The markets may be turbulent right now, but the price of copper has been steadily climbing for the last several years from $2 a pound in early 2016 to $4.49 a pound on Feb. 28.
A conductor of heat and electricity, the red metal is fueling the future. It's being used for everything from electric vehicles to wireless communication and energy storage systems. Demand for copper is expected to grow 31% by 2030, Kitco reported.
It's "the new oil," according to a report released by Goldman Sachs in April 2021.
"There is a revolution coming towards green energy, and there will be increased copper consumption," said Fabled Copper Corp. (FABL:CSE) President, Chief Executive Officer, and Director Peter Hawley. "All of this will happen regardless if you think the (financial) world is going to crash or your portfolio's going to go do down the tank."
Hawley said Fabled Copper, which split out from Fabled Silver Gold Corp. (FCO:TSX; FBSGF:OTCQB; 7NQ:FSE) in December, is on track to locate those needed resources.
There's room for players in the market. About 40% of the world's copper reserves are in Chile and Peru, according to the Chilean government. The largest copper mine, Escondida in Chile, is believed to have reached peak production. Chile's government sued the mine over excess water usage and the owners dealt with a strike by workers.
Fabled Copper, at $0.04 on Feb. 28, is clearly an "undervalued asset," Hawley said.
Hawley has over 35 years of mining industry experience, from grassroots exploration to development and production. In 2017, he was asked to cofound Fabled Silver Gold and to act as a technical adviser. He was retired at the time but due to mismanagement took over the helm of the company when it was "a shell" worth about $1.3 million with $375,000 in debt in July 2020.
Last year, Fabled Silver Gold decided it made more sense and gave more value to shareholders to split its copper holdings out to a second company. Fabled Copper began trading on Dec. 21 on the Canadian Securities Exchange, (CSE). Fabled Silver Gold shareholders received one nontaxable share in the new spinout for every five shares they owned of Fabled Silver.
Hawley serves as president, CEO, and director of both Fabled Copper and Fabled Silver Gold, which has had success of its own this year releasing drilling results from its Santa Maria project in Mexico where it intersected high-grade gold.
"These are hydrothermal gold, not epithermal silver domain intercepts, so it's a whole different plumbing system," Hawley said of the Mexico results. "It's a major discovery, as far as I'm concerned."
'A Crazy Amount of Copper'
Fabled Copper is exploring the Muskwa Project in northwestern British Columbia, near the Yukon border. Muskwa consists of the Toro, Bronson, and Neil claim blocks, which were explored in the early 1970s before rockslides and burgeoning snowfields limited further development.
Hawley said there's about 24 square miles where "there is just a crazy amount of copper there in various forms, and in the more intense copper mineralization, we own this whole area. We've spent the summer of 2021 on the property and there has been a lot of field work accomplished."
Surface exploration results from 2021 have begun to be released, with at least one sample that was 14.30% copper over a width of 4.60 meters on the Lady Luck copper occurrence. Hawley said the copper is already visible at the surface.
"You've got this copper vein … going up the mountain and you can see it … and on the top of the mountain walk along it and look over the other side," Hawley told Streetwise. "And you didn't drill a hole yet."
Hawley said the 2021 exploration program consisted of systematic exploration of the veins and breccia, both horizontally and vertically.
The Neil breccia ranges from 19 meters wide at the junction of the Neil Vein to over 60 meters at the northeast side of the mountain, where it is visible vertically for more than 1,000 meters.
The previous work consisted of a deep trench cross-cutting the breccia, which assayed 10.2% copper over 3 meters, while further up the breccia, a true cross section assayed 6.1% copper over 20.8 meters.
The Eagle Vein (or Davis Keays Vein) on the Neil property witnessed almost 7 kilometers of underground work from 1969 through 1971. Drilling was done on four levels, extending through a mountain. About 40,000 short tons of development material were removed.
Crawling Through the Eagle Vein
Fabled Copper will now undertake what Hawley is calling the largest field program in the last 25 years, starting to digitize all previous data from the properties as part of an exploration database foundation to build on. This includes airborne and ground geophysics, past sampling and drilling, ongoing data from drone surveys, and digital mapping. The 3-D tilt mesh drone surveys are great for mapping and can be a great tool for locating ore occurrences in the field, he explained.
"It will give you the XYZ of that exact point where that mineral occurrence is, and then the next day, you can go to the chopper pilot and say, 'Take me here.' And now you just found a copper occurrence in the middle of a mountain someplace."
Hawley, a self-described "tunnel rat," assisted the effort in the field last summer, crawling into an ice-filled 850-meter tunnel through a mountain at the Eagle vein to get a sample.
What they brought back was pure chalcopyrite and bornite, as much as 34 percent copper by mass.
"We managed to dig out a small hole and crawl through," he said of the tunnel. "On average, the Eagle Vein was 4 meters in true width where we viewed it."
The company announced on Feb. 23 that it had sampled up to 6.84% copper over 0.40 meters on the Neil property.
Drilling to Start This Summer
Hawley said the drone-based digital maps they will create of the properties will show the topography of ore bodies and or occurrences to within an accuracy of 1 to 3 centimeters.
The company plans to start drilling on the properties this summer, he confirmed.
"We'll be taking all the data we generated, and with the drilling, we'll start to define the true size of these things," he said of the copper deposits.
If you have geological experience and are a tunnel rat like Hawley, get in touch with him. It's getting harder to find people willing to get dirty with him, he said.
"They don't want to crawl in the tunnel," Hawley told Streetwise. "People are retiring, and the old, you know, boots on the ground and slogging and doing stuff, people don't want to do it anymore."
Disclosures:
1) Steve Sobek compiled this article for Streetwise Reports LLC. He or members of his household own securities of the following companies mentioned in the article: None. He or members of his household are paid by the following companies mentioned in this article: None.
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