Wildfires erupt in Canada crude patch in threat to oil sands
One 7-acre fire is within about 6 miles of MEG Energy Corp.’s Christina Lake site, which produced almost 100,000 barrels a day in May.
The stock chart is enough to make every mining investor relations professional salivate. A gradual bumping along at around 25c a share, and then, like a sudden lurching of the needle on a seismograph, a massive, electrifying move upward. And when I say up, I mean stratospheric- we are talking a five-fold, rapier-like price spike in a single day.
As it turns out, that day was Valentine’s Day, and while most people were picking our cards and chocolates and trying to remember to say all the right things to their significant other, Peter M. Clausi was expressing another kind of love, the love of money, as he watched investors bid up the stock in the company by some 528%.
That company led by Clausi, an energetic 48-year-old who can’t seem to spit the words out fast enough describing recent successes, is GTA Resources and Mining (TSX-V:GTA), a small-cap explorer whose drill results have certainly impressed the market.
The $15 million market cap company has a prospective gold property near Thunder Bay, Ontario, and it is creating buzz at the PDAC conference in Toronto this week. I met Clausi in a quiet lunch café in the North hall, a rare refuge at this bustling, frenetic show, where he told me he is taking a break from the hubbub in the South hall where most of the action is at PDAC.
The technical team is still figuring out all the details behind the Feb. 14 drill results that had investors hitting the buy button in droves, ratcheting up the stock from 25 cents at the beginning of the day to $2, before settling back to close around $1.50. The stock has slipped back a bit since, but is still trading near a dollar, which is four times more than at the beginning of February. That is one hell of a year for GTA, and the year is only three months old.
“We’re still trying to address what we have. Are they veins, vein systems, stock works, we don’t know,” says Clausi. “What we do know is there is mineralization in this area. All 12 holes began and terminated in mineralization.”
Clausi is referring to a 12-hole drill program done on the property in October, which exposed three main vein systems. Notable intercepts included 1.05 g/t over 150 metres and 131 g/t over half a metre. The 1,035-metre drill program was shallow, which suggests an open-pittable deposit, though Clausi is reluctant to speculate, preferring to leave that to the mining engineers.
For now, Clausi said GTA is focusing on completing a recent financing, where the company raised $6 million led by Laurentian Bank. When all is said and done, GTA will have about 22 million shares issued and outstanding.
There will also be more drilling to further delineate the gold mineralization. GTA issued a press release on March 12th indicating that drilling has restarted and is expected to run until mid to late-May. Clausi points out that the property is within a kilometre of the historic Northshore gold mine, which produced 3800 tons of gold ore graded 21 g/t during the 1930s. The site was drilled in the 1990s by Noranda and by American Bonanza in the mid-2000s, before it was sold to Balmoral Resources and GTA optioned it off last July.
Excellent chip samples taken in November of last year provided the confidence to move forward with drilling. All the 22 samples except one assayed over 12 grams per tonne and over half returned values over 31 g/t, states the Nov. 8 press release.
Asked whether GTA looks ripe for a takeout, Clausi said the company is waiting to see how things unfold: “We’re trying not to look that far ahead. All we can do is keep the drill bits turning, deliver value to shareholders and let capitalism do its thing.”
