Transcription of The Stock Network Interview with Southern Cross Gold (ASX:SX2) President, CEO & Managing Director, Michael Hudson
Lel Smits: Southern Cross Gold is a mineral exploration business focused on the discovery of gold deposits in the Victorian goldfields. Its flagship asset is the wholly owned Sunday Creek Gold and Antimony Project, which could represent one of the most significant exploration discoveries to come out of Australia in recent times. Ahead of appearing at the Newsom Mining Conference, Southern Cross Gold President and CEO Managing Director Michael Hudson joins me on the Stock Network. Michael, welcome to the Stock Network.
Michael Hudson: Thanks Lel, lovely to be here.
Lel Smits: Now, the current version of Southern Cross Gold was formed in January after your merger with Toronto-listed Mawson Gold. Since then, you’ve reported a series of high-grade drill hits at Sunday Creek and defined an exploration target of between 2.2 and 3.2 million ounces of gold equivalent. Can you tell us about the significance of this project for the company?
Michael Hudson: Sure Lel, it’s one of the few multi-million ounce pre-development projects that is around the 10-gram mark. So, that exploration target that was all drill-constrained has a gold equivalent of 8.5 to 10.6. So, one of the few assets on earth that is incredibly high-grade.
The average gold grade globally is 1 gram in mine. So, you know, we’re talking 10 times that. These produce amazingly high-grade, high-margin projects.
So, they get valued very, very highly for that reason. And we’re rinsing and repeating what happened in Victoria only over the last five or six years ago where there was another discovery that really rewrote Victoria’s history of mine called Fosterville. So, we’re onto another one of those.
Lel Smits: Excellent. Now, let’s talk about fast-tracking Sunday Creek towards development. You recently raised around $160 million through a strongly supported placement to Advance Works at Sunday Creek. What outcomes can we now expect to see from this cash injection over the next couple of years?
Michael Hudson: Yeah, time is the biggest destructor of mining projects along with CAPEX and OPEX. We can control time. So, it means more drill rigs to drill out the project but also keep exploration going.
So, exploration is the true driver of value in this business, but you can’t just explore without de-risking projects. So, we’re going to put 200km of drilling to drill out the primary resource, which will be significant. We’ve got $30M to put a decline or a tunnel under the ground, which will make drilling three times as fast with more rigs underground operating 24×7 and going through the engineering studies.
And we’re only touching about a kilometre of what is a 10km long project. So, it will allow us to do a lot more exploration to keep that discovery optionality continuing.
Lel Smits: Well, Michael, thank you for the update from Southern Cross Gold and look forward to seeing you at Noosa Mining.
Michael Hudson: Great. Thanks, Lel.
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