‘It’s quite an astonishing piece’ — Aurania’s CEO Keith Barron, on a 46% Au historic gold specimen

Kitco mining's special coverage of the rule Symposium natural resource investing is brought to you by G mining Ventures [Music] learning from history has proven to be a successful exploration strategy for Iranian gold which is embarked on Expedition unknowns in the search for the precious metal the company has done it again and to tell us all is gold exploration's very own Joss Gates Dr Keith Barron Keith welcome to Kitco that's quite an introduction orania is known for its Lost Cities project in Ecuador based on the search you did in the general Archive of the Indies in

Spain looking for the centers of gold production for the Conquistadors 500 years ago now you seem to have turned to Asterix the Gaulle having announced the gold exploration project in France in search of the source of Celtic gold tell me more well it's uh it's a very interesting thing um back last November at the Natural History Museum in Paris a very large gold specimen went on display for the first time uh it weighs three and a half kilos and it has a kilo of gold in it which is incredible uh grade of gold and I

became aware of it and you know it has a little tag on it it says where it comes from and I knew that historically um well as far as I was aware and looking through the literature there was no mention of of gold being found there before so it's very very intrigued by it one of my colleagues contacted the the staff at the Museum and they said actually we have some some old documentation there's an old reference from a newspaper in 1875 that talks about a couple of gentlemen who were building a road and they

were actually pulling rocks out of a Hedgerow to fill in some holes in this road and one of them was extraordinarily heavy and they cracked it open and it was full of gold so they they supplied us with that and also another excerpt from a book that was by the shop who first explored the very famous cave paintings at Lasko the prehistoric cave paintings that a lot of people know about he had examined these specimens 50 years on from when they were they were discovered and I I've got a piece here which I think was

found at about the same time historically it comes from uh it's not mine unfortunately but it's uh I borrowed it from a collector and uh so it's a historic specimen and this one contains one pound of gold so it's quite an astonishing piece it's actually 46 gold 460 000 grams per ton and look you know when you find out something like this and you're a geologist you get very very excited so um my company irania we've um we've filed uh for the mineral rights over this area and we'll see what transfers from that but very

exciting that's quite amazing Keith and this rock specimen you've got here um it's got a quartz vein with gold uh very high grade gold obviously uh all through it it looks pretty amazing yes yes well you know I'm I'm as you know I'm a real history buff and actually it's it's a very interesting point Julius Caesar who we all know about he wrote a book um called the gallic wars and uh and this actually goes back to the comic strip Asterix the goal um the Romans of course invaded Gaul led by Julius Caesar and when

Caesar returned to Rome and famously crossed the Rubicon he had his own Army he was very very wealthy at that point and where did the wealth come from and I believe I believe that there was a source of gold in Gaul that we really don't know about historically or many many sources and you know he essentially plundered it and uh and that's what uh what financed his his armies and his uh eventual uh attack on Rome and becoming the dictator and all the rest of it and then invading Great Britain or what was written at

the time okay and for the the gold projects in Ecuador he did an extensive amount of research uh in the historical archive is there more of that sort of research that is possible to do to further your investigations in France uh potentially so yes and you know we haven't even scratched the surface really um there could be stuff could be stuff in the Vatican uh we we just don't know at this point um but uh when we um well one of our people examined the site um found some courts sticking up out of the ground

no visible gold on the surface but uh evidence of of old workings which are potentially uh pre-roman um time will tell okay so you've applied for some concessions what what's the plan there assuming you're able to be awarded those well we'll see we'll see uh you know it's a it's a little bit of a black box in in France and there's a lot of bureaucracy it's going to take some time um but uh certainly we'll work with the authorities and um I expect there's a lot more than this um there's never been any technology thrown

at this so who knows what's actually in the ground um gold is all gold is considered property of the states in France so you have to have a a lease of some sort uh license uh to extract it and you know we'll work within the law and work with the authorities and and move this thing ahead okay um is France a country where you believe it's possible to bring a gold mine into production well actually um I'm sure that you're aware but um France has various departments Around the World and places like New Caledonia Vanuatu

are considered to be French territories French Guiana for instance and of course there's lots of gold mines in French Guiana so the law in French Guiana is the same as law in France the country right and we know um there there is one active uh concession right now there's there is a a foreign company that's exploring gold uh for gold in in uh in France and there's also a very very big project for lithium going on so um you know the country is not anti-mining it has a long long history of mining course of things

like coal and iron ore and even uranium um so um yeah you know and everywhere everywhere needs jobs of course absolutely and France is part of the European Union of course and uh the European Union um has very Advanced who is advancing a critical minerals plan um presumably uh France is very keen on that as well so if you do have the potential for critical minerals on the on the the areas where you are looking at such as lithium or others um presumably that would be a positive yeah yeah well one of the the critical

medals is antimony and antimony is used on a small scale in uh in in circuitry and things like that there is no source of antimony in the whole of the EU so it's all imported right now and then there are other metals like for instance let's say nickel 55 percent of nickel is is imported from Russia and the Russians are are talking about cutting off the supply so what's going to happen um you know for manufacturers of stainless steel car parts all that kind of stuff right so there's a real push on right now in

uh in Europe to become self-sufficient in critical metals and it covers things like battery metals and other things other Commodities as well they just don't want to be beholden to China beholden to Russia to these other countries uh macron is actually announced a 500 million euro fund to fund battery Metals within France so and they've just built a gigafactory up in Dunkirk up in the coast the famous Dunkirk um yeah you know they're very very committed to this okay well let's cross the ocean now um let's get an update on the Lost Cities project in

in Ecuador yes well uh as as you're aware there's going to be a national election next month um our projects are are very Advanced we've been working at this stuff for six years now we've spent over 80 million dollars on expiration and we've got to the stage now where we need to have a partner so we've been talking with uh well pretty much all the major companies in the world um but uh there's a couple of Front Runners um I believe that they're waiting to see what happens with the election coming up but nevertheless you

know for instance we have copper silver and sediments extending over 22 kilometers now just think you know in the early days if you went to the uh the copper belt and staked up 22 kilometers of the copper belts in in Zambia what would you do with it right your little company do you have the money to go and do the expiration of course Notch you're going to have to bring in a partner who has obviously the wherewithal financially but also the expertise to find the things and then bring them into production that's where we are

not just on the copper instead of the Shale and Sandstone hosted stuff but also perfect copper uh in the last AGM um that that we had uh last month um we uh I I it's a little bit of a story and I won't bore you with all the details but originally I applied for 400 000 hectares not to 200 000 which we presently have and the other two hundred thousand were placed by the government in what they called the reserved areas and they said we could get them in a year's time a year and a

half time or something like that that was later canceled and but in the interim thinking we were going to get it we flew an Airborne survey over the whole thing for radiometrics and for mag we got over 200 perfect type targets and unfortunately a lot of those targets are outside of the present concessions I'm working very very hard to see that we can get those things restored uh to the company and um and then we'll really be cooking with gas because you know everybody needs perfect copper excellent okay well let's finish up with uh getting

back to the history aspect uh when we spoke uh a year ago you just announced the the discovery of what you believe with one of the Lost Cities how's the search for the Lost Cities going well um that one lost city is an alluvial area and it's actually just outside of our concessions and that's unfortunate um it's owned by a construction company I've talked to the owner uh at one point they had 50 um invading uh excavators on the property Colombians who were mining illegally they were all driven off by the governments and a lot

of their machines were actually torched by the army so and that's a good thing um now the second one which is uh called Sevilla Oro we think that that's that's in that 200 000 hectares which is just uh outside of our present concessions we've been to the area um and you know over an area of about two three hectares every little stream you can pan gold out of it so that's very exciting I need to get that land okay well I wish you the best of luck with that uh Dr Keith Barron thank you very

much for joining us today thank you stay tuned to Kitco mining for more from the real Symposium in Boca Raton Florida Kitco mining special coverage of the rule Symposium natural resource investing is brought to you by G mining Ventures foreign