Transcription of Finance News Network Interview with Dart Mining NL (ASX:DTM) Managing Director, James ChirnsideCarolyn Herbert: Hello I’m Carolyn Herbert from the Finance News Network and joining me from junior explorer, Dart Mining NL
(ASX:DTM) is Managing Director, James Chirnside. James, welcome to FNN.
James Chirnside: Thanks for having me Carolyn.
Carolyn Herbert: Can you start by giving us an introduction to Dart Mining?
James Chirnside: Dart Mining is a listed company here obviously in Australia, been listed for about 10 years. It originally was an aggregation of exploration licences in northeast Victoria, focused in the gold space.
Carolyn Herbert: Now to your projects and exploration licences. Can you tell us a bit more about those?
James Chirnside: We’ve got 2,000 square kilometres of exploration and mining licences, some of which are still under application in northeast Victoria. And a small mining licence in central Victoria, at a place called Rushworth. The northeast Victorian tenements offer up a host of different style of mineralisation, as well as different minerals. The small gold strategy, our first one is really focused on exploiting gold from small deposits. Now when I say small, we’re talking potentially 5,000-ounce up to 100,000-ounce type deposits.
Our second strategy is what we call our porphyry projects. We’ve got about nine porphyries, one of which is a signature project for the company. Back in 2008, we discovered molybdenum there at Mt Unicorn. Mt Unicorn is regarded as a very significant world-class deposit of molybdenum. Unfortunately the price of molybdenum collapsed after the GFC, hasn’t actually recovered a great deal since and so that project is on hold. But the other porphyries and typically, porphyries will be dominated by one metal or other, typically.
So we have one called Copper Quarry, which is essentially a copper porphyry. For those who don’t understand, porphyries offer up enormous scale and Cadia-Ridgeway operated by Newcrest Mining Limited
(ASX:NCM) out at Orange, that there are all part of a porphyry system. So they’re not particularly high-grades, but the tonnages are enormous. So our porphyry strategy is very important to us. That can offer I guess, a lot of the blue sky for the company in the long-term.
Our third strategy is around the lithium. Very recently, we announced that we had assayed a couple of grab samples I might emphasise of pegmatite rock, which contained what appeared to be commercial quantities of lithium and tantalum. So that’s where we’re at with our strategies.
Carolyn Herbert: What’s your focus and what can investors expect to hear in terms of news flow, going forward?
James Chirnside: I think over the next six months we’ll need to raise some capital. The capital will be deployed efficiently into an intensive exploration program, particularly around the lithium but also around the gold. I mean not to forget that gold and the gold sector, as most people would understand, is in a very good place at the moment. If you’re an Australian dollar producer, we’re in a massive bull market. I mean margins nominally have now never been better. So gold is an exciting mineral for us to pursue and concurrently, we will run exploration on gold and lithium.
Carolyn Herbert: Now to financials, what’s your cash position and are you funded for 2016?
James Chirnside: We had at the end of the quarter; we were holding around $450,000 of cash. We clearly, if we have any aspirations on the exploration front, we’re going to need to raise some more cash for that. We’ll be announcing details around that soon.
Carolyn Herbert: Finally James. Where would you like to see the company by year’s end and what’s your long-term ambition for the company?
James Chirnside: By the end of this year, which gives us about five months, I think an exploration program on the lithium would be good. To be well advanced into that to understand a little bit more about what we’ve got there. And equally, some more drilling around some of our smaller gold projects to understand them better, with a view to taking them into production. I think long-term, the idea is to get - and when I say long-term I guess I mean the next couple of years, we want to get to a point where we’re making a profit. Where we don’t have to go back to the market the whole time, for cash and we think we can achieve that.
Carolyn Herbert: James Chirnside, thanks for joining us.
James Chirnside: Thanks very much Carolyn.
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