Aurania Resources: Discovery of High-Grade and Ready-To-Ship Nickel at a Beach in France

[Music] welcome ladies and gentlemen to commodity TV and the new edition of our online interview series and finally we made it we talked to Ora resources and Dr Kei Baron the president and CEO is here with us hey Kei how are you a long time no see yes yeah here I am very good to see you and you are in good shape that's the most important thing here I like it really a lot and I also want to say I'm a shareholder in the company since many many years and also thank God I bought at

a low level which was a good idea um stock is now yeah still between 60 and almost 70 cents which is great so we really want to get an update for you from you because you had some very interesting news I must say let's start first with CA what's going on there CA well I got to tell you it's the damnest project that I've ever come across in 42 years of working in the industry it's uh it's an two artificial beaches which are composed of waste uh that came originally out of an asbestos mine long

long since uh defunct and Abandoned and the waste contains a mineral called awo White which is a natural nickel iron alloy it has the same composition as stainless steel this mineral right nickel and iron together and um the stuff was recorded way back in 1957 and 58 and again in 68 by the uh the French Geological Survey uh they Bo Beman the fact at the time that the grade of the rock uh out of the open pit esp's mind was low in nickel about 2% nickel which at the time was of not in not of

interest because the nickel price of course was uh was well under a dollar a pound so you couldn't make any money however in this report there was one paragraph that was very intriguing talking about a beach at near the village of albo albo uh which had um the the the uh asbestos waste on it um and uh the um the nickel contents in this material were much more elevated than um than the stuff at the mine right so I was very intrigued about this and I got online and I looked up Google Earth and uh

I looked at that beach I didn't see a hell of a lot that was interesting but an adjacent Beach well just a a kilometer or two away at a place called nonza there's a beach which is 1.3 kilm long and it's 350 M wide it is widest and I could see these black squiggles on it and anybody can do this themselves they can look at the Google Earth images and they'll see the black squiggles and I thought gosh what are these things they look like what we would firm in the business a black sand pler

a pler accumulation of heavy minerals on the surface so um I told stepan an who's the guy who originally found the reports I told him about this he got very excited jumped in his Jeep drove all the way down to Marseilles went across on the ferry to Northern Corsica and the next day was sending me photographs of a black sand plaster on the beach and he sampled this thing he took about I don't know maybe 10 12 kilos of the sand you could pick it up with an ordinary magnet and uh it's highly highly magnetic

stuff and he brought it back to Switzerland and I had it in my f front garden I had a gold pan and a big tank of water and I was washing it like you would wash like you would pan and gold and I ended up with a concentrate of this mineral called a wte which when it is fresh and untarnished looks silvery in color uh when it becomes tarnished it looks a little bit yellow and I took this concentrate to Canada took it to a laboratory had an assade and it came back 50.4% nickel with

appreciable contents of cobalt and copper in it I think if I remember rightly about uh 7% Cobalt and 0 4% copper it's in the press release anyway I can't remember the exact numbers um but significant and I thought to myself well Jesus if I can go ahead and just pan this this is about as low Tech as it gets this is what the the gold miners in California were doing uh though they would do it with a tin pan right I'm doing it with a plastic one and uh certainly you know if you can recover

it that way then you could recover it commercially in an operation and um you know I looked at this beach and I kind of did a back of the envelope I'm not going to mention the number here because The Regulators wouldn't like it but um I came up with a number that was interesting uh in terms of of of tons of nickel contained on this speech right now here's what's happened so the mine started operating in 1926 it closed in 1965 but after around 1946 they started throwing the waste from the mine into the Mediterranean

so just like threw it over the cliffs into the sea right crazy probably the best place for it because nobody's going to breathe in ASB bestus fibers when it's under the salt water or in the salt water so anyway uh what happened over time and we're talking 50 60 years 70 years whatever um right back to the time of the second world war this material has migrated through the tides and through something called Longshore drift uh and has moved down the co Coast with the prevailing currents and filled in two ports one's the port of

albo the other one's the port of of nanza before that you could take a boat right up to the to the rocks on the shoreline and now in the case of nanza um the beach extends 350 meters from the rocks out into the sea right and so what happened is that the tides and the winter storms and everything have acted just like a like a natural ball mill a nutrition Mill and smashed up the material in fact I've got a piece of it right here look at this see how rounded that is that's a piece

of the waste and it would have had very very sharp edges when it went into the sea right but the the the sea has rounded it it's a rounded Pebble now knocked off the edges and reduced the size of this this might have been might much larger at the beginning and converted it crushed it down to sand so the material on the beach in these black sand accumulations is magnetite which is iron oxide and a weo which is nickel iron right in a combination depending on where you're in the be on the beach uh there's

uh different percentages right but the percentage of of a warte the nickel mineral is um let's just say because I haven't released any numbers on this yet uh but it's certainly compelling right and um so uh you know what what you can do you can go to the beach today and you can take a MAG magnets just an ordinary house magnet we used one of these uh rare earth magnets which is very strong and you can you can pick the the material up um so the material has been broken up broken up by the the

action of the waves and the tides and everything and now it's essentially a sand what we want to do now these sand particles smaller than 1 millim are either just grains of magnetite or just grains of a wte both of them we want to extract right now anybody who's watching this must realize understand this that stuff that I had in the pan you could dry it bag it ship it it's exactly the sort of stuff that would be suitable to go in a nickel matte furnace U's got one in Finland Ban's got one in Sweden

and you make stainless steel from it right you need the iron and you need the nickel right you would add a little bit of chromium to it um that's for those guys to do and then you have then you have uh material that's suitable it can go straight into the furnace so you know what we can do we can just process the stuff we can put it in those big bulk bags those great big white bags you see that can hold up to a ton and ship the damn stuff and then collect the check best

thing ever so you know I um probably a lot of your people are not uh aware but um I have a business already um it's not within irania uh it's a private company that I own uh that recovers Sapphires and gold in the state of Montana in the US and I've been doing it for nine years and I know everything top to bottom about heavy mineral recovery because gold of course is uh it's a it's a heavy mineral it's one of the heaviest and and Safar has got a density of of uh four times water

so they're very easy to recover but I know all the equipment right and uh and I can tell you right now that the um extraction and Pro processing of the sand on this beach would be very low cost very low cost it it's uh it would be a typical aluvial operation what we would do is leave the Pebbles behind so rocks like this we're not crushing them we're not doing anything with them we're just leaving them behind so that the locals still have their Beach but there'll be more Pebbles there than well they'll they'll there'll

be less sand I mean over time these Pebbles will get converted back to sand again because uh Mother Nature doesn't give up and and you know the tides wash in every day and etc etc but we're only interested in the sand fraction and we want to recover the magnetite which is iron oxide I mean if you've got highgrade uh iron oxide that's essentially um that's even better than the stuff that they're mining in Western Australia for uh to to make um to make steel right and uh of course and the other thing is the aware

white so what we could do is just dry it bag it ship it and collect the check however if we wanted to do value ad value ad then we would work towards getting a um 100% or as close as possible a WEA white concentrate and in that concentrate we would extract uh through a process called hydrometallurgy we would extract the Cobalts and the copper because I've I've run the numbers and it may be possible that there's enough Cobalts that it would pay for the whole operation all the extraction so it comes as a bonus byproduct

right mhm okay yeah that sounds really compelling story to be honest and I I fully get it absolutely so let's say where are the hurdles what would you anticipate you need let's say to we talk about 20 million 50 100 million $200 million just a guessing I know it's a for looking statement and you do not have the exact numbers just for us an idea and how would it and do you own already the whole stuff yeah well we're it's in in the process of being permitted we're we're doing the Environmental Studies right now which

is what we have to do so uh we're just uh really uh we had to get this other stuff done uh with the communities and uh uh we're about to sign the contract or maybe we signed the contract with the environmental company um we would have to do some drilling on the beach uh possibly some bulk sampling and uh lots and lots of studies now um two things that very critical to mention here first of all there is no asbestos on this beach now so what has happened is that the material when it was dumped

over the cliffs it had maybe two three% asbestos in it but asbestos is brittle and it's soft and what has happened over time is that it's been broken up by the way of action and we think it's actually dissolved or it's sunk to the bottom or whatever but it does not show up on the beach so and and the government has done repeated testing I mean tourists walk on this beach sometimes so you know the beach is safe I want to emphasizes there is no asbestos on the beach okay it's very important and we're not

crushing any Rock and we're not liberating any asbest so that's very important to know the other thing to know is that this beach today is naturally leeching into the seawater heavy metals nickel Cobalt uh Cobalt and chromium all three of which are considered to be heavy metal poisons and we're eliminating it we're cleaning it up so that's you you you would do let's call it the mining for environment well yes and you know you can walk on this beach and you will see no sea life there's no Barnacles there's no crabs there's no snails there's

no limpets there's nothing washing up on the beach it is sterile it is completely dead and there's not even any seaweed and that's because of the heavy metals uh there's already been studies done on it I mean you know the the fish that are offshore of this Beach uh are all elevated in heavy metals and you wouldn't really want to eat them um and uh but uh we're not going to 100% eliminate the problem by removing the sand but sand because a sand grain has got more of a surface area than this Pebble does in

terms of volume to surface area ratio it has more area to leech and it's more of a problem MH so you know we can't wave our Magic want to get rid of everything and and the government or the local people don't want us to take away the beaching entirely uh they're they're used to it now it's been there for for 50 years or whatever um but uh I think we will cut down on the amount of uh of of of heavy metals that's leeching into the into the water so that's an important thing and certainly

the process that we're thinking of doing is not going to add to the problem at all it's just a simple uh heavy mineral recovery like you see uh in Gold plasters around the world some of which uh are mining offshore um Diamond uh you know off the coast of Namibia they they've been recovering diamonds for I don't know 50 60 70 years uh using um Jigs and things uh same sort of heavy mineral recovery y they do this for mineral Sands and places like Kenya RT Z's got a big project uh they're recovering roual uh

there's nothing uh magical about any of this it's it's a well-known and simple technology now you ask me what is the entry level uh to get this done right are we looking at 100 million bucks no so um okay what I can tell you I'm not going to give you a number on on uh on uh Corsica because I can't but um the um the project that I have in Montana in the US I have a plant there that's capable of doing 200 cubic meters an hour uh processing and the entire plant including the installation

cost me about 15 million okay here we go right so that is the order of magnitude that we're talking about okay so let's say of for sure below 4050 million I think that's that's aable number that's fantastic super so let's guess the permitting moves forward could you start production by end of next year already well hopefully um you know the French government government has got a a directive to find critical Metals uh within France is even better than um the outside French territories they have been getting a lot of their nickel from New Caledonia but

because there's an independence movement there they've closed that down so where are they getting their nickel from well 45% of it's coming from Russia Russia actually is supplying the whole of the of Europe the whole of the EU with 45% of their nickel right exactly and we know what Mr Putin said last week right like uranium nickel and something else chromium I think also is now on the on the band list for the West right yeah you put sanctions on me I'm going to stop the supply of nickel right Tit for Tat so and then

then what happens after that then then car companies like Fiat and F Volkswagen and uh and citran and Rena and all these ones who are producing electric cars have a problem because nickel and Cobalt are intrinsic in electric batteries you can't build an electric battery without them right lithium is important too but so is nickel so um you know if we're going to have the Green Revolution and remember in Europe they have signed it in the law that that's uh no more uh petrol driven cars after 2030 I don't know how the hell they're going

to do it I mean it's only six years yeah yeah uh so 2035 is it still still not attainable but um I know that they're buying a lot of electric cars in Scandinavia and they've got a big program there um so you know I I think uh hell I'm I'm an inv environmentalist like everybody else I don't want to breathe in car pollution uh but um you know it's people have to realize that if they're going to do this they have to have the copper for the wiring and they have to have uh the nickel

and the Cobalt to make the batteries and uh you have to extract it from somewhere and it's coming out of the ground so that is uh that's a reality we're not going to get it by uh uh you know some uh crazy Hocus Pocus coming from recycling yeah that's right sounds like an interesting game plan and I think you also sold your per your Peruvian interests to palamina right yes we did yeah yeah yeah probably that you can concentrate now more on CA and yeah we have to talk about Ecuador also yeah well you know

we all we all are human beings we only have so much bandwidth uh that we could do and uh you know we weren't getting any value in the market from the Peruvian asset at all um and uh you know it would have been a real stretch uh for us to uh to go ahead and uh and populate that with uh uh with uh geologist and all the rest of it so uh We've Let It Go we've uh we're retaining a u a role loyalty um and good luck to them and I hope that they find

a mine um so in Ecuador we're still working away there we've got two crews in the field today um and uh the um the Anaconda mapping at a watcha just got finished about a week and a half ago two weeks so that's done and there's some samples uh that are in the lab right now um the um the IP survey will be done at CU yawi and um it was delayed for a little while uh it's kind of a crazy story but well maybe we don't have to go into it here but well maybe we

do um we were uh the the indigenous people who live in the area were approached by a phony NGO and uh the NGO said that uh if you uh if you keep the company out we'll give you $1,000 and then they came back a week later and said yeah but we need an administration fee of $400 and three of The Villages paid it yeah and of course what happened is these guys vanished and um you know it's it's uh H it's like a scan it's like a variant on the Nigeria scams that that come out

all the time right and so um that delayed us for a little while because one of the uh uh one of the communities and thank goodness they didn't spend the money uh but they were waiting to see if the other communities got their money of course they didn't um and uh uh we weren't banned from working but it was difficult uh we couldn't do because we we wanted to hire uh the the local people uh from the community to do the line cutting uh for the IP survey and they weren't available to us so that

got delayed by about uh six weeks or so it's on track now um we've signed the IP uh contract um so that will go ahead and um I expect that we'll have the results by Christmas and the plan would be to um um have it interpreted look at the targets and uh and potentially drill in in January mhm okay um but I also saw that you are investigating visible gold which you found at crunchy Hill and I think crunchy Hill was the thing which yeah first was really running right yeah yeah we found some epithermal

veins at crunchy Hill and we found a lot of alteration and a lot of sulfides on Surface in the rocks uh we drilled it we drilled the anomaly where uh we thought that the goodie Zone would be and we got nothing we got no gold um we did hit hit some epithermal style veins now the gold uh occurs in the sapit uh which is a soil profile above the Bedrock and um the first samples we took we could see the gold we could Pan the gold out of the sapper light which is like a CL

but we when it went to the lab we got nothing back and that's because it's very very nuggety and it didn't get represented in the splits that the lab did that went in for fire assay and so we did it again using uh the new technology proton assay and we got some uh we got appreciable gold in in those samples and since then we've been trying to track down uh the source of the gold but uh up until now I I must say it's eluded us and and that's the way it is uh sometimes it

could be washed out of the Sandstone up above uh crunchy Hill and not even come out of the Bedrock uh we just don't know um but uh at some point um you know we're uh when um the time comes to do the IP survey Curry II uh we must focus on that instead of running after Wild Goose chases and um and then uh you know we'll have some hard IP targets to drill um and um we'll see what we get now the previous work that we've done on on cawi um we've done fluid inclusions uh

from the uh the veins and we know that the veins are High salinity veins uh but they're low temperature so uh what we think is that um the uh the material came up from very deep the the hot water uh probably carrying gold and uh and that gold dropped out a depth somewhere uh because the fluids cooled and when they cooled they're no longer able to carry the metal load um they continue up towards the surface Sur and they form hot springs and Geyers and mud pools and all that good stuff and things like arsenic

antimony and Mercury are able to travel much much further up through the Rocks up to the surface the Paleo surface not the present surface but the the original land surface in Hot Springs and that but you know there many many places in the world like I'll give you for instance uh place called Waki in North Island New Zealand where they're producing steam to to to turn uh turbines uh to uh uh to generate electricity uh that is uh it's a geothermal plant it's been there for for a long long long time and they have something

called a throttle plate to control uh the steam that's coming out of the the ground out of the hole um and it's like a choke plate so that the steam it's it's a regular flow and they don't have suddenly have an explosion of steam and it blows out all the infrastructure that's on top right they have a blowout so this throttle plate one of them they replaced it this is a oh gosh this is going back about 30 years I guess but um a person who was uh looked at this saw that it was covered

in scale uh and it was kind of a brassy colored scale on on the the steel throttle plate so he cut the um he cut a chunk out of the plate on a with a saw and had it analyzed and it contained 5% gold oops oops so so what has happened there is that the the Steam and the hot water are carrying gold within them but when you drop the temperature of the steam it instantly precipitates on the walls of the pipe and on this throttle plate right the same sort of thing happens naturally in

the ground every time there's a geyser eruption if it's in the right place right territory where you know some places I mean you know you won't find it in Hawaii because the uh the the hot water is not carrying gold but in another places in the world like New Zealand and I mean fruit Del Norte is exactly like this right so the gold will precipitate but it will be at depth it won't be at the surface right um so it's um you have to drill this thing and we're expecting that it would have been uh

precipitated with sulfides and that there's a conductor at death which we'll find with the induced polarization survey and then we pop it okay super so that means we will have a lot of news of course um because of kosa also and Ecuador that is great um I saw that you also converted $2 million um of debentures into shares so if I look at the share price today that was a nice deal but it shows also that you are really convinced right well you know I kind of have the inside track and I'm a Believer right

if I wasn't a Believer I wouldn't have done it hand it over couple million bucks uh I was delighted to do it and um you know the the last private placement uh we did it at 20 cents at a 40 with a 45 Cent warrant um the warrants weigh into the money right now uh everyone who participated in that is happy happy happy um and um you know that's uh it's a wonderful thing it's great okay super oh that sounds great um so yeah that perspective I would say everything looks really really interesting I must

say and it will be a very informative next uh yeah three to six months probably and I have the feeling we we speak quite soon keys I suspect so and hopefully next time I'll get over to switzo and then we can share a schnaps afterwards and celebrate that sounds like a great thing or at least the beer schnaps is not so mine but that's okay super much really for that and I wish you well and yeah let's talk soon excellent thanks so much yen for the opportunity take care yeah ladies and gentlemen that's that was

Dr Keys Baron the president and CEO of Oria resources and yeah you heard it things are really progressing here Kika is the new baby I think really interesting because the stuff is laying on the surface and you just have to do it right and Kei has the expertise through his setfire mine and so from that perspective everything looks really really interesting that's why I'm a shareholder probably also that's one of the reasons why as Keys alluded to he converted again $2 million of debt into the stock and I would say really check out Oria resources

this is now the real big thing really moving 2025 should be their year so thanks for watching us and bye-bye from Sand