NorthMin’s Tynagh project is near Loughrea in County Galway, Ireland, is a past-producing carbonate-hosted zinc, lead, silver and barite deposit with copper that was mined between 1965 and 1982. The company is running two things in parallel: a tailings and waste stockpile recycling project on surface, and brownfield hard rock exploration underneath and along strike of the old workings for remaining reef mineralization plus a footwall copper zone. In this interview, I asked the CEO about ownership and incentives, metallurgy, permitting, drilling plans and how much money it all takes.
TL;DR
The base case he gave me is to build the recycling project themselves, not to sell, and he was direct about it. Surface resource is 6.7 Mt total, with about 4 Mt of it running roughly 6% combined zinc plus lead, about an ounce and a half of silver and about 30% barite, and he says roughly 6.7 Moz of silver sits in the compliant resource with about 5.5 Moz of that in the high grade. Flotation alone does not work on this material, so the flowsheet they developed with Wardell Armstrong is an ambient-temperature alkali leach, and finalizing that flowsheet is the gate before permitting starts. Permitting is a minimum two years and they are budgeting two and a half, so construction is about three years out.
What have they done for shareholders lately?
They finished the first two hard rock holes into the footwall and those returned the higher grade copper intercepts that got attention and prompted the interview. He walked me through the sections on screen: one hole cut about 27 m of reef mineralization at roughly 4.6% lead plus zinc with a higher grade 10 m interval inside it, and lower down where the hole crossed the Tynagh fault they hit 15 m at 2% copper with narrower intervals at 5% and 10%, and a hole 80 m away had 9 m at about 1% copper. He also referenced two 2022 holes through Zone 3 that hit 31 m of lead plus zinc starting around 70 m depth, with an 18 m interval at about 8.5%, and another that cut 40 m of remaining mineralization from about 40 m depth after passing a 20 m stope. On surface they have done a drone survey of the waste stockpile, which is not yet reportable, plus first pass panel and selective sampling showing about 5.5% combined zinc and lead and about an ounce of silver, with galena grabs around 250 g/t silver and oxides into the 300s. They also secured a two year permit for a 39 hole infill and metallurgical program on the ponds, and picked up six new prospecting licences on the Ballyshrule and Pallas fault structures, which are still just at data compilation and target generation.
How much money do they have and what are they spending it on?
They raised C$3M at 25 cents in June as part of the qualifying transaction, which converted into 12 million units with 6 million half warrants exercisable at 40 cents. He says about two thirds of that is left, so roughly C$2M, and it is funding the current two rig program, one rig on hard rock and one on the tailings collecting fresh material and doing infill, plus the metallurgical work and putting numbers around the surface project. He told me that gets them drill coverage over about 1,100 m of the roughly 1,500 m of strike. From there he estimates another C$3M to C$4M to reach a construction decision on the recycling project, and roughly C$4M to C$5M to drill off an inferred resource in the hard rock and chase the copper. Marketing over the next few months is budgeted at about C$100,000. The qualifying transaction valued the private company at C$8.5M, 90% to the family and 10% to employees, and he says the market cap is now about C$11.5M on roughly 53 million shares. There is some cheap CPC paper that has been selling since listing, but he thinks only a couple hundred thousand dollars worth is left to clear.
Upcoming catalysts
Technical: metallurgical test results on the surface project around early September, including flowsheet direction and a scoping-level set of numbers, continued hard rock drill results through the rest of August and into September from six angled holes testing the footwall and reef and four vertical holes in eastern Zone 3, ongoing tailings infill drilling to bring the waste stockpile into 43-101 compliance, and additional silver-focused hydrometallurgical work he says is going well but has not been released.
Corporate: consolidation of the land and surface ownership with the current landowners targeted for the back end of September, after which they can say they have everything needed to build, then a decision on whether to do a PEA on the existing resource or wait for the stockpile to be included. Operational: entry into the permitting process for the surface project once the flowsheet is locked, with construction roughly three years away, plus a September trip to Canada, an Irish industry conference, the 121 in October and the London 121 in November.
Risks
The two main risks the CEO named are permitting and the flowsheet. He is confident on the surface permit because it cleans up a contaminated site and produces barite and copper that the EU treats as strategic, but it is still a minimum two year process and the hard rock side depends on building community trust first. On the flowsheet, the choice is between maximizing recovery and keeping capex and power costs down, and Irish power prices have roughly doubled since they started, so that decision is not trivial. The exploration copper target in the footwall is the genuinely speculative part of the story, and he was clear that the value case does not depend on it. Beyond that, there is market risk and continued access to financing until cash flow exists, near term supply when the June paper goes free trading on October 19, legacy environmental sensitivity around the site including past complaints about lead in cattle and cyanide traces, and what he called a “show me” attitude from investors who assume tailings are low grade and that a closed mine is exhausted.
NorthMin CEO Interview
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