P2 Gold — 1 video in collection
In this interview, P2 Gold’s president, chairman and CEO, Joe Ovsenek, discusses the prospects, geology, timelines and much more at its 100%-owned Gabbs project in Nevada’s Walker-Lane trend, including the decision to increase the throughput rate by 33% in its forthcoming (full) feasibility study, anticipated early next year. P2 Gold is a precious metals and copper explorer managed by a team with a proven track record from Pretium. It is focused on advancing its 100%-owned, PEA-stage gold-copper Gabbs Project on the Walker-Lane Trend in Nevada.
What has driven the rise in P2 Gold’s share price?
Joe Ovsenek: I think sentiment is finally flowing, and people are realising that you need gold and copper – and where’s it going to come from? You need mining companies, and you need people finding it. As people have looked at that, they have seen that we’re sitting on a lot of gold and a lot of copper, and people are buying our stock, which is allowing us to move our project forward to production.
Where is P2 Gold’s Gabbs project, and what are the plans and timelines for production?
Joe Ovsenek: We’re in a feasibility study right now on a gold-copper open-pit mine in Nevada, so it’s a great jurisdiction. It’s a simple mine: open-pit mining of gold and copper. The feasibility study is targeting production of 150,000oz of gold and 50Mlbs of copper, in that neighbourhood, for a minimum of 12 years. Our target is to be in commercial production in 2029, starting construction in 2028 with a one-year build.
What historic exploration and mining activity has taken place in and around the Gabbs project?
Joe Ovsenek: Right on our southern border is an older mine called Paradise Peak. It was in production in the ’80s and into the ’90s, and that’s on our south-southeast border. On our southwest border, there’s a small open-pit operation that’s still mining today. They mine the ore and truck it to a different plant for processing about 25–30 miles away. So, we’re in the heart of a mining area, and there are lots of historical mining works on our property from the late 1800s and around 1900. There’s a lot of minerals here.
Why does it matter that the Gabbs project is on Nevada’s Walker Lane Trend?
Joe Ovsenek: There have been a lot of mines historically within the Walker Lane Trend, and the nice thing about Walker Lane gold is that it’s free gold. It’s not tied up with any other minerals.
There’s a big mine that’s been operating for a long time. One of our directors was CFO of a company that owned that mine in the 1990s, and it’s still operating. It’s Round Mountain, which Kinross owns. As the crow flies, it’s not that far, maybe 20 miles. It’s a little tougher to get there by car, but you can see it in the distance from our property.
So we’re in a great mining jurisdiction. Further south on the Walker Lane Trend, AngloGold Ashanti and Centerra are building mines. It’s a great place to be. We’re really pleased to be in Nevada, and the permitting is going well.
What is it like operating in Nevada, which the Fraser Institute ranks as the world’s top mining jurisdiction?
Joe Ovsenek: What we’ve noticed is that the regulators are very professional, and the process is very well laid out. You know what’s required of you, and you know how to deal with it. We deal with the BLM, the Bureau of Land Management, whose land we’re on. We’re using local consultants to help with our permitting, and they’re all very knowledgeable. I would say there’s deep bench strength in this part of the world for taking a project from exploration into production. There’s lots of support, good relations with the government and good support from local professionals.
What types of mineralisation are in the Gabbs resource, and how big is the exploration upside?
Joe Ovsenek: The majority of our mineralisation is gold-copper, and the deposits are porphyry deposits. Some of the biggest gold mines in the world are really gold-copper or copper mines: porphyry mines with gold.
So we’re sitting on one of these. Right now we’re exploring the parts of it that have come to the surface and drilling them off, so we’re expanding them. As I mentioned, we expect to produce a good number of ounces of gold and pounds of copper over a long mine life. We think that at a minimum, when we come out with our feasibility study, it’ll be roughly a 12-year mine life, maybe longer. We’re still drilling, and, as an aside, the target for the feasibility study is Q1 next year. But we feel there’s potential for it to be twice as long on near-surface mineralisation alone.
The big potential, though, is the question of where this porphyry mineralisation came from. There’s usually a source porphyry that the mineralisation came from, and when you get into one of those, you’re into a long-life, large mine. There’s potential for that on our property. We haven’t yet had the opportunity to really explore for it. Our focus is on taking our project from exploration into production, getting that flat cash flow going and getting a return for our shareholders. But as we move forward and get that cash flowing, we will start looking for the source of that mineralisation. If we get into it, that’s another big game changer for our company and our project. So there’s a lot of potential for growth here at Gabbs in Nevada.
How will the upcoming resource update and feasibility study build on the 2024 preliminary economic assessment, or PEA?
Joe Ovsenek: We came out with an updated mineral resource estimate on the project in April 2024. At the time, we used even lower metal prices for our resource to be conservative: about $1,800/oz gold, $25/oz silver and $3.75/lb copper, so well below current metal prices. We’re updating that now.
If I lump indicated and inferred resources together, just to give you a feel for the scope of the project, that resource estimate had 2Moz of gold and 864Mlbs of copper. We’ve been drilling to expand the resource since we came out with our PEA, and we expect the new resource later this quarter, so I’d expect it before Christmas this year, 2026. Our target is roughly 3Moz of gold, which is a nice bump up in the gold ounces, and 1bn–1.5bn lbs of copper, again a nice bump up.
In tons, we’re probably looking at 170–200Mt of mineralisation defined in this resource estimate, with potential for much more – another 100–200Mt down the road as we keep drilling.
Why has P2 Gold increased the planned throughput rate from 9Mt to 12Mt per year?
Joe Ovsenek: Because we’ve seen growth. We haven’t released the resource estimate yet, but we need to be proactive, and we’re seeing that we have a lot more mineralisation. So we’ve decided to increase the size of our mill, and we’re now going to run it at 12Mt per year. That deals with the sulphide mineralisation.
As we mine the sulphide, there’s also a layer of oxide mineralisation on top of it. That oxide mineralisation will go on a heap leach, mined in parallel with the mill operation. So we could be operating at a minimum of 12Mt a year and up to, say, 16Mt a year at times. More realistically it’s probably 12–14Mt a year, over a life of mine that we think is a minimum of 12 years and potentially a lot longer.
Does the Gabbs project have reliable access to water and electricity in the Nevada desert?
Joe Ovsenek: Yes. As you mentioned, there’s a historical mine from the ’90s on our southern border. They have a 120kV transmission line coming into their property that’s still active, and we plan to tie into it and wheel the power up to our property. We’ll have to build maybe a 6–7 mile spur line off that transmission line up to our mill, so not much capital there.
On the water front, it’s amazing. You drive through this part of Nevada and it’s brown, there’s no getting away from it. There’s a bit of green depending on the season, but it’s brown and it’s desert. However, when we drill, depending on where we are, we get down 100 metres in some areas and we’re into water. Up where we’re going to be mining in our pits, we get down to about 400 feet and we’re into water. So there’s lots of water in the aquifer.
We had to secure water rights for it, though. Just because you have water on your property doesn’t mean you’re entitled to it under Nevada law. So we’ve bought water rights from a dairy farm to the north of us, and we’re in the process of having them transferred from agricultural use to mining, milling and dewatering use. That’s going through now, and I’d expect it to be approved later this quarter or, more likely, in Q1 next year. Once that’s in place, we’ll have access to all the water we need for the mill and the heap leach operation.
When does P2 Gold expect to reach a final investment decision and secure project financing?
Joe Ovsenek: In about a year, give or take. Once we get the feasibility study out in Q1, as I said, we’re actually starting detailed engineering later this quarter. If the stars align and things work out well for us, we feel we could be permitted by the end of 2027 and be in a position to break ground at the beginning of 2028. If the stars are only somewhat aligned, we think mid-2028. Either way, our plan is to start construction in 2028.
We want to have our detailed engineering completed by the end of 2027 and our construction financing in place before then, so that’s when the permits are issued and we can start construction straight away. That’s pretty much our timing.
When could P2 Gold pour first gold?
Joe Ovsenek: There’s an opportunity for us to bring gold forward in our production profile. As you mentioned, there are different types of mineralisation on the property, which I never really addressed. We have a smaller deposit to the south of our main deposits that’s a simple epithermal gold deposit of about 100,000oz, and it leaches incredibly well. In our metallurgical test work column tests, we got 90% of the gold out in under two weeks.
So what we’re thinking is that if we sequence our construction schedule well, we can get our heap-leach facility in place first: at least one to two years’ worth of liner down, plus our ponds and our carbon columns. Then we could bring in a contract miner to start mining that higher-grade material. It’s about 1g/t gold and higher, up to 2g/t in areas. We’d get that on the heap leach right away and start irrigating it with our solution, and we could potentially be cash flowing within seven, eight, nine months of starting construction, which would be great for us. From then on, it just keeps ramping up.
Where could P2 Gold be in five years’ time?
Joe Ovsenek: Well, I focus on the near term. Right now, I look at peer companies and where they’re trading, and I think our share price should conservatively be 2x, and potentially 3–4x, higher than it is today.
Once we’re in production, I look at companies that produce that amount of gold. Look at companies producing 150,000oz of gold and 50Mlbs of copper. Not many produce that specific mix, but on an equivalent basis, depending on your metal prices, you’re looking at about 225,000oz of gold a year. Those companies are trading at US$4bn, or higher. That’s just a number from some companies I follow.
We currently have 365m shares outstanding. If we do this right, we feel we can get into production with under 400m shares outstanding. With 400m shares outstanding and a US$4bn market cap, you can see there’s a lot of potential for our shares to run and re-rate as we become a producer.
If we can’t make 400m, I feel 400–450m is roughly the top end of our share issuance to get into production, if things go the way they’re going. That still leaves a big multiple from where our share price is today.
What experience does the P2 Gold team have of building mines?
Joe Ovsenek: We’ve built mines before, and we know what we’re doing. We built the Brucejack Mine in northwest British Columbia, where you’re constructing and operating with 22–25 metres of snow a year. That’s a lot of shovelling.
Nevada is so nice. You might get a trace of snow, and you don’t get much rain. The ground is nice and flat, whereas at the last mine we had to drive over a glacier to get to it. Here we drive on a paved highway to get to our project. You couldn’t ask for a better place to build a mine, so we’re really pleased with the infrastructure and the location of our Gabbs project in Nevada.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability. Verbal fillers, false starts and minor repetitions have been removed from the interviewee’s responses only. Punctuation, spelling and formatting have also been standardised in line with Edison house style. No substantive changes have been made to the meaning of the discussion.
