measured and indicated and then go into our proven and probable reserve at some point in the future. But again, it’s among the top five undeveloped copper projects in the US and actually in all the Americas, and probably, we believe it to be the largest undeveloped molybdenum project globally in the actual world. So it’s a gigantic project, huge life, economics look good. We can get into as much detail as you would like, but the long and short of it is it’s in a great location. It’s in a state in the US, Idaho that’s very pro-mining. It’s in a decent location in terms of being about 30 miles, 35 miles north of the city of Boise. Boise is the capital of the state of Idaho. Big workforce availability, infrastructure availability, everything you would ask for in a project, and very importantly, there’s no outstanding legacy, environmental damage, anything that hampers a lot of other projects that would otherwise be an impediment to us, it doesn’t exist. So we’re very, very positive on the project.
Paul Harris (04:25): Okay. Tell us a little bit more about the deposit. You say it’s the mineralization is hosted in narrow stock work veins that measured an indicated resource. I mentioned 0.08% copper, 0.06%, molybdenum, 2.5 grams per ton gold. That seemed to be sort of very low grade.
Andrew Brodkey (COO, Idaho Copper) (04:47): Yeah, and by the way, silver, not gold.
Paul Harris (04:48): Oh yeah, sorry, silver.
Andrew Brodkey (COO, Idaho Copper) (04:49): We don’t have any, the gold we have is just basically barely traceable. But the idea here is that the in-situ grades, as you note, aren’t really that high. They’re really nothing to write home about. But the key to this project is, ore sorting, this is a copper porphyry, I guess you’d call it classically a porphyry, but it doesn’t really represent itself as a garden variety porphyry where the mineralization is somewhat evenly distributed throughout the host rock. Here we have specific fractures upon which thin veins went through with mineralization. The hence for the geologists that would listen to this, it’s a stock work vein system, as you described from our corporate presentation. What this allows us to do, Paul, is to easily visually separate the veins, which carry the metals of interest, carry up to 90% of the metals of interest, from the waste rock, which is much lighter colors.
So you’ve got these clearly mineralized metal-carrying veins that are discernible in all the cores that we’ve seen and easily mineable and separable from the waste. So SRK in the 2020 preliminary economic assessment that you mentioned that’s referenced in our corporate presentation. SRK assumed that we could only eliminate a certain percentage of the waste, I think they use a 28% number. We’re doing current studies on, ore sorting, ore sorting being a very proven technology, been around for 40 years, but it’s been advanced to the point where it’s very, very useful in many aspects in eliminating ore from waste, and that’s the key to making this project work, because it’s not the in situ grade. If you look at the in situ grade, again, it’s not fantastic, but if you can get the head grade to the concentrator, to the mill, up to a level where it is much more robust and decrease the size of your concentrator, you’ve made great progress.
And that’s the whole point of what we’re trying to do with this project, which again, lends itself very, very clearly to ore sorting. What we want to do, and we’re in the middle of testing now, this year, is we’re scanning all of our core again, to about a one-and-a-half-centimeter intervals to determine exactly what the in situ grades are in the core. Then we’re going to take that material to a very reputable ore sorting firm that actually has technology that has sensors at the level of the mine face. So when the shovel picks up the material, it goes through sensors, and that will be, that will actually allow you to be able to distinguish between what’s ore and what’s waste, and we’ll set what those parameters are. We’ll also be using secondary ore sorting, by the way, that’s XRF, X-ray diffraction type sensors.
We’ll probably be using some permeable type of additional ore sorting once the ore has been separated from the waste, so that when you put the ore fraction onto a conveyor, it can distinguish between what we will set as parameters for high-grade, low-grade, and medium-grade. The end result of all this is really to come to, the main point here is that, SRK in 2020 proposed that we build a concentrator of the size of 150,000 tons per day because it was receiving a considerable amount of waste, along with the ore. We know we can do a lot better than that, I guess you would call it the ideal amount, the optimal amount of elimination of waste is more like 84 or 85%. So instead of building a concentrator at 150,000 tons a day, we can bring it down to the 25 or 30,000 tons per day input level. What that does to the capital is amazing. So again, going back to the SRK document of 2020, they estimated that the capital will build the project, again, this was a PEA, was about 3.1 billion. My aim is to bring that under a billion. Still, it’s a massive project. It’s big, but we’re going to make great strides on reducing CapEx and OpEx.
Paul Harris (09:08): Okay. To what extent has all sorting for molybdenum changed or improved? Because in the PEA, you refer to SRK basically said this technology isn’t proven for molybdenum. A lot more test work needs to be done to be able to determine whether all sorting can work with molybdenum at the grades that you have in the CuMo deposit.
Andrew Brodkey (COO, Idaho Copper) (09:33): Well, as we have a zone deposit, we have three specific zones that need to be considered. We have an upper zone, which is a copper-silver zone. Then we have a mixed zone in the deposit, which is copper-molybdenum, and then finally you get to the moly (molybdenum) itself, which is sort of the core of the deposit, the center zone. We know from the test work that’s been done already that we can differentiate between based on either copper or molybdenum, we can understand what’s going on. The ore sorting has advanced to the point where it’s obviously usable on copper. Many mines throughout the world, many very large mines, very large producers are using ore sorting for copper-based input. But we’re also very confident that it will work even on the molybdenum-only zone. It’s not quite as advanced, but it does provide enough information for us to be able to at least come to this preliminary conclusion that it’ll work on all the mineralization that we have.
Paul Harris (10:34): Okay. It’s interesting you’re talking about the, let’s say the donation of the deposit. Unfortunately, we can’t see that because your corporate presentation, your website, you don’t have any maps, plans cross sections or anything like that for us to myself or other people to try and get an understanding of what you’ve got. Why is that?
Andrew Brodkey (COO, Idaho Copper) (10:54): Well, there is a presentation on ore sorting and actually using our core, so you can access that.
Paul Harris (11:01): No, I mean, there’s no maps or plans of the deposit, or the sections of the deposit.
Andrew Brodkey (COO, Idaho Copper) (11:06): Oh, I’m sorry. We’re at a preliminary stage. I think that as we progress and do some more work, we have some more drilling to accomplish before I think we can come to the final conclusion about what this is going to look like. In fact, nobody knows what the final mine plan will be until we go into a bankable feasibility study, but if you’re suggesting that there isn’t enough information on the site, I would say that it’s easy for us to supplement and give people a better idea of what we’ve got. So I’ll go back and take a look at that. We’re not hiding anything, but again, everything is just at the PEA stage, so people need to understand that a PEA is kind of plus or minus 40% on costs and everything else, and it’s not a definitive final mine plan. So I think ultimately we’re going to be able to show the resource in a way that people can play with the block model, but we haven’t got enough information yet to be able to post that in a meaningful way for people to, if you will, jockey with.
Paul Harris (12:08): Well, it sounds like you are planning to, with the things you are testing and studying at the moment, you’re planning on making very big changes to the project, to the project envisioned in that 2020 PEA. As you say, if you’re able to reduce the size of the concentrator, I mean, that’s a massive reduction in the size of the concentrator, and as you pointed out, that would have a very, very substantial impact in the initial capital to build the project. The PEA also talked about how you’d be looking at developing a large open pit, and also you’d need an offsite or a roaster for the molybdenum. What’s the thinking there? Because as you mentioned, you’re what, 30, 35 miles from Boise. I imagine a lot of the residents in Boise wouldn’t necessarily be thrilled at having a large open pit and a molybdenum roaster just beyond their doorstep.
Andrew Brodkey (COO, Idaho Copper) (13:00): Well, a couple of things. Let’s talk about the open pit first. It is a massive mine. We are looking at a pit that’s probably as much as 3000 feet deep. We’re looking also though, because we’re located in an area, you can’t see this project from Boise. A lot of other projects shouldn’t say a lot, but some projects in the US do suffer from the quote, aesthetic effect. They are too close to communities. You can’t see this project from the city of Boise. There are three or four mountain ranges sort of interceding, so that’s not going to be an issue. It will be an open pit, but we aren’t in groundwater, so there shouldn’t be any hydrological issues, no connection to the local streams and groundwater. That issue has been litigated, and the science in the end will, I think, prove us right on that issue. Although you always get pushback from NGOs and people that want to make arguments against your project, it’s just natural on the issue of the molybdenum roaster.
We haven’t decided yet whether we’re going to go that route. It’s very possible that we’ll just end up making, in addition to a copper concentrate, we’ll make a moly (molybdenum) concentrate and ship that to one of the existing roasters. There’s a couple in the, not on the East Coast, but in the eastern part of the country, and have the flexibility to build our own roaster. If we make that decision, we’ll put it in an industrial area, probably. There are a couple of options that are in and around the Boise metro area, but not near the city itself, where there are some, I think, some good opportunities to put that in, if we decide to do it later on. But it’s another capital expense that we currently aren’t providing for, and I’m not looking at as being part of our updated preliminary economic assessment because moly (molybdenum) roaster plus or minus $300 million. Don’t know whether that’s something we’re actually going to get into, but I think our updated, we’ll wait for our PFS to that decision.
Paul Harris (14:51): When is the approximate date you’re thinking of the PFS?
Andrew Brodkey (COO, Idaho Copper) (14:57): Well, the updated preliminary economic assessment, which will be principally based on two things, the implementation of the optimal numbers from the ore sorting exercise we’re going through today, plus the different metal prices, which have increased substantially since the 2020 PEA. That’ll give us new economics. We’ll also revise our block model to take into account in each block, each 10,000-ton block, what percentage of ore sorting actually can be addressed and inputted to that particular block. So we’ll have a new resource essentially established, but it’ll be an economically based resource rather than a grade-based resource. Most mines end up coming in and developing based on initial grade. We are going to develop and start our mine based on initial economics, but again, that’s a number of years still down the road.
Paul Harris (15:51): Let’s bring in you a bit more, Andrew, and specifically your background, one of your previous roles with BHP business development in the copper division. So it sounds like you’ve got a lot of very, very relevant experience to bring forward, to be able to develop and put together a copper project.
Andrew Brodkey (COO, Idaho Copper) (16:10): Yeah, I’ve been in the copper business since 1987. I started with a company called Magma Copper, which was a spinoff from Newmont. We were their copper division, and we were spun out, became a New York stock-traded company. We built that company from an initial market capitalization of about $200 million to over 4 billion when we were acquired in the late nineties by BHP, and I stayed with BHP for the next six or seven years. Really, I was more of a fireman helping out with projects principally in Latin America and the US. My background is I’m a mining engineer. I’m also a lawyer, so I’ve seen basically every part you can imagine of the business from the legal side, commercial side operations. When I left, when I actually left BHP in the early 2000s, I founded a boutique M&A group that was associated with a worldwide commercial company called CB Richard Ellis.
So I founded their international mining group, doing principally boutique M&A for large clients, and then became the CEO of four junior exploration companies. One was copper, one was iron ore, and one was lithium, one was gold, and our projects were primarily located in Latin America, in Chile, and I lived, and I’ve lived in Chile. I lived in Chile for five years and came back to the United States in the year 2018, and more recently obviously became involved with Idaho Copper and CuMo. But my experience in dealing with large projects and helping to permit them, helping to bring them into production, helping to build them really spans a lot of different experiences, but mostly with the larger mining companies, Magma and BHP.
Paul Harris (18:03): It’s quite a unique combination of skills, a mining engineer and a lawyer. So for permitting, I imagine they’re both two very good things to have in one person seeing all those different sides.
Andrew Brodkey (COO, Idaho Copper) (18:16): Thank you. Yeah, I’ve been told that before. There’s some of us out there. There are a couple of folks I know that are metallurgical engineers and lawyers and some mining engineers, but it’s not the most common combination.
Paul Harris (18:25): Okay. Another thing that’s also interesting to see with the company, with yourself, the CEO, Steve Rudofsky, and the CFO and other insiders, you own about what, 28.4% of the Company’s stock, so you’re very aligned with shareholders. What’s your sort of average price, do you think, amongst you?
Andrew Brodkey (COO, Idaho Copper) (18:47): The average price that we came in at? Yeah, I think about 10 cents. I think that was the, that’s my best recollection.
Paul Harris (18:56): Okay. Let’s bring our call to a close. You’ve got some key catalysts coming up, but why don’t you lay them out for us in the next six, six to twelve months, bringing in the ore sorting, the PEA update, etc. What’s the sequence of the catalysts that are going to come over the next six to twelve months?
Andrew Brodkey (COO, Idaho Copper) (19:13): So the next thing we’re doing well, the first underlying theme that in the background of everything we’re doing right now is the fundraising that we’re currently undergoing. We’re looking to raise on the order of between, I’d say 1.5 to 2 million dollars US, and that will fund the ongoing technical studies that we are undertaking. Those technical studies include, as I mentioned, the scanning of all of our core. There’s about 60,000 feet of core, some of which has been scanned already by a group out of Salt Lake City. The core is being stored in a suburb of Boise, so the group that we’ve hired, which are experts in the scanning business, are coming up and they’ll probably take three months to do the work that’s necessary to scan, again, all the core, and verify not only the assays that were done at the time that the core was created, but the visual assays, the visual sorting that was done by our Chief Technical Officer, and let me mention him just for a second. His name is Sean Dykes, D-Y-K-E-S. He’s been involved with the project for almost 20 years. He’s the one constant that’s been here, and he’s run the drilling programs. That started back in the 2006 era and up through 2012, that was when the last drilling was done, was 2012. So he’s been in charge of everything, and he’s a constant and continuing sort of glue to hold the technical part of the company together. So those technical studies start with the scanning. At the same time, we’ll be taking the pieces of core that are relevant and sending them up to the group in Vancouver that has the ore sorting technology that I mentioned before. Once we get those results, we’ve hired an ore sorting expert, an ex-BHP, I would call him a waste reduction.
He’s one of the most renowned in the world, to help us come up with these percentages of ore sorting that can then be fed back into the block model and become part of the updated PEA report. We’ve also retained a very reputable mining consulting firm, engineering firm, to be the lead author on the preliminary economic assessment. Target date for that is sometime by the end of first quarter* of 2024. Originally, we’d hoped to get it out at the end of this year, but it’s too long of an exercise to get it done too quick. So once we get that done on the technical side, the next step is to move into a pre-feasibility study. We’ll be raising money. I mentioned earlier that the likely progression is to succeed to one of the better US exchanges and be able to raise a lot more capital that will fund the PFS.
The PFS will most probably be in the range of 25 to $30 million US, and that will include infill drilling, geotechnical drilling, a lot of additional metallurgical work, some environmental work. All that’s got to be done sort of simultaneously. Let me digress for a second. Go back and say we’re also working very much hand in hand with the forest service to get them to publish the final document that approves our plan of operations. That will allow us to go in and simply finish our drilling. We certainly, like everybody else in the US on federal land, expect pushback from the NGOs. It’s going to happen, but we feel like all we’re trying to do, we’re not trying to build a mine today, we just want to finish our drilling, and so we think that we’ll be able to be successful ultimately in getting that done. Target date will be, again, sometime during 2024.
The PFS will probably be twelve to fifteen months, that’ll come out sometime in 2025. At that point in time, pretty much a go or no-go decision to go to a bankable feasibility. I personally feel like it’s a slam dunk. That will be a go decision, and then we’ll need to raise the money to do all the baseline and all the environmental permitting needed on the state and federal level. We’ll have to produce an EIS. We’ll have to get all the environmental permits, the water permits, everything you can think of. There’s a matrix of 50, 60, a hundred permits in the US that are necessary, but we’ll go down that road and we’ll hire somebody to actually publish the bankable feasibility study. Again, be the lead author. So whatever else we need to do is in the offing With a little bit of luck and everything going well, I think that we’d be in a position to get project financing and break ground on this project before the end of this decade. I don’t want to over promise because who knows how long some of these opposition, court, in a court where people are pushing against you, you can’t really estimate the amount of time that’s needed. But I will say this though, Paul. There are projects, there are mining projects that are located in such sensitive areas that are going to either affect, let’s say a salmon population or some native cultural, historical or religious resource, that they run into so many problems just throughout the US. These projects are gigantic, they’re massive. Billions of pounds of copper, millions of ounces of gold, but they run into so many problems, that it’s problematic whether they’re ever going to be developed. CuMo is not one of these projects. We just are in an area that is just, it’s so much different from the ones that are receiving all the pushback. Not to mention that we aren’t going to get pushback. We are, but I’m confident that we’ll overcome them. We have a lot of good things moving in the right direction for this project.
Paul Harris (24:39): And it sounds like you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you, Andrew. Idaho Copper, as you mentioned earlier, trades on the OTC under COPR. Andrew Brodkey, thank you very much for joining us today.
Andrew Brodkey (COO, Idaho Copper) (24:52): Thank you too. Appreciate it.
Paul Harris (24:53): And that’s all from me, Paul Harris. Stay tuned for more from Mining Stock Daily.
Mining Stock Daily (25:00): The information presented should not be considered investment advice. Mining Stock Daily and its affiliates are not responsible for any loss arising from any investment decision in connection with the material presented herein. Please do your own research or speak with a licensed financial representative before making any investment decisions.
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