Infinitum Copper plans IPO in January; advances Adelita project in Mexico

With an “A” team of technical advisors, Infinitum Copper has big plans for its Adelita copper project in Mexico, and plans to list on the Toronto Venture Exchange early next year.

“We’ve centered the company around a world-class team,” Steve Robertson, Infinitum Copper’s founding president and CEO, said of the junior’s two senior technical advisors, Peter Megaw, a geologist and co-founder of MAG Silver, and Doug Kirwin, a geologist with more than five decades of experience and major discoveries under his belt while working for Ivanhoe Mines from 1995-2012.

“We’re a well-funded junior with good access to some of the best projects through our connections with Peter and Doug and we’re really going to hit the ground running with Adelita in Mexico,” Robertson told The Northern Miner in an interview, adding that it was Megaw who brought the project into the company.

Adelita is an early stage copper project in southern Sonora state, about 5 km east of Pan American Silver’s (TSX: PAAS; NASDAQ: PAAS) past-producing Alamo Dorado mine and 60 km southeast of the Piedras Verdes open pit copper mine owned by Mexican miner Cobre del Mayo.

Infinitum has the option to earn 80% of the project from Minauram Gold (TSXV: MGG; US-OTC: MMRGF). After the earn-in is complete, the two parties will form an 80%-20% joint venture. A third party 2% NSR covers base and precious metals on the property.  Once Infinitum goes public, Minaurum will own about 16% of the company and insiders about 25%.

Drilling by previous companies that had signed earlier option agreements with Minauram has been limited, Robertson said.

“In total, that’s less than 7,500 metres of drilling,” he said. “Minaurum owned it through all of this and optioned it out along the way, but they’ve never really put a strong effort into the property because they’ve been distracted by other opportunities elsewhere, so this has preserved the opportunity for us to come in and have a really good look at it.”

The two key targets are Cerro Grande, a high-grade copper-silver skarn, the main showing, and Mezquital, a large copper in soil anomaly over a multiphase porphyritic intrusive.

At Cerro Grande, a 4,900 metre drill program between 2010 and 2012 returned “significant” copper, silver and gold skarn mineralization, Robertson said, and a combination of mapping, drifting and drilling have established a zone at least 400 metres long, 300 metres deep and open in all directions.  “It’s quite an impressive system in terms of its strength and size,” Robertson said. “It’s quite vertical so if we find enough of it, it would be a favorable orientation for underground mining.”

Historic drill results at Cerro Grande include 10 metres of 1.52% copper in drillhole CG-02; 16 metres of 1.96% copper and 78 grams silver per tonne in drillhole CG-01; and 19 metres of 1.50% copper and 79 grams silver in drillhole CG-10.

“The skarn stretches down the north face of the slope,” Robertson noted. “They drove a 40-metre adit into the hillside in the 1970s, and took the high grade copper off to a local custom miller but no follow up mining ever took place. So it is a pretty raw prospect. It doesn’t get pinched out to the north, it gets lost under the cover. A focus of our efforts this year will trace this mineralized zone back towards its source.”

Historic drilling yielded “some impressive widths,” he adds, “from 3.35 metres up to almost 37 metres true thickness so it’s substantial thickness and it’s got a pretty significant silver kick to it, so a lot of these grades would be 2% copper-equivalent plus. If we’ve got 2% plus copper equivalent, I think we would have a very good chance of this being an economic deposit—if we can find 10 million tonnes of it.”

Meanwhile, Mezquital is the porphyry that’s the driver of all the mineralization, Robertson said.

“With some drilling and planned trenching we’ll be able to expose that porphyry and get a better look at it,” he said. “We have a more than 4 km long copper in soils anomaly, so a very big broad anomaly sitting over the porphyry target, and we’ve also got a nice copper anomaly sitting on top of the skarn zone as well, with some downslope dispersion.”

In addition, and similar to the copper anomaly, there is a 2.5 to 3 km long molybdenum in soils anomaly that is sitting over the porphyry. There is also a zinc anomaly at the south end of the skarn. “You start getting into zinc, silver, lead mineralization, so the zinc is starting to show up at the south side of the skarn, so that will be another target we’ll be pursuing in this target rich environment,” Robertson said.

Infinitum plans to start drilling Adelita in late January or early February after it receives results from geophysics work.

Robertson says the plan after the listing in January is to build a portfolio of four to six properties.

“I’ve got lots of non-disclosure agreements I’ve signed but we can’t talk about them yet,” he said. “We’re going to continue to look in Mexico, but we’ve got other spots and we’d like some jurisdiction diversification. We don’t want to have all of our properties in one spot. I’d like to work in the U.S. and Canada and I wouldn’t be averse to going to Asia. We’re keeping a pretty broad view of where we want to go, but certainly we’re going to be selective.”

“We’re hoping Infinitum is going to be a premium copper explorer. Our thesis is that we want to acquire a portfolio of high quality assets and we’re going to operate in only safe and friendly jurisdictions.”