Aston CEO outlines potential at Storm copper project

Despite an uphill battle in raising funds, Aston Bay Holdings’ (TSXV: BAY) founder and CEO Benjamin Cox remains upbeat on the copper potential at the junior’s Aston Bay property in Somerset Island, Nunavut. 

The recently expanded 2,600 sq. km land package, previously known as the Storm property, contains the Storm copper project and the Seal zinc-silver project. 

Cox — a former mining analyst at New York-based D.E. Shaw Group, and the founder of research and consulting firm Oreninc — believes that copper is one of the metals that the world will run out of. “It’s not extremely scarce, but it is economically very scarce at current prices,” he said in a June interview. Cox claims mining companies have spent $40 billion globally in the past decade exploring for copper, with little luck in finding “big discoveries.”  

“When I left D.E. Shaw [in 2010], I wanted to find a high-quality copper asset,” Cox says, adding that the asset had to grade over 1% copper and be outside of Africa. 

While on the lookout he was managing Oreninc, which tracks global resource projects and placed him in front of many mining executives. One of those executives was Commander Resources’ (TSXV: CMD; US-OTC: CMDRF) president and CEO Eric Norton. 

“One day [in 2011] I was in [Norton’s] office, and he had this big, massive rock on his desk,” Cox recalls. “I looked at that rock and said: ‘I didn’t know you guys were in the Congo.’ And he was like, ‘No, that is not from the Congo. That is from Canada.’” 

Surprised by the ore quality at the Storm copper project, Cox pursued an option agreement on the Aston Bay property, closing a deal in November 2011. The companies have amended that contract several times, with the latest revision in April 2015 giving Aston two more years to complete its initial 51% earn-in. 

Aston now has until the end of 2018 to spend $3.5 million in exploration costs on the property. That amount is broken out into annual spending requirements, including $750,000 each in 2015 and 2016, and $1 million each in 2017 and 2018. Aston also kept the right to earn up to a 70% interest in the property, as well as its buyout option.  

Storm is intriguing because it’s a sediment-hosted copper deposit. These deposits often exist in African copper belts, and are large-scale and high-grade.   

Bruce Counts, a geological engineer and Aston’s chief operating officer, says it’s hard to find an exact analog for Storm, but that it is similar to Ivanhoe Mines’ (TSX: IVN) Kamoa copper project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

Storm is “fairly high grade,” and has size potential, he says. “When you’re talking about sed-hosted copper, you’re talking about basin-scale fluid systems that capture the copper and, if the conditions are right, potential for the deposition of very large bodies of high-grade mineralization.”

Teck Cominco, which started exploring the Seal zinc project in 1994, identified the Storm prospect during a 1996 regional mapping and sampling campaign. From 1997 to 2001, Teck drilled 9,550 metres in 72 holes on the Storm project, delineating four copper zones — 2200N, 2750N, 3500N and 4100N. 

Highlights from the 2750 zone include 110 metres grading 2.5% copper from surface, and 56 metres of 3.1% copper from 12.2 metres deep. The best hole from the 2200N zone returned 49 metres of 1.8% copper starting from surface. (The results reflect core lengths and not the true widths.) 

Aston is compiling and interpreting the historic results from the other two zones and will release the data once completed. It points out that the historic drilling was shallow, averaging 100 metres deep. The junior now intends to expand the zones along strike and depth, as well as test several targets. 

The main target is the large SE Anomaly, 220 metres below surface. The anomaly is egg-shaped and spans 4 by 1.5 km . Commander Resources identified that anomaly, among others, in its 2011 versatile time domain electromagnetic survey. (The company acquired the property in 2008 after Teck let its claims lapse.) 

Aston, which investigated the SE Anomaly in a three-week joint-exploration program last December with Antofagasta (LSE: ANTO), found higher levels of copper in the rocks and soils that lie above the SE Anomaly. The junior explains the anomaly’s “apparent location along the structural system that hosts mineralization indentified in previous drilling” helps enhance the prospectivity. 

Antofagasta ended the joint-venture agreement with Aston this January due to weaker copper prices and budget constraints, Cox says. But the setback has not deterred the junior from moving forward with the Storm project, which has a more than 110 km prospective strike length.  

Given the project’s magnitude, Cox admits it’s not a traditional project for a junior. “It’s a project that I picked up because it was just that appealing. If someone puts a chocolate éclair in front of you and says, ‘Do you want it?’ The answer is that of course you want it.” 

Also increasing Storm’s appeal is a 1999 historical ground survey from Teck that Aston retrieved this May, which “improves the prospectivity of the kilometre-scale target, with a coincident gravity over the southern third of the SE Anomaly.” 

While the anomaly remains untested, Cox believes the average 1.8% copper grade seen in Storm’s existing zones could exist at depth at the SE Anomaly. 

For the rest of the year, Aston intends to put in a small camp on site and start a larger gravity survey, while conducting more prospecting and soil sampling. It intends to start drilling in 2016, if it has enough funds lined up. 

Aston is closing the first tranche of an up to US$1.5-million non-brokered private placement that it announced in May. The proceeds should help Aston meet its 2015 spending obligations, and keep it afloat.

If all goes well, Cox says Storm has enough long-term potential to become a “brilliant company-maker.” 

Aston recently traded at 14¢, within a 52-week trading range of 8¢ to 24¢. It has a $4.2-million market capitalization.