Welcome to Dig Deep, the mining podcast. In this podcast, we go deep into mining news, hot topics, and live interviews with mining professionals and leading figures in the mining industry. Introducing your host, Rob Tyson, founder and director of Mining International and Mining International Executive, a leading global mining recruitment and headhunting agency.
Hi mining community, welcome back to another episode of the Dig Deep the Mining Podcast, the show that brings you the latest insights, thought leadership, and stories from across the global mining industry. In today's episode, we've got Gilbert Clark, who's the CEO of Meridian Mining, a mineral exploration and development company focused on unlocking high-value copper, gold, silver, and other metal resources in Brazil. Meridian's flagship asset is the advanced Cabacal volcanogenic massive sulfide project in Mato Grosso. Hopefully, I've pronounced that correctly.
We discuss Meridian's recent resource milestones and how the company's positioned itself for execution and growth. We're going to speak about update on Brazil's mining industry and what the outlook could look like for the company as it heads towards a meaningful copper gold producer in the critical global market. So, Gilbert, welcome to the podcast. How you doing?
Thanks, Rob. Look, I'm very happy to be here today and just bring to another great audience what we're doing in Brazil.
Yeah, certainly. So, as we always start these podcasts off, just want to maybe just tell us a little bit about yourself, about your career, about your background, how you got into the industry, and how your career has developed over the years.
Well, I'm actually from a bit of a mining family, second generation Australian mining family. There were one, two, three, four geologists and one mining engineer in my family. I have my son's a geo, my nephew's a geo, so we're very much a mining focused family. I actually worked in the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia back in the mid to late 1990s. I then moved across to Europe with my wife, she's French. I got involved with oil and gas for a while as I developed all the NGOs that hated the person who created shale gas in Europe. That was me. And then I joined in 2008, I joined a private equity firm and I stayed with them until 2020. Sat on public boards, traveled internationally. I've just seen about every mineral province in the world. And then in 2020 or 2018 I became involved in Meridian and I left the fund in 2020 and ever since then I've been solely focused on developing the Cabacal copper gold silver belt in Mato Grosso.
Great. Just want to take you back. You mentioned obviously how you was three or four generations of mining. Did you feel pressure to be obviously come into the mining industry because of the family background?
No, not at all. I actually liked being outside. I liked the country of Australia. I've always, I haven't lived in a capital city since 1995, I think. So I was in, I got seconded to Montreal for 3 years, that was very nice. But no, look, it's a wonderful industry. It's a constructive industry. I think today 15% of the world's commodities or the world's industries are based around natural resources. So, we're just a fundamental building block of everyone's daily going about their business. It is mining.
Yeah. And you mentioned obviously your son's in the industry now. How easy was it for him to choose mining as an industry? And the reason why I ask that question, we do get a variety of different people listening to these episodes from obviously more experienced people right through to people graduates entering our industry. So, again, just wondered how he got involved. Was it because of yourself or was it just naturally he was interested in the industry?
Well, I think he's going to get a hard time because he just started a new job in Western Australia. So, sorry about this. Oh, no, he found the career himself. I said that it's a very rewarding career. You can stay in the production, exploration, development. You can branch out into banking. There's a whole raft of career development that goes with being in the mining industry. But yeah, look, I think with people who are looking for a great career, you cannot fault mining. And I think when you know, United Kingdom has still got, you know, some great mining schools, some great post-graduate studies. And then you can go to Australia, Canada, America. Brazil has a very dynamic mining industry. So, it really is if you're choosing a career, I can't fault it. It's well remunerated. It can be wildly fluctuating at times, but it is a very long-term decision.
Yeah. So, moving on, just wanted to see if you can give us a snapshot of Meridian Mining.
Okay. So, Meridian Mining has listed since about 2016 and it had a predecessor before then. It was focusing on, prior to my involvement, on manganese in Brazil. And I came down in 2018 to do a restructure. It took me 2 years to fix it. And during that time we probably did one of the only capital restructures that on the other side of that restructure the minority shareholders came up earning 25% more of the company than they owned at the time. So then we set about saying what are we going to focus? And I made it very clear to the market we're not doing manganese. We're going to focus on copper and gold. This is in 2019 because it was an absolute no-brainer where these commodities are going to go. And then we did the restructure and literally the month after we were saying okay look, let's find a new project. And I got a flyer which just said Cabacal, that's an opportunity. And I just stopped everything. I said hang on guys, let's just break here because when we look at today's mining industry, to be honest, it only exists as it is today by the investment of the oil and gas industry in the 1970s, 1980s. BP Minerals, every major oil company had a mineral division. And BP Minerals found this very prospective copper gold belt in the 1980s and then they sold the entire portfolio to Rio Tinto in '89. It was too small for Rio Tinto so they just shut it down. So effectively this very productive field identified by a major was shut down for 30 years. Not for a commercial reason but for a corporate decision. And then we at Meridian, we bought it off a small private co in Brazil. And for me, as a pretty experienced, well, I'd say reasonably experienced private equity investor in natural resources, for me, my fundamental concern is risk. If I'm going to deploy capital, my shareholders' money, do I risk it? And what was presented to me with Cabacal was such a low-risk opportunity to grow into a mid-tier mining company. We stopped everything, we focused, we did the deal. We already had that executive team in Brazil, that technical team to execute. And ever since then, we've just powered on. And since we first acquired the project to today, our focus is build the mine.
Yeah. Obviously, you mentioned about risk and de-risking. What was, I suppose, significant about the actual project and the asset that made you want to move forward because you de-risked it so much?
Well, the original Cabacal mine was a small underground mine. And they had 4 years production. And they understood the geology. So, straight away, I had no geological risk. I knew what the ore body was going to be. And because we knew the chief geologist and the senior underground geologist from back in the '80s, we had like coal face knowledge. And then, the next phase is, you know, metallurgical risk. You know, can you extract your metals? We had all the data from their test work. And they actually did test work and production at much lower grades, open pit grades. So, I looked at this near-surface underground mine and just said, this is an obvious open pit development scenario. So, that's your second risk. And then, what about permit risk? So, when we were doing our study July 2020 of where we're going to invest in Brazil. What I did is I said, look, there are parts of Brazil which are NGO sensitive or they don't even need a very dry climate or there's operational risk. We're not going there. We're not going to go next to sort of indigenous parts or anything like that. So, we carved out all that sort of development risk. And we came to a couple of states we thought were really good to work in. Rondônia is one and Mato Grosso and Cabacal in Mato Grosso. So, that was fantastic for us. And then permits. So, all of the investors says, look, is this a good state? Can you get stuff permitted? Can you build a mine? In the eyes of the authorities in Mato Grosso, this is a brownfields restart. That's the best thing you want to have. And local communities, they remember when the mines were in production and they see it as a period of prosperity. So, we had community support, we had regional government support. And all these things you look at them. These are sort of in every aspect of a mining investment, each one of these risks is a red flag. If there's one, you don't deploy your money because it's just going to get blown. But in this one scenario, it was perfect for us.
Obviously, yeah, Brazil is an established mining jurisdiction. But there's obviously still geopolitical and logistic considerations. How do you see Meridian's role in building obviously a reliable and responsible copper and gold project in the country?
Look, for me, it's an absolute no-brainer. If you're in the Amazon jungle looking to develop a mine, good luck to you. NGO risk, logistics, infrastructure, the time frame for those type of projects is outside of the time frame of our investments. With Cabacal, Mato Grosso and the Cabacal project, we inherited legacy infrastructure. Over the road, concrete bridges, power easements to the permitted site. So, then that is not there, we don't have to build that. So, that's very prospective for us. And then we look at the state of Mato Grosso, they have two operating mining centers. One's run by really good companies, Ero Copper and Aura Minerals. They've got active operations in Mato Grosso. And at the same time for logistics, Mato Grosso is an exporting state internationally for agricultural products. So, when you fly into Mato Grosso, you see trucks going to port. And although it's 2,400 km to the port we're going to export the concentrates, because there's so much agriculture, so much logistics, the cost to export is pennies in the dollar compared to the concentrate.
Recently Meridian announced an update of resource, a maiden resource at Santa Helena Central, as well as the obviously the expansion of mineral rights. What do these milestones really mean for the company strategically?
It's really interesting. So, with the Cabacal resource update, when we published the pre-feasibility study, the PFS, even before that we identified improvements in the geological model that would result in increased tonnages, increased metal contents. And so, we set about, we raised the money and we executed that program. And the result of that, we increased the resource grade. And this is all part of the ongoing work streams that will lead to the completion of the definitive feasibility study. And from that work that we did, we've increased the resource of gold, the contained metal by 39%. Copper by 14%. And for silver, that's 19%. Now, to give that a quantum, I think we added approximately 350,000 oz of gold into the Cabacal resource. But with volcanogenic massive sulfide belts, there's just not one pod. You have multiple occurrences. They're a very well-known system throughout the world. And then we had a second deposit that was identified back in the '80s, partially exploited in the mid-2000s, called Santa Helena. And that's quite a big system. So, we're focused on the central part, called Santa Helena Central. We've published our maiden resource on that. So, that's given us the opportunity to not just have one mining center and processing center where satellite deposits, potentially future satellite deposits can be trucked in for processing. We've now got one 10 km to the southeast that can be used as the southeast central hub. And in future, we keep growing the resources down there and convert them to reserves and then to mining operations. That will be the second hub. So, this is really, this is not new. This is an absolute carbon copy of every VMS built in the world. Multiple hubs, multiple producing mines. But the great thing about VMS deposits, unlike say a porphyry that requires billions and billions and billions of dollars of capex to build, our capex is only circa 258 million USD. And that's very easy to accomplish to build.
How is Meridian preparing for the scale of execution obviously required if we obviously look from engineering, procurement, construction, through to obviously operating readiness?
