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I thought it had been lost....

My quick interpretation. Two pictures. The short term that the Open pit mine project is being delivered with minimum dilution, at a very good profitability, and short payback. But then the wider picture. Once they have the open pit up and running, and maybe even before, they will be going after the other projects, namely the silver in Red Star, and the gold in Navarre Creek. We see the pointers loud and clear. This could indeed be a billion dollar company before too long. With the Empire Mine financed, and my guess is that we’ll hear more about how they plan to do that within weeks, they’ll also be able to fund other exploration leading directly into mine development work. This RNS represents the game changer for me. The first time when we see the company are presenting the economic case and demonstrating the cash flow. Here we see that they are really trying to do things in a stepwise approach, financing from their own cash flows, thereby minimising dilution, and retaining shareholder value. It’s to be applauded. I’ll take a deeper look and post some more later.

My quick interpretation. Two pictures. The short term that the Open pit mine project is being delivered with minimum dilution, at a very good profitability, and short payback. But then the wider picture. Once they have the open pit up and running, and maybe even before, they will be going after the other projects, namely the silver in Red Star, and the gold in Navarre Creek. We see the pointers loud and clear. This could indeed be a billion dollar company before too long. With the Empire Mine financed, and my guess is that we’ll hear more about how they plan to do that within weeks, they’ll also be able to fund other exploration leading directly into mine development work. This RNS represents the game changer for me. The first time when we see the company are presenting the economic case and demonstrating the cash flow. Here we see that they are really trying to do things in a stepwise approach, financing from their own cash flows, thereby minimising dilution, and retaining shareholder value. It’s to be applauded. I’ll take a deeper look and post some more later.

I think that they are virtually connected, since the EM (Economic Model) is being developed for the financiers. I would be very surprised if they were not talking already, with everyone hanging on for the EM. In this way, when the EM RNS comes out, we should remember that it will be more targeted at the financiers, rather then us private investors, so I would expect it to be more technical in nature.

I've just posted over on ADVFN my amateur guess for a fair company value, after the EM, and according to my calculations I estimate it should be 81p. That's a long way for the sp to move up between here and the days after the EM is issued., so I am expecting quite a positive shift. Look at GRL which has gone up 26% just today on news of an environmental permit being issued!

For those interested in what happens in a company on the morning of good news (in this case the news of the award of an environmental permit this morning), take a look at Goldstone Resources (GRL). Then imagine what will happen to PXC when the Economic Model is issued, and then confirmation of finance....

Hi Mr Negative. There's no Resource made yet for Cobalt, so we can't tell the absolute quantities. PXC would need to complete a drilling programme to come to that number, and my guess is that this is not in the front line, with a focus more on The Empire Mine and Red Star before we looked at the Cobalt. This is, in my guess, at least 1 year away, and after the start up of the Empire Open Pit mine.

It's interesting to look at the share price, for on a day of low trades, all the MM's have done is to drop the selling price, which has widened the spread, and shows a lower share price. But if you look at the price to buy on the trades so far, it's unchanged. My guess is that the MM's are trying to shake out a few sells by spooking the holders, to fill their buys.
Here's my instruction. Hold on tight, for this share will bring you a very large reward. Don't sell, for you could miss out on one of the opportunities of the century. End of instruction.
Good luck all!!

Keeping to the subject of Cobalt, here’s what our 23rd January 2018 RNS stated, concerning samples taken on the Cobalt belt properties:

“Highlights
• 46 surface grab samples were collected at the Company's Redcastle iron-rich copper/cobalt and Bighorn copper/cobalt properties in Idaho, USA - 20 samples are representative of the Redcastle (SCOB) project and 26 of the Bighorn (NCOB) project
• All of the sample results showed cobalt mineralisation above detection limits and ranged from 2.0 ppm to 3120 ppm, or 0.31% Co
• The sample results showing cobalt values greater than 100 ppm and copper values greater than 0.5% Cu are considered significant for the purposes of future exploration and targeting”

Those are pretty good grades. As our CEO wrote at the time “I believe that Phoenix is at the right time, and at the right place, to deliver a successful cobalt exploration programme …”

Below the radar, or what?

Hush. Hush. Be quiet everyone. Listen, and don’t let this out. This is top secret. I say this, as I don’t know why this has been kept quiet. But maybe it’s just been missed? But I’ll let you into this.

Cobalt price 1st January $33,000/ton. Cobalt price, 1st February $41,240/ton. That’s a 25% increase in price this year so far!! And PXC have a large Cobalt patch, over in the Idaho Cobalt Belt, at Redcastle and Bighorn.

And we’re on the strike line with the Iron Creek Mine being developed by First Cobalt who purchased the property for $149 million in June 2018.

Plus this is the only Cobalt region in USA, and it’s a strategic material. What more needs to be said?

Sorry guys, when I wrote "on a silver price of 30p", towards the end, it should have been $30 of course.

Another and perhaps more reliable way of looking at this question for Red Star (ie PXC silver) was suggested by Hardman in their research, who wrote, “Our DCF valuation is 31p/share, based solely on the silver mine (at Red Star), a cautious (for now) 15% discount rate and a long-term silver price of $19.00/oz. PXC’s share price is highly geared to the upside thesis for silver, with each $1.00/oz adding an estimated 6.2p-6.3p/share.” If we input the present price of silver, that would suggest that the Phoenix share price should today be 99.2p, I repeat based solely on the Red Star mine, which in any case is now determined to be much, much larger than when this valuation was first made.

It is worth noting that the BoD consider Red Star to be so interesting and have such potential that they have already announced that they will be restarting drilling just as soon as conditions allow. For those interested, the Hardman and WH Ireland Researches can be accessed from the PXC web site under “Investors”.

So, to summarise, in their research Hardman suggested our fair value share price based ONLY on the silver mine at Red Star should be 99.2p (on a silver price of 30p), a valuation which excludes the extension of Red Star, the Empire Open Pit mine, the Carlin deposit at Navarre Creek, the Cobalt at Redcastle and Bighorn, or the extensions of Empire through Windy Devil, Horseshoe and White Knob. Now I hope you can see why I’m so enthusiastic for this share and this great opportunity. I myself cannot understand why the sp is not already way above 100p. But it does represent a fantastic opportunity.

A poster on Telegram wanted to know about our silver assets, so I posted the following:

You asked Markymark about the silver potential. I think this could be my most important post of the last week, even more important than Navarre Creek, and I therefore thank you Marky for the question. This subject is worth a more detailed explore, as it reveals, in my opinion, some of the hidden potential from Phoenix. The silver resources have been formally determined to date for just 2 mines. Empire and Red Star. Looking at Empire, this is the open pit gold mine, and the subject of the present investigations, namely metallurgical studies looking at the recoveries of gold and silver with environmentally friendly ammonium thiosulphate, and presently plugging this data into the economic models to work out the profitability, which should be presented to us in a few weeks. The resource data for this mine was presented in an RNS dated 9th December and shows Measured + Indicated for silver as 7,595,198 ozs. Inputting a price of $30/oz, we come to a value of $228 million. That’s M&I. If we include inferred (2,538,574 ozs), that makes a total of 10,133,000 ozs or $304 million at $30/oz. Of course not all the metal can be recovered, but this sets the scene.

But the real silver mine is Red Star, which has fallen from attention a little in recent times. This is a silver/lead seam located a short distance from the Empire Open pit. An exploration programme was part completed in 2020, but was held back as it was discovered that the seam twisted and buckled, making drilling difficult (the seam was also covered on the surface), but they identified that it was hosted in magnetite, which should make future drilling programmes much easier, as the magnetite is magnetic and can be traced. They also identified that this seam almost certainly carries up beyond the previous determined 320 metres through to the historically mined high-grade Horseshoe and White Knob claim blocks 5 kms away, which would make Red Star a giant. We only have the data from the first 320 metres at the present time, and if my information is correct (taken from the WHIrelend Research), we have 6.8 million ozs of silver, which at $30/oz would value this at $205 million. So add together silver from Empire and Open pit and we have $525 million for silver alone, as silver in the ground.

“As the world electrifies, the mining industry will strike gold, Robert Friedland predicts”

A nice read from Robert Friedland, the legendary mining financier. His comments on the USA are particularly relevant to PXC, in particular his view that pricing differentials in metals will develop, depending on the “greenness” of their production. Since much of the electricity in Idaho is hydro-produced, PXC is well placed.

He talks of this age as being the “revenge of the miners” ”People are waking up to the fact that certain elements in the periodic table are going to be huge winners” and “The world is screaming for copper to electrify the world economy”. “The whole system has to be rebuilt, top to bottom, and that is what is bringing the onset of the revenge of the miners.”

hTTps://www.bcbusiness.ca/As-the-world-electrifies-the-mining-industry-will-strike-gold-Robert-Friedland-predicts

Just posted on Telegram by Richard Wilkins, PXC CFO

Dear All. Thanks for your patience. It has been frustrating for all of us waiting for results. Hopefully the Navarre Creek results were worth waiting for. We certainly believe so.
As for Empire we will publishing the economic analysis shortly, as Ryan says. Once the optimisation work is completed. We hope that will be worth waiting for too.
But we must keep the bigger picture in mind. We intend to build a billion dollar company, and keep the issued share capital as small as possible. The open pit mine on its own won’t achieve this. But the cash flow from the OP mine, much of which will be ploughed back into very exciting exploration (Navarre Creek, Red Star and of course the underground elephant in the system), thus avoiding the need to finance exploration entirely through equity issues, will, we hope, achieve this. Production and cash flow, plus exploration on serious potentially high value targets, is a great and valuable story.
Stay well everyone

I sense the excitement here, which is based around the Empire mine and its gold, plus more than anything today the gold play at Navarre Creek. But please do not forget that the Empire Open Pit Mine does not include any economic assessment of the deeper Empire Sulphides, the Red Star silver mine, the continuation of the Empire pit north (Windy Devil, Horseshoe, White Knob and Blue Bird Mines), or the Idaho Cobalt belt properties (Redcastle and Bighorn), or other projects within the Phoenix portfolio. You buy into the Empire Open Pit project, and you get all the rest for free. And what a bargain at today’s price!

Have you seen that PXC have posted over on LinkedIn the reason for their confidence in Navarre Creek results creating a money making mine. See this on
hTTps://www.linkedin.com/posts/phoenix-copper_pxc-pxclf-activity-6760531514473119745-DyzZ/

Here's the text: We have today announced the results of our sampling at the Carlin-style Navarre Creek gold play.
Surface grades of gold at Navarre Creek are consistent with historical early-stage exploration grades reported from Carlin-type projects in Nevada. Here’s the data, and there’s no better way to compare than to see announcements from other companies, going back to the pre-drill stages in their history, trying to ascertain what levels of ppb made them continue exploring and then able to fund their projects. Looking at those companies who are today active in mining the Carlin Trend in Nevada, all data from open sources, showed Gold Standard had initial findings of “1 to 325 ppb Au”, Crestview “240 to 400 ppb Au”, Dynasty Gold “as high as 100ppb Au”, whilst Kinross’s Bald Mountain mine uses a cut off of 140 ppb Au. For Phoenix, in all samples where we found gold, we had above 100ppb, with one sample up at 569ppb. We can therefore say with a degree of confidence, based on regional experience, that surface grades of gold are consistent with historical early-stage exploration grades reported from Carlin-type projects in Nevada.

Let me write a little more concerning today’s RNS. I’ll address the 2 topics separately, Empire and Navarre Creek.

First, Empire. This is the near surface oxide pit, always the easiest and lowest cost to mine. The company have explained the delay in producing the report, blaming it on COVID and the complexity of the pilot plant work. Although this delay is frustrating, it does sound reasonable to me.
It looks like they are now in the final stages optimising all the scenarios, including the size of the operation, of the recovery of cathode copper manufacture from either heap leach or agitation leach, plus recovering in a second stage the gold and silver using Ammonium Thiosulphate in place of cyanide. That sounds like they are getting very close to their preferred optimised solution. This will allow them to produce an optimisation of the Empire Mine open pit economic model. I would expect this to be in weeks. I also note that the PEA has disappeared, and it is now a PFS, which can explain the delay as well. Moving to a PFS represents a major step forward as it has much more credibility with financiers. Maybe they should have gone this way earlier would be Sparkey's question.

Now on to Navarre Creek. The key information is there in the title “Navarre Creek surface sampling results confirm presence of volcanic hosted, Carlin-type gold mineralisation”. Carlin deposits are named after the little settlement of Carlin in Northeastern Nevada, and Carlin deposits can be very big gold strikes indeed. The Barrick gold mine on the Carlin Trend which started this off is the world’s 8th largest gold mine, which is a relatively short hop and a jump away.

The shallow ore in Carlin Trend type deposit is usually oxidised, which is relatively simple and cheap to extract since it can often be mined by open pit which costs a fraction of underground mining. I wrote last week that we are expecting the assay results back from surface samples, and should not expect high levels of gold. This is because the gold should be present in very fine particles, generally too small for the human eye. Over time, the gold near the surface is leached out, so there should be just minute traces near the surface. Levels in the parts per billion level would be very positive. Now just look at the results. They’ve gone and found gold. Not just gold, but lots of it, in levels equivalent or better than those found over in the original Carlin Trend. This confirms that the Navarre Creek deposit probably has immense value.

That’s the smoke showing there is fire below, in other words below the leached top layers, we have a gold mine. I wrote last week, that if we have higher than parts per billion, we can expect the champagne corks to start popping. My friends, we have many times parts per billion! Look at the results, we have several samples with hundreds of parts per billion.

Sparkey, you got your wish, but a day early!

My quick takeaways from the RNS (I’ll post later with a more detailed analysis):
# This is a CRACKING RNS. It may not have the results of the PEA, but it’s made up for it in many other ways, maybe even surpassing it
# The PFS should be delivered very shortly, but the optimisations continue, hampered by COVID in the laboratories. Note it’s now a PFS, not a PEA (which takes more time, but has better acceptance). That’s much better!
# Navarre Creek looks remarkable, genuinely remarkable, with many conclusions:
> They were expecting gold in the ppb, but found it in ppm. That’s amazing !!
> The results on the samples to date appear at worst equal, and maybe even better than the initial samples found on the Carlin Trend in Nevada. That’s GIANT!!!
> The southern end sample (32519) has a similar metallurgy to the Empire pit some 5kms away. That says that the Empire pit may be larger, much larger than initially thought

Twitter.com/Phoenix_Copper/status/1353632132074246145

Have you seen today's Tweet about Navarre Creek? It's enticing and teasing.

The Navarre Creek formal announcement when it arrives could be game changing. The company have mapped out the route to opening up our potentially enormous deep resources by throwing off cash from the Empire open pit mine, but for Navarre they have speculated on a different route, maybe through a JV. The perfect example of this is from Carlin itself, which gave its name to the trend. Let’s dream a little by reading the opening words on the Nevada Gold Mines page on the Barrick site:

“Nevada Gold Mines is a joint venture between Barrick (61.5%) and Newmont (38.5%) that combined our significant assets across Nevada in 2019 to create the single largest gold-producing complex in the world.”

That’s the Carlin Trend for you…. Let’s dream

Hi Harry,
Good question. As I understood it, the relationship was for EAS to identify companies prepared to finance PXC, once the PEA was issued. I know that they have been busy talking, but guess that it is premature for any arrangement to have been reached before the PEA. I am also aware that the company intend to plan some webinars and other forums once the PEA is out, when they will obviously have quite a lot to talk about, and I know they want to broadcast this business. Discussion concerning finance will be on the agenda. That's not too long to wait now.