Market Opened(ed) #Issue 2

ISSUE #2

FAMILY VALUES

DEAN TUCK INTERVIEW

RIGHT BREW FOR SUCCESS

DAVID DRABBLE SAYS HE HAS IT WITH INNOGY

A CLEAR AS ROCK

Dreadnought boss Dean Tuck grew up staring at rocks but didn’t see them. Then, he really saw them while at a career crossroads, reading books on how to be a geologist sitting on a drill rig in the Pilbara.

THE RIGHT BREW FOR TANZANIA

IPO hopefull David Drabble does not look like your typical mining executive. Neither does he seem like the type to be an English brewer. Rueben Hale discovers he’s been remarkably successful at both.

03 ANTILLES OPENS UP GOLDEN INVESTMENT

ntilles Gold is taking advantage of Cuban foreign investment openings and Antilles are at the front of the queue with thier new partnerships with a a a stateowned mining company.

MARKET WRAP FROM THE KING

On Monday, the ASX was not it’s usually displeasing self of late, with a promising start as eight sectors saw positive gains. This was before the party pooper brigade led by the most oversized wet blanket, the US Federal Reserve, sent the others into a yellow-bellied decline (like last time, the time before that, and the time before that ... The Utilities and Energy sectors did well, along with the central banks. However, gold was unusually lacklustre, dropping out of the race for more glory too early, in my reptilian opinion!

On Tuesday, the central bank raised the rates (why bother giving the poor mortgage holder a heads up!) after telling flabby webs that they wouldn’t!

The share market proceeded to dip to its lowest in more than three weeks, and no sector reported gains; property fell by 2.2 per cent, and mining went down by a point, but the Aussie dollar at least managed to crawl to a week a half high after the hike.

Of course, this was enough for the rot to set in, sending things into an irretrievable decline of falling stocks, reaching their lowest point since March due to increasing interest rates. The banks experienced significant losses (diddums), while the energy sector suffered due to a drop in oil prices to a six-week low. However, gold prices increased, rising by 30 dollars per ounce.

On Thursday morning, the ASX experienced some initial losses, which later recovered but ultimately closed in the negative. The financial sector was hit the hardest, with a dip of 2.52%, particularly impacting big banks. This was in response to the Fed’s recent overnight rate hike. On Friday, the local stock market made a small gain (yay!), with the S&P/ASX 200 increasing

by 0.37%. Gold was the top performer yet again, with All Ords Gold rising by 1.79% and a total gain of 3.31% for the week. Gold prices continue to increase and are now less than $30 away from reaching a record high of US$2075 per ounce.

rock discovery leads to yin

By Rueben Hale

Dean Tuck grew up staring at rocks but didn’t see them. Then, he really saw them while at a career crossroads, reading books on how to be a geologist sitting on a drill rig in the Pilbara.

His story is the stuff of legend after arriving in Perth in 2007 from the US to study, only to drop out after six months of “timewasting” to stumble on a fortuitous path leading to an uber-successful career in resources.

He arrives early for our interview — straight off the plane from his company’s Mangaroon rare earth project near Exmouth in Western Australia. “Everything seems to be going pretty well up there,” he tells me while settling on a rickety café bench opposite.

Great to hear because this founding CEO of Dreadnought Resources will be putting shareholders out of their collective misery next month when he pulls the trigger on a resource upgrade on its Yin Ironstone Rare Earth discovery within the Mangaroon project which could blow its current JORC 2012 Exploration Target at just over 14 million tonnes out of the sky.

“We are looking for a resource intensity of 4.8Mt/ km to within a range of 50-100Mt at 0.9-1.3% TREO but our region and ground could easily reach 100Mtpa at 1% TREO,” Tuck speculates. TREO stands for Total Rare Earth Oxides, and that’s where the money is as long as a) you can extract it and b) it has a lot of NdPr.

“And there will be a high proportion of neodymium and praseodymium, or NdPr, which is what the market wants,” Tuck says after sipping his newly arrived flat white.

I asked him what led to him discovering geology after all those years.

“I realised I was never going to be an engineer,” Tuck recalls bluntly.

“It involved a lot of engineering, calculus, and I soon realised I didn’t have the capacity for the mathematics involved. So, after a year and a half of floundering around on campus, trying to do engineering, maths, calculous and all the rest, I finally found geology, which was a big awakening moment for me because I’d found something that I absolutely loved, which ironically had been staring me in the face my whole life.”

That foundational discovery would be the first of many in a successful career in resource exploration spanning 15 years of the typical ups and downs of the industry, including working with some of the best companies and minds in Western Australian resources of the era.

“I met Brendo at a pub called KKs, where I got to know some people quite well.

I first met Brendo, this guy with a big ol’ bushy beard, after he returned from exploring the Wonmunna project in the Pilbara, which Mineral Resources now operate. At the time, I just realised that there were plenty of job opportunities for geologists in Western Australia in 2007. It became evident that they urgently needed a geo. Smelling a geologist in the room, Brendo had him in front of his boss from Talisman Resource, the now late Harry Cornelius, dressed in a tee shirt, thongs, and hat for the most informal of interviews. Then, before he could down another pint, he was reading books about drilling for minerals in the Pilbara while logging results as a geologist for Talisman Mining at its Wonmunna, now mined by Min-

eral Resources. And the rest is well-documented history.

But more astounding than this well-documented story is finding out the underpinnings that have made Tuck more successful than most at making discoveries. So, I asked him …

Since announcing the Yin discovery in June last year, you have published an astounding amount of material news. How do you keep up the pace?

Getting caught up in stuff that doesn’t matter is a trap many geologists fall into. Exploration is simple: define targets and drill targets. To do that effectively and efficiently, geologists need to focus on what matters and what can be mapped – that’s our job, and the hard part is doing it right. With the exploration process simplified

to its core components, we can keep our attention on the exploration strategy, which is a numbers game in its simplest form. A prospect, once defined, has a 1 in 10,000 chance of becoming something significant. So, you work in greenfield terrains as we do. In that case, you need to generate many prospects and continually test them, turn them over, and learn from that feedback loop to generate better and more robust targets for testing. We want to constantly try targets (to make that discovery and at least produce some learnings). While we are doing that, we want to continually generate new targets to which we can apply our improved understanding. And if we do the above correctly, then that also means you are constantly testing your best targets, and you can’t be afraid to kill your favourites – a trap that many lifestyle companies or overly attached explorationists fall into. We often joke that the targets we like the least are probably the ones that will be the big discovery!

Being prepared to give up on an idea is bloody hard – I know that first-hand as a long-suffering journalist. How did you learn that discipline and courage?

I have been blessed with some fantastic geological mentors over the years, but more fundamentally, my upbringing in a family of geologists, teachers, coaches and military personnel. My grandfathers both served in the American armed forces their entire lives instilling in me a respect for discipline and courage. Couple that with my mother being a geologist and earth science teacher and my father being a history major and coach who played professional baseball in his younger years, and you get a love of science, in particular geology, and more discipline and courage from sport and more importantly teamwork because teams make all discoveries. This discipline and courage manifest as a work ethic. Growing up, my father said that no man is above any work. He would say, “Who saves more lives, a doctor or the garbage man?”

Before I was old enough to drive, I worked in construction and pouring concrete, which I did throughout high school and university. How have these influences manifested in exploration work?

I spent five years doing a science fair research and competition through high school; my mom, with her teaching background, would say that you genuinely understand your material once you can explain it to a 5th grader. As we discussed earlier, that would influence the focus on keeping exploration simple, effective and efficient. Combine that with the love of history, research and desire to build a fantastic team, and you have the core ingredients of our exploration work.

At Dreadnought, we specialise in greenfield exploration. The most extraordinary value-creation event in the resources industry is making a significant discovery. While in Western Australia, I’ve watched as Tropicana, Nova Bollinger, Julimar, Hemi, Degrussa, and others did just that. And while many people will say that the best place to make a discovery is in the shadow of a headframe, that’s only true if you own the headframe. Each of the above is a significant discovery in a new province that had been unloved or poorly explored before.

So we look at the areas on the map that geologically should have deposits but don’t, and then dive into the history to try and understand why not. And that history isn’t just the historical mine records (which are often limited in unexplored areas); it’s sitting and talking with the pastoralists, the native title owners, going to the state library and digging through old newspapers looking for that little nugget of encouragement to have the courage to go in big—the marriage of science and history.

Macaroon is an excellent example of this; we can see in the mine records that gold had been found and mined by pastoralists from the 1960s to the 1980s. In speaking with the pastoralists and their descendants, like Drew Money and Alan Macdonald, we learned that

they also had found nickel and copper. Digging further back in the newspapers, we knew that in the late 1890s, 1910s and again in the 1930s that the region had been calling out for a state battery to encourage further gold prospecting and development. Still, that state battery has yet to materialise, which has a significant disincentive to early exploration. So now we have this region with obvious mineralisation potential that was thought to be barren and never explored properly, quite simply because there was never a shadow from a headframe to explore within. And despite our success there to date, we have only just begun to unlock that region.

Successfully driving this exploration process and feedback loop since our inception has been the main driver for increasing a $3 million market capitalisation of less than half of 1c a share when we started in 2019 to $50 million on the back of our high-grade gold discovery, Metzke’s Find. The intersection of massive sulphides in the holes at our Orion Prospect in the Kimberley got us to between $80 and $100 million. Then Mangaroon was always there, bubbling away in the background, as one of three projects on the go, which has got us where we are today. We’ve delivered some significant shareholder returns to date and will continue to do so as we advance our exploration efforts.

Antilles joins Cuban regime

Foreign investment opportunities are now available in Cuba as the government considers allowing majority ownership at El Pilar. Antilles Gold JV, in partnership with a stateowned mining company, has caught the attention of major investors due to an impressive 134m @ 1.23% copper intercept from a single drill hole in the outer zone of El Pilar. Antilles is planning to conduct more drilling as they have discovered new copper-gold targets. Antilles is also waiting for results from three high-priority porphyry deposits and is currently drilling the El Pilar oxide deposit to establish resources for a potential New Sabanas gold-copper mine in Cuba. Exciting developments are expected in the coming months.

Get Nimy with It

The government of Western Australia is searching for rare earth minerals and is supporting Nimy Resources in their exploration of the Mons Nickel Project in the Forrestania Nickel Belt. This project is an undeveloped prospect for rare earth minerals and has the potential to provide in-demand commodities. Nimy’s Executive Director, Luke Hampson, believes that if significant rare earth elements are discovered in the Mons Carbonatite, it could lead to further discoveries in the area. The addition of rare earth minerals would be a valuable addition to the project, which already has high-grade lithium resources and the potential for massive sulphide mineralisation.

Team Briefs

The search for graphite in Australia is currently underway. Kingsland recently presented to investors about the potential for a large graphite resource in a location that is considered top-tier. This is particularly important as the graphite market is expected to experience a shortage this year. Kingsland believes that their discovery could be a globally significant asset, and converting their exploration target of up to 27Mt of contrained graphite over 19km.

Burley is managing to maintain the rage at its Chubb lithium project in Canada identifies spodumene mineralisation up to 12m widths It will be interesting to see what they uncover next with intital diamond drilling already expanding known mineralisation to the south and down-dip significantly beyond prior drilling. Burely boss Wayne Richards says the “Main” dyke is tabular and has consistently returned spodumene-pegmatites

Dreadnought’s attention is currently on drilling into a Mangaroon rare earth discovery, which has received support from the WA Government. However, the company shouldn’t overlook the significant amount of gold discovered at Metzke’s find. This is especially relevant as the price of gold continues to climb towards all-time highs, and the All Ordinaries Gold outperforms a sluggish ASX. It is just the start for an excitingly transformational phase.

NT Graphite Hunt Burley keeps charge Dread–not

from rocks to beer and back

By Rueben Hale

David Drabble does not look like your typical mining executive. Neither does he seem like the type to be an English brewer. Rueben Hale discovers he’s been remarkably successful at both. “Some people initially think I am going to be a pushover, but those people inevitably learn that I can be quite direct,” Drabble opens with a guileful smile.

The air stiffens just slightly. “I just don’t like people thinking they can take advantage of my generally easy-going nature,” he adds at pause.

Drabble is back in Perth from his home in Wales promoting his Tanzanian nickel play Innogy. If the IPO gets up it will kickstart the next exciting instalment of a mining career which so far has included a long stint based in Perth where he quickly moved up the ranks as a project geologist before taking a semi-hiatus pursuing what he later realised was going to be his second passion – brewing beer.

“I developed a taste for Little Creatures Pale Ale while I was working in Perth in 2008,” Drabble says. “I thought, why not—because I thought if I didn’t, I might regret it later.”

“It was also a good time to try it because the whole boutique beer thing was still in its infancy back home and I thought there could be a good market for hoppy pale ales as a change from English beers which Australians call warm and flat.” Its name, Lithic Brewing (Lithic meaning something relating to stone in Latin!), was named as-

surance that brewing would only be a temporary distraction. Drabble sold the rapidly growing business two years and nine months later to refocus his energy on geology and the demands of spiralling success in Tanzania as EcoGraf’s lead geologist.

“It got to the stage to decide, go big or go home,” Drabble explains. “It was the right time to move on, and I made a good profit. Importantly, it gave me that business perspective to apply to Innogy, combined with my technical background—it’s my first role at this level in the minerals sector. The skills I have learnt in resources and business operations will be invaluable.”

Drabble’s CV more than equips him to lead this nickel-focused spinoff of his former company EcoGraf given the years spent in Tanzania, after brewing, responsible for graphite

and nickel exploration amid East Africa’s rising prominence as a globally essential battery metals hotspot.

And if all goes well, a successful ASX listing would unleash an exploration package of 5,300 square kilometres of Tanzanian terrain — more than 90 per cent of that ground prospective for a nickel.

“There is also good propectivity for lithium, cobalt, copper and gold on the tenements where we will immediately benefit from early mover advantage,” Drabble points out.

“The Northern Frontier Project near BHP’s Kabanga project is our priority, closely followed by beginning fieldwork on two pending prospecting licences on the Western Frontier Project in the Katavi region and three located in the Rukwa region.”

“It will be a level playing field opportunity for our investors considering there has been no seed capital raised, therefore everyone is in at 20 cents, combine this with the project’s current low valuation and near-term drilling bringing a steady flow of material news” he adds. Should people be concerned that it’s in Tanzania?

Tanzania has a stable government that is focused on supporting mining. The fact that the country is open for business has been clearly shown by a massive recent investment by BHP of US$100 million in the Kabanga Nickel project, and Rio Tinto’s declaration that they are actively looking for a sizeable project to acquire in the region. Added to that, we have phenomenal connections locally and with the Tanzanian government to assist with advancing exploration across our massive landholding.

Plus, I’ve worked on projects in Tanzania over the past eight years, mainly with EcoGraf. When I first went out there, I was the sole expat on this drilling program, it was 2014, and they were doing early resource work.

How was Tanzania different to Western Australia?

The similarities are large, both places share a similar geological setting, with prospectivity for many of the same minerals, but the advantage Tanzania has is that it hasn’t been tested to death by exploration companies. There is so much more opportunity in Tanzania for a big discovery, and that is what we are aiming for; a repeat of Kabanga or Manono!

Yes, there are cultural differences, but English is widely spoken and I’ve always found Tanzanians to be hard working and committed to the task in hand. They have a long, established mining sector meaning that they know the industry well. As a whole the country is socially and politically stable, without many of the associated challenges that some other jurisdictions in Africa present.

So, there is a metaphor begging to be made between brewing and mining exploration, isn’t there?

At face value, they’re entirely different; with beer, you’re dealing with customers and small buyers.

At Innogy, you’re dealing with shareholders, and once we have a mineral resource, you’re dealing with potentially multi-national customers. But brewing, I learned that people are people, a shareholder on a list or an old bloke at the market having a beer, you learn how to communicate with them.

Most importantly, mining and brewing have taught me the valuable lesson of trying your absolute hardest to understand where other people are coming from, regardless of who they are. You will cut off a huge audience if you cannot access all different parts of society. By the way, how is Lithic doing these days?

I haven’t had a pint in quite some time, but some of my old customers have commented that it doesn’t taste quite the same as it did.

“Some people initially think I am going to be a pushover, but those people inevitably learn that I can be quite direct”