Normally when you enter into a JV agreement it is done because you've reached a point where the financial (and/or sometimes technical aspects) costs of developing your deposit further are beyond your means. For most juniors this stage is normally reached when they are a number of seasons into their drilling campaign or if they've found a deposit too large for them to handle alone within a reasonable time frame.
To attract a JV partner you need to be able to present a really good economic case backed up with hard data, more often than not set out in an NI-43-101 report with further mineralogical/metallurgical data (ok, you've told me you have x million ounces at 10g/t, but how much is recoverable and what are the likely costs involved?), structural and geological information. After all, if you're going to put up a considerable sum of money and utilise your time and expertise, you want to be sure (or as sure as you can be) that you are doing so with a reasonable chance of making a profit.
With a situation like ADL where there is very limited data (for a very small area of the total claim), backed up with indications of historic artisanal mining, a potential partner would be coming to the table without any real idea of what they were dealing with and would have to undertake MDMN's role in acquiring the preliminary data. They would need to have a good map of the plateau and a method of delineating potential drill targets (core drilling is expensive and needs to be targeted with as much confidence as possible). The cheapest and most rapid method is soil sampling, say on a 25m grid (that can be infilled over anomalies). Mapping would take a couple of geologists a month to six weeks (at a cost of around $100k max) and a geochemical survey would cost say around $150k. Once that information was available they would have to decide whether to proceed to a geophysical survey, with some trenching and RC drilling over anomalous areas. A reasonable budget for this whole phase would be $500K to $750k dependent on coverage. A single season drill campaign would cost potentially double this dependent on the meterage involved (and it would likely take a number of seasons to firm up a decent resource model).
If it were me I would not commit myself beyond this first stage unless the results were good and I would negotiate preferential terms even if I did walk away as I had undertaken/paid for that work to be done. Further work would depend on continuing good results as the project proceeded.
AI
