Transcription of The Stock Network Interview with Rumble Resources (ASX:RTR), Managing Director and CEO, Peter Harold
Lel Smits: Western Australia-focused explorer and emerging gold producer Rumble Resources is accelerating development across its multi-commodity portfolio underpinned by recent resource upgrades, a maiden tungsten resource and ongoing drilling designed to expand high-value assets. Joining me today is Managing Director and CEO Peter Harrold, outlining how Rumble is fast-tracking its Western Queen gold and tungsten project towards near-term production, advancing the globally significant zinc-lead-silver discovery and leveraging a disciplined technical methodology. Peter, welcome to The Stock Network.
Peter Harold: Thanks, great to be here.
Lel Smits: Now, with Western Queen now upgraded and a scoping study released, how is Rumble positioning the project for potential production in the year ahead? And also, what are the key milestones that investors should expect?
Peter Harold: Yeah, well, we put out the scoping study last week, and that’s sort of an initial project. It’s a couple of years of production, about 60,000oz of gold produced.
But that doesn’t include the deeper material at Western Queen South or Central. So basically, what we’re looking at doing now is we’re sort of running pretty hard. The next thing that we really have to do is sign a tolling agreement.
And we’re quite close to doing that with a company called Guilden Resources, who own Kirkaloka, which is the gold plant. It’s about 180km by road from us. So that’s probably the next major milestone.
And we’re close to doing that. And then after that, it would be getting all the permitting, which is the approvals and so on, which are required. So we’ve already submitted some approvals for the open pit, but we’ve obviously changed that to underground.
So we’ve just got to resubmit those. So that shouldn’t take too long. And so we’re hoping to be in the second quarter to make a financial investment decision once we’ve got the financing sorted out.
And we’re looking to obviously debt finances because it’s only a relatively small amount of money, $10M of capital, plus there’ll be a bit of working capital as well. So we’re running all of those things concurrently, if you like. And then we’d make a financial investment decision early in the first quarter, early second quarter.
And then it’s about two months to pump water out from the pit, two months to clean up that area and then cut the portal. And then it’s about six months to production. So we’re saying at this stage, early 2027 for production.
Lel Smits: Fantastic. And when it comes to exploration and resource growth, and really your broader pipeline of base metal and battery metal targets, how do you think these assets are strategically compelling when it comes to the longer term growth?
Peter Harold: Well, I think we can get ourselves into cashflow pretty quickly through the gold. So that’s 12, 13 months away.
We’ve got tungsten, which is obviously a supercritical metal. 85% of the world’s tungsten now comes out of China. So the world’s looking to sort of get off that and get its own supply chains going.
So the tungsten could come on stream relatively quickly after the gold, subject to the metallurgical test being positive, which we think it will be. That can be a co-product stream. That would require some sort of processing through a gravity circuit, either at Western Queen or potentially down at Kirkaloka, and then ship that material offshore for further processing.
That could come along. So that’s a really near-term opportunity. And then behind that, you’ve obviously got Irohide, which is the big lead-zinc silver project out at Walloona.
And we’ve done an internal scoping study on that. We need to do a bit more metallurgical test work on whether we can, instead of producing a bulk lead-zinc concentrate, we can maybe produce separate concentrates. The beauty of that means we’d get a higher lead-zinc con, which would get better payability than the bulk concentrate.
So we’ve started that test work now. And the idea there is we bring a partner into that project because that’s going to be a major capital undertaking. That’s a 20, 30-year project.
So it’s a big project. And I think we realistically would struggle to do that on our own. So we’ll be looking next year to bring a partner in to do the resource reserve conversion and the bankable feasibility study.
So I suppose it’s a combination of get the Gold production going and then use the cashflow from that to increase the resource base there, get into the tungsten production, and then obviously bring the Irohide project along as well.
Lel Smits: Well, Pete, I appreciate the update to Rumble Resources. Looks like 2026 is going to be a big one for you and look forward to hearing more in the year ahead.
Peter Harold: Yeah, look, I think it is going to be a huge year for us. And not that this year wasn’t, but I think that with the exploration that we’re doing and getting the project into production, it’s a sort of a game changer for us. And I think the market will realise that we’re very undervalued and hopefully close that valuation gap. Thank you.
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