Ivan Bebek: Sombrero Could Be One of Copper’s Next Big Discoveries

Trevor Hall (0:19)

Alright, everybody, we are wrapping up our first day here at the Beaver Creek Precious Metals Summit. Normally, Michael McCray would be sitting here across the table with Ivan Bebek of Coppernico Metals. They do trade on the TSX with COPR and on the OTC QB with CPP MF.

Mike has allowed me to sit here with Ivan. I haven't seen you in quite some time, man. Like, good to see you. And things are ramping up there in Peru. I mean, how has the summer been?

Ivan Bebek (0:46)

It's busy. I've been in this business for 26 years, and it's great to see you, but this has been the busiest summer of my entire career. Wow. And it's not just Peru, it's the sector coming alive. And we saw the majors do extremely well. Agnico went up 7X in the last few years. That's where it starts, but in the junior world, it's different this time. It's different because there's real, real supply crunches and metals that take a long time to find and bring online, and that's where the Copper story really kicks up.

But you have a lot of geopolitics and financial crisis on the horizon with gold performing in the dollar, record money going into gold ETFs in August of this year, 18 billion, I believe it was. So market's coming alive, and for somebody that looks for mines and is close to finding a big one, it's perfect timing.

Trevor Hall (1:35)

Peru's coming alive.

Ivan Bebek (1:37)

Peru had a big shift politically. We went back to the right. You know, it kind of does follow the US, I've noticed, in the last 10 years since I've been doing business there. We've never seen real issues with either side. We love both parties, but the right is definitely much more pro-mining. But what also happens, not just in Peru, in Ghana, Mongolia, Ecuador, places I've done or I'm doing business, you start to see a lot of accelerated timelines get moved up, red tape removed, as commodity prices start to take off. Because mining improves about 40% of the GDP. They're mining in surrounding networks that support mining. So the more they can encourage that, the better the country will do. And that's a big push.

For us, I mean, this is year 10, trying to bring this project online for a big discovery.

Took a lot of bullets in that way, because that's a long time for any investor, but the project's gotten bigger, it's gotten richer, and the targets have gotten better in that timeframe. So the reward is certainly increasing considerably.

Trevor Hall (2:36)

All right, let's talk about the exploration at hand here. You did sign a drill contract with 8K Drilling. That was about two weeks ago, September 10th, to carry out the phase two of it's Sombrero, at Sombrero in the project in Peru. The agreement commits the company to 5,000 meters of diamond drilling.

You said in the news release, Ivan, that you expect to start drilling in the coming months pending permission from Peru's mining ministry. Where does that stand today?

Ivan Bebek (3:04)

That's a great question. So, signing a drill contract is a massive vote of confidence on that timeline, that's been hard for us to meet.

Right now, we're anticipating completion of that permit in October, from those authorities you just mentioned.

We're in the final stamping process for the start of activities and then you can drill. So, that means it's coming soon. The 5,000 meters is a minimum, but we'll likely get into a 20 to 30,000 meter drill program, because we have this phase to test 7 of the big targets we're going to test. We have a 20,000 minimum just as a first pass on them. Two of those targets are really advanced. One is expanding a resource where we're going to start drilling at the end of November is our estimated timeline. And then the other one is an absolute jewelry box with some of the best copper grades in the world. Tens of meters of 1% copper, over 100 meters of half to 1% copper in some areas, with a massive geophysical target to go with them. So we plan to start drilling in the most probable areas first, and they also have the potential for massive scale and very rich grades. And then there's five more targets that are a little bit buried by the volcanic ash, so you can't really see them outcropping, they're a bit more science. And we'll get to those too. And in a perfect world, we drill about 70 holes, 20,000 meters, by the end of next year.

Our permit is substantial. We need one more permit for one of the targets, for five or six of the seven targets, we're permitted for that. And that permit allows us to drill from 181 spots, we call them pads, and we can drill 300 holes, and we can use multiple drill rigs, which is the last permit we would need for that area to drill for a mine to be discovered and delineated. So it's a big permit we got this year, few months behind schedule, but right on time with an exploding Copper price market.