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Mining firms in Arizona seek riches

Investors face long odds in quest for mineral profits
by Ryan Randazzo - Dec. 24, 2011 05:53 PM
The Arizona Republic

Arizona is the top copper producer in the U.S., but several small-time geologists and entrepreneurs combing the rocky desert in hopes of finding the next bonanza don't produce any minerals at all.

Many exploration companies prospecting in Arizona hope to raise money through the stock markets to take investors along on their risky hunt for mineral profits.

They might have historical maps of their mines, ore samples, assay reports and other data, but almost none have a shovel in the ground.

Exploration companies face extremely long odds of finding minerals that big firms have overlooked and raising the money to dig for them, but they persist on the small chance they could strike it rich.

"It is definitely a risky form of investment," said Daniel Bleak of Mesa, who has been involved in several exploration ventures, most recently Silver Horn Mining Ltd., which has stock traded on the over-the-counter market. "It is a long shot. It is just like the old oil fields."

The exploration companies make up a niche somewhere between the weekend gold panners and the global miners such as Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold and Asarco, which run the state's big mines.

Some are run from home offices, and most trade on the over-the-counter or Canadian stock markets.

Most of them are trying to restart mines that have been closed for decades in hopes the prior operators left some metal in the ground or simply stopped mining because of a lull in metals prices and that the ore might be valuable in today's market.

Many of these exploration companies spend millions of dollars in investor money trying to develop a project, only to sell it to another small exploration company or drop it altogether when it's deemed uneconomical.

It takes tens of millions of dollars to drill sample holes, conduct geological mapping and other background work before millions of dollars more in equipment can be purchased to begin digging a mine. And that is assuming that environmental permitting and entitlements to the land go smoothly.

But every now and again, one of the junior companies will make good. One recent example is American Bonanza Gold Corp. of Canada, which after several years of preliminary work and millions of dollars spent on mining equipment, has restarted the Copperstone Mine in La Paz County between Quartzsite and Parker.

A ways to go

Silver Horn, like many of the Stage I companies, hasn't gotten much further than finding historical mines and trying to raise money to drill them to test for minerals.

It has burned through about $5 million since April, when the owners of a publicly traded company called Eclips Media Technologies Inc. used that operation as a shell to acquire Silver Horn, hire Bleak and redirect the company's focus to mining.

Since then, Bleak has been trying to develop claims northwest of Phoenix known as the 76 and Tip Top mines, which produced silver in the late 1800s but are a ghost town today. The area was briefly mined in the 1930s for tungsten, and another mining company explored there in the 1980s but abandoned the project.

Now Bleak is trying to find out whether the project could be economical again.

"We know it was rich, but is it big enough?" he said. "The Tip Top and 76 still show some potential, but now we wouldn't say there is an economic mine there."

Bleak said he also got close to raising the investment needed to drill additional exploratory holes at a project known as the C.O.D. mine near Chloride in Mohave County but is tied up in a legal dispute regarding who first staked the claim.

Bleak said his goal is to find a viable mine and raise the capital to develop it.

"Is it possible? Yes," he said. "Does it take a lot of money? Yes. Are there people willing to risk that? There are."

Investors warned

Many of the people willing to risk their investments on exploration mining in Arizona contact Nyal Niemuth, the Phoenix branch manager for the Arizona Geological Survey.

The agency keeps a large collection of maps, some of them hand-drawn and more than 100 years old, for the major mineral districts in Arizona.

These maps show the tunnels dug for mines such as the Tip Top and 76 that historically produced minerals, which is why so many exploration companies are focused on these operations rather than entirely new mines.

It also has a variety of ore-sampling reports or drill-hole locations to indicate where people have found minerals, or a lack of them, in the past. Exploration companies rely heavily on the data kept by the Geological Survey, formerly the Department of Mines and Mineral Resources.

Niemuth said many investors fail to conduct due diligence, or background work, before investing.

"Say you are buying a new car. Do you just buy it? Or do you check the engine and kick the tires?" he said. "It's a bouncy ride out to many of these mines, but you can get there. You can see if it's reclaimed. You can corroborate (what the companies say about the mine). People fail to do that."

People from across the nation routinely call Niemuth asking about investment opportunities.

"I had a guy call me last week from Florida who was raising $7 million to invest," he said. "He was asking what should the (mine) sampling (data) look like."

The recent opening of the Copperstone gold mine in western Arizona and Gold Road mine near Oatman show that Arizona's historical mining districts offer potential, he said.

And the Resolution Copper Project, a massive mine that Rio Tinto and BHP-Billiton are trying to develop, shows that new discoveries can be made in old mining districts, he said.

"The discovery of Resolution Copper has encouraged lots of people to explore copper in Arizona," he said. "Copperstone is the reason people can explore for gold in Arizona. They think they can potentially find a world-class gold mine."

He said that Arizona has a history of outright mining scams, where people have tried to drum up investments in worthless properties, but that many companies operating today are in more of a "gray area."

They might have actual minerals in the ground, but it is questionable whether they can be mined economically or represent a large enough deposit to pursue, he said.

Profits without a mine

Mineral exploration might not always bring profits to investors, but the company officials involved in such companies can earn a sizable income.

Even if Silver Horn's current ventures flop and the investors' money is lost, Bleak turns out OK. He takes a $15,000-a-month salary from the company, and salaries of $150,000 or more are not uncommon for the CEOs of similar exploration firms, even when they don't produce anything.

Bleak said the real financial incentive for him is to produce a working mine, which would enrich him through millions of shares of company stock.

A producing mine likely would increase the current value of the stock, which is about 13 cents per share.

"I'll have a good, vested interest in the thing if I make it work," he said. "I have a good incentive to bring something to production."

Niemuth, from the state Geological Survey, is prohibited from commenting on the likely success or failure of a public mining company, but he can assist exploration companies and others in researching what public information is available regarding historical mining operations.

For example, he can point would-be investors to information that might indicate whether a company is claiming to have a gold mine in an area where there never has been a gold discovery.

"One of the things the Bleak family members appear to have done quite well over the years is they are very astute at recognizing the commodity trends and being early acquirers (of mining claims)," he said.

Rocky past

The Bleak family has been involved in several Arizona mining ventures, and their run-ins with regulators and other troubles show how freewheeling the exploration and mining-claims business can be.

Bleak learned to make a living in exploration from his grandfather and his father, Floyd Bleak, who started staking uranium-mining claims in Utah in the 1950s as a teenager, Daniel said.

Floyd was able to sell those claims to mining companies and eventually moved to Arizona, where the family was involved in rock quarries in Flagstaff and the East Valley.

"They basically were explorers," Daniel said. "They were project generators. They would get a project to a certain point and get bought out at that point in time."

Floyd has a history of brushing up against the law with his exploration and mining activity.

He was charged in Canada with filing a false mining-company prospectus in 1971 for Pan American Mines, but the charges were not pursued, according reports in the Montreal Gazette.

Several criminal and civil suits were filed at the time, charging fraud and conspiracy to influence the stock price of the company before trading was halted.

In the 1990s, Floyd was in a conflict with residents near a Morristown rock quarry regarding his use of heavy explosives to remove soil. He also challenged the fees that operation had to pay to the Bureau of Land Management.

In the early 2000s, he temporarily held up the San Tan Mountain Regional Park with mining claims within the proposed park boundary, where he threatened to develop a mine if the BLM did not enter into a land swap with him.

The BLM said those claims were invalid because he had missed filing deadlines on them in the 1980s. The park eventually was formed.

Floyd lives in Queen Creek and said he still is involved as a partner in several mining claims and ventures in the state.

The mining business hasn't always been trouble-free for Daniel, either.

In the 1980s, he had a rock quarry in Pinal County as part of his Mineral Butte Mining Corp.

The BLM ordered the operation to shut down because it was operating outside of his mining claims and because it was registered as a gold mine, yet Bleak was actually mining landscape rock at the quarry.

Landscape rock would normally be subject to a fee per ton. There is no royalty on gold, however.

Bleak, at the time, told The Arizona Republic that he was selling the landscape rock people were using in their yards as gold ore and that it would increase in value as gold prices rose.

The BLM contended that there was not a recoverable amount of gold in the rock.

More recently, the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year required Silver Horn to explain or restate multiple portions of its financial disclosures, which is common occurrence among exploration companies.

Securities regulators sent a letter detailing similar financial-reporting concerns this year to Continental Resources Group, a uranium-exploration company for which Daniel was a director and his son, Joshua, was CEO, before that company was acquired.

Joshua also is CEO of Passport Potash, an exploration company that has seen big swings in its stock price in the past year as it pursues a mine for potash, a fertilizer ingredient, near Holbrook.

Passport recently got a letter from the British Columbia Securities Commission. In it, regulators said the company overstated the amount of potash that could be mined on its proposed project.

The regulators said some of the statements on the mine's potential were not in compliance with the exchange's rules for mines.

Exploration successes

Daniel Bleak said he also has had successes. One of his exploration companies sold a mine called Newsboy Project near Wickenburg to another junior company, Bullfrog Gold Corp. of Grand Junction, Colo., which is drilling the area to determine if a mine is viable.

The project conveyed for $3.4 million, payable in installments through 2017, according to regulatory filings. So whether or not that venture ever becomes a full-fledged mine, Bleak likely has turned a profit through exploration.

"It had past production in the late 1890s and early 1900s," Bleak said. "Because it was a low-grade deposit, it wasn't profitable until gold was above $400 an ounce."

Bleak said he sold the project because he couldn't raise the capital to drill it.

And so it's on to the next project.

"We truly do not want to be bought out," Bleak said. "We want to be a mining company. Hunter Dickinson (a major Canadian mining company) or Phelps Dodge ( now Freeport-McMoRan), they all started this small, with a guy with a shovel and a pick. We won't do anything we don't believe would go into production."


Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/business/articles/2011/12/22/20111222arizona-exploration-firms-seek-riches.html#ixzz25sx2UaRu