Prince Silver Targets 100 Million Silver-Equivalent Ounces in Nevada’s Pioche District

0:14Derek Iwanaka: Welcome back into Mining Stock Daily. Ian Wagner here with a corporate introduction to Prince Silver. Prince is a silver gold manganese explorer with their flagship Prince Silver Project in the historic Pioch Mining District of Lincoln County, Nevada. They trade on the CSC with the symbol PRNC and on the OTCQX with the symbol PRNCF. This is a name we have not covered before on the show. So today we're going to go into the full picture, the company's land package and project portfolio, including the past producing Prince Mine itself and the historic production there. We'll go into the current drill campaign and what the assays have shown so far, the manganese byproduct angle and the path and timeline to the company's first ever NI43101 resource estimate.

1:05Derek Iwanaka: Here today to talk about the project and the company is CEO and director, Mr. Derek Iwanaka. Derek, good to see you. Welcome to the podcast. I believe it's your first time. First time. So thank you so much for having me on. I guess to start, since your name might be new to some of our listeners, give us an overview of what the company is and kind of how you're positioning the company, especially that Prince Silver project there in Nevada. Sure. I'd say starting off, we are not an early stage company. So we are an exploration company or considered an exploration company, but really we're quite advanced.

1:45So we have the past producing Prince mine itself. On top of that, we have about 130 historical drill holes. We have the data for all those drill holes. And on top of that, we've now drilled almost 35 additional holes. So we have roughly 165 holes of data, which we intend to put together into a resource estimate. That would be 43-101 compliant. And we're aiming to have that completed by the end of this year or maybe by early 2026 if we can't quite get it finished by then. So early 2027, right? Sorry, 2027.

2:26Derek Iwanaka: Correct. Yeah, so that's the real probably crux of things is that we're not an early stage company. We're in one of the best jurisdictions in the world you could be in. We're in Nevada. So Lincoln County, and if people aren't familiar with that or Pioch, you should go down there. It's a terrific little place to head down with a family. it's kind of a quaint little place where it was a old mining district so i don't know if you've ever been to barkerville or something in in bc but it's one of those kind of historical areas that had old mining done there's the old saloons and whatnot that are still sitting there so it's kind of almost like the cowboy era type of buildings that are still up right um and that's exactly when some of this mining was occurring it was really early 1900s basically from 1911 to 1949 and the mine produced about 1.1 million tons of ore at about 100 grounds per ton silver so you know it was a significant mine at the time right but they left a lot of mineralization there and we've been able to drill through a lot of that and so we're certainly making this a lot bigger than it used to be albeit it'll be a little lower grade than what they had mined in the past but it's it's going to be significantly larger which i think you're more than going to offset the uh the grade loss and improve improve the ultimate economics of the project uh not only that but you know we have because we're in the u.s in particular and we have at least four metals that are in the critical minerals list.

4:07So you have silver, manganese, zinc, lead, all in the USGS list. And then on top of that, we have the strategic metal gold in there, which it wasn't really mined out for gold in the past in large quantities. But with our drilling that we've been undertaking since, I guess, late last year, we've been hitting a lot more gold than ever kind of expected. and it looks as though we have a gold deposit sitting underneath, essentially a silver deposit. And it's really looking good. It's very exciting. And I'm a new CEO, so there's a lot of fun things going on here.

4:48Derek Iwanaka: Yeah, that's great. I'm glad you went into the variety of metals there because I'm just looking at your deck and some of the numbers. That historic production, right, 100 grams per ton, you mentioned, but 10.2 % manganese, 4.5 % zinc. lower on the about a half gram per ton gold, right? But producing a lot of material, you noted at recent spot prices, that would have been about$5 billion US. So a couple of quick questions. One, geological. One, you guys note that bedded carbonate replacement deposits. For someone who's not familiar with that, explain that. Why does that matter? Why is that important?

5:29Derek Iwanaka: And then two, because you're a new CEO, what do you bring to the table? Like, what is your sort of vision here for this? How are you going to move this from, you know, where you are to where you want to get to? So I guess I'll answer the first question, which is the, it is a bedded carbonate replacement deposit. And for those who are not familiar, and I'm not a geologist either, but you know, basically they're known for size, continuity and metal diversity. So in other words, They're generally fairly big, quite continuous, so they keep on going. They're almost like the gift that keeps on giving.

6:04And they typically are going to be multi or polymetallic. So that's exactly what we're seeing in all cases here. They're also known for grade quite often. And historically, this was mined at a fairly high grade. But what they left, I think, behind is a little bit lower grade, but albeit much larger. And at today's prices for metals, I think it's going to be very economic. Just so you know, when the mine was shut down in 1949, I don't know if this is appropriate, but do you want to take a guess at what the silver price was back then?

6:44Derek Iwanaka: Oh, putting me on the spot here. Gosh, I would have no idea back in 1949. Most people don't. So it could be anything. but the answer is 79 cents an ounce of silver so a lot of people might say a couple bucks or a few dollars or ten dollars um most people have no idea actually but the answer is 79 cents so the metal prices were quite low back then and now we're sitting at what 65 dollars an ounce or so for silver and obviously with with technology um i think that the economics of it are going to be a lot better because we have much better mining equipment than ever before. We have a more robust metals prices.

7:29Yes, of course, costs have gone up as well, but we can now recover a lot more metal, um, for, I guess, at a lower cost when you're talking about bulk tonnage. And for us, we're looking at probably some sort of bulk mining.

7:42Derek Iwanaka: Okay. And underground or, or are you conceiving like an open pit kind of operation? It potentially would start off as an open pit, but then likely go underground as we move up towards the north. And is that you visualize in it, and granted, I don't want to speak totally in hypotheticals, but would the open pit be for all of the silver and the underground would be for gold or there would even be silver to go underground to get? Still a little too early to say, but I suspect, at least based on the drilling we've done so far, It would be the open pit would encompass both the, there's basically two stratigraphies.

8:21So there's a more of a anoxide layer, you could say, and then there's more of a sulfide layer below that. It potentially could be mined because it's fairly shallow. It could be mined, I think, with an open pit, at least to start in the southern part of the deposit. But as you move up towards the north, it tends to go a little bit deeper. so it may not be economic or as economic to to be open pit throughout the whole thing so it quite likely would go into an underground mine towards the north but start off as an open pit and that works out perfectly because you know you could have pretty good paybacks if you started off with a nice open pit mine to start off with relatively low costs and then you go into an underground mining operation afterwards.

9:08And that's been seen many times over in many different deposits around the world.

9:13Derek Iwanaka: Yeah. I mean, does that then really put some pressure on you guys to build out that scale of the deposit at that Southern portion, right? You don't want that to be in the big part of the deposit to be in the Northern part where you've got to get underground, right? That sort of changes your economics and how your mine plan would work, right? Yeah. And if you've seen our website uh you might notice there's a couple holes in there um and so some people wonder what what are those two holes sitting there yeah me one of them and i did notice that collapse okay yeah it was so because it was an underground mine in the past uh basically over the last 80 years or so uh there's been some collapses there so there's actually a few more that you can't see on the on the photo or at least on our website but uh those are the two larger ones that basically it was an underground mine after a long time many decades it just collapsed and so that's basically your starter pick because if you look closer you'll see the mineralization is basically starting right from surface around that area like i said that's in the southern part of the deposit as you move north it will go a little deeper but to start off it's very shallow so you're basically looking at almost right at surface open pit mining with very little overburden, at least to start off with.

10:36Derek Iwanaka: Yeah, I'm just kind of looking at those now. Right. So, you know, to your point about the depths, and so you're looking at shallow oxides into sulfides around that 800 feet range. And those upper oxides are the silver, manganese, zinc, lead, and that gold would be in the lower sulfides. Am I reading that correct? That's correct. Yep. Yeah. Right. Okay. Okay. And then go ahead. I was just going to, I didn't finish your other question, I think, um, which was as a new CEO, I guess, what do I bring to the table? And I guess you could say I'm one of the younger CEOs out there. Um, and this is my first time, so I'm going to give it my all.

11:18I mean, I'm, I'm hungry. I want to make this a big success and I'm trying to get, you know, my friends and family and everybody into this, as well as a lot of bigger investors. So I think that might be one of the differentiating factors. This is my first time at it. I got a lot of help. There's going to be, well, we have our directors that are supporting me, as well as a lot of friends in the industry that have been helping me out. And I've worked with some of the best people in the industry. I mean, most recently, I was working with Clive Johnson, who just recently retired from B2 Gold as CEO.

11:52Keith Neumeyer, who's the CEO of First Majestic Silver. John Robbins, who's the founder of the Discovery Group, as well as Jim Patterson there. So I've worked with some really terrific people, not to mention Dennis Higgs, who's started many companies. So yeah, I've worked with some of the best guys in the industry, certainly in Vancouver. And so I think I bring quite a bit to the table here.

12:15Derek Iwanaka: Yeah, those are some big names. So then just a little bit, just to push a little bit on that. So, because again, someone may just not know your name, are you bringing more of, you know, a banking sector background in? I know you mentioned you're not a geologist, you know, what's your sort of relationship to the industry and like, where can you rely on your lived knowledge versus having the directors or the VPs of X or project management or engineering? How do you, how do you see that unfolding? Yeah. So I started a little differently than a lot of people, I guess, in my role. A lot of them tend to be geologists or sometimes engineers.

12:53So I come from the investor relations and corporate development side of the business. So I started off doing investor relations for a company called Bima Gold. Bima ended up getting bought out by Kinross Gold after we had a major discovery in Russia. That got bought out for three and a half billion dollars. And then the next two companies I worked with were part of the discovery group. So both of those companies were bought out as well and then moved on to a company called Uroner's Energy, which was a uranium mining company down in Wyoming. Also, that got bought out. So I got a lot of corporate development experience, also a lot of marketing experience.

13:29So I think that's a little different side than a lot of the CEOs out there.

13:33Derek Iwanaka: Yeah, for sure. I think that is a helpful background. as, you know, let's be honest right now, over the last 12 months, the gold and silver price, I think, has brought a lot of attention to the sector in a good way. But it does mean that it is, there are a lot of companies and a lot of projects, right? Especially in silver that didn't work at 20, but do at 60 and get people really excited at$100 silver, right? So it does place a premium, I think, on getting your message out, getting your project in front of the right eyeballs, making sure the market sees when you have a strong drill result or a, uh, material, you know, permit news, things like that, because, because it is crowded, right.

14:16Derek Iwanaka: And, um, jurisdiction does go a long way and drill results do go a long way. Um, but, but, but it is still a competitive space. Oh, absolutely. I, which is why I'm glad you brought out where you are is a big, is a big differentiator because i've worked in africa i've worked in um wealth in russia and we even had some projects in japan uh with the with the past company that i was with so we've i've worked all over the place and nevada has to be one of the easiest places i mean not only is the permitting regime um very streamlined uh but also it's just it's a mining friendly area in general. And there's not a huge population in Nevada.

15:00So you see a lot of mining. I mean, it's called the Silver State for a reason. And so there's lots of silver there, and there's lots of silver that has been mined historically.

15:10Derek Iwanaka: Yeah. And I think probably something that doesn't come up at least a lot on shows like this and just in general is probably that quality of labor force, right? In the sense that you're going to have some of the best miners in Nevada, BC, you know, parts of Mexico and things that you're not going to be able to get in parts of, of, uh, just other parts of the world. I don't want to speak bad about any other parts, but you're going to have that, you're going to have that, uh, you know, premier skillset. Yeah, no, that's, it's a good point. I mean, our guys, they can go up to site they're they're working for what is 10 hour shift and then they just drive back to their home or uh so it's it's it's quite easy um you know it's not in a a major metropolis i mean piochi is a pretty small town and there's a few other smaller towns surrounding it called caliente is where some of our guys um drive out of but you know it's it's easy i mean you can use your cell phone right up at site it's not as remote as you know working in the yukon or northwest territories or something like that.

16:14It's all very civilized. Yeah.

16:18Derek Iwanaka: Well, let's transition to some of your drill results for this year. And you mentioned, obviously, you guys had had those historic drillings, historic drill results and historic production there. Some pretty good, some pretty strong highlights here across the board. So hole 37 with 230 grams per ton silver, 10.78%. manganese, whole 30, you know, 5.67 grams per ton goal. But like give, you know, if you want to hit on the highlights, you certainly can. But I think give us the sort of like context of what you guys are seeing, what you're drilling for. Is it all for depth, for step outs, how you're defining the resource still so far?

17:01Derek Iwanaka: Kind of talk us through what this campaign was meant to accomplish and what you're seeing so the first goal was really to just verify the historical drill holes so that was kind of when I first started that was my worst nightmare was you know I just left B Metals which was part of the B2 Gold Group so I had a good safety net there and coming over to a junior exploration company where the job first was let's drill this thing and see if it matches up with the historical drilling and thank god uh it did um in fact it was even better than the historical stuff so that made me sleep a lot easier the next day so um that was kind of job one was just kind of to make sure that the drilling is in line and then as it turns out it ended up being even better i think than some of the historical drilling job two was to see how big this thing gets and so that's what we're really working on right now We're not doing a huge amount of step-out drilling.

18:07Main goal is really to kind of drill in between the historical holes. So as I said, we start off with about 130 holes. We're drilling in between those holes. So it's a lot of just resource definition with the goal of coming out with a 43-101 compliant resource by the end of the year.

18:26Derek Iwanaka: This is sort of a strategic question, not a, hey, give me forward-looking statements question. But I mean, do you have a number that you want that you feel the market would respond to? And then two, is it how much of that will be inferred? Is this just this first one just going to be all inferred? Or are you able to do some indicated based on your spacing with what you're doing and how it relates to the historic holes there? yeah okay so in terms of numbers i would say my personal goal is to get to about 100 million ounces of silver equivalent and i think that based on the drilling we've done so far i think that's going to be pretty easily achievable uh and then the next number would be can we get to 100 million ounces of just silver alone i don't know if we're there yet but at least get to the silver equivalent number i think is pretty achievable and that number is relevant because if you look at a lot of the silver companies out there predominantly they're going to have some other metals mixed in silver is very rarely just a silver mine is going to be mixed with other metals so quite often it's going to be quoted in silver equivalent right and so that that's kind of the magic number if you can get to 100 million ounces of silver equivalent that kind of puts you in the ballgame you're an natural bona fide company that has a serious resource.

19:47So that's the first number that we're trying to get to. In terms of what categories they're going to be in, to start off, I'd say the majority of it's going to be inferred, but we probably will get some measured and indicated in there as well. Okay.

20:02Derek Iwanaka: Measured and indicated based on kind of the expanding on the historic. Sorry, maybe not measured, but indicated for sure. Indicated. Okay. Yeah. And you noted the other metals, right? And it's certainly going to see lead and zinc, right? The manganese, I've seen a little bit more this year. I mean, how much of those other metals are you seeing continue down through the drill results? And I guess the different way of asking this is like, obviously they were present in the historic drilling. Are you seeing continuity across the drill results with that? And is that a part of that CRD deposit? Is that part of that, um a characteristic kind of of that yeah so when and if if you ever get down to piotra i'd be happy to take you around generally when you see black in the the cuttings that come out we're using rc drilling so we're not doing core drilling generally when you see black material coming out and kind of the darker the better uh that note means that you're in manganese and typically the silver is associated with the manganese so you quoted out uh whole prc 37 i believe and you said it was 230 grams per ton silver with about 10.78 manganese so typically and that's going to be in your your oxide layer um but when you go a little deeper down typically you're going to find maybe a one gram per ton silver gold um but you're still going to see a bit of silver maybe it's going to be 20 to 30 or 40 grams per ton silver but you're also still going to see some zinc and lead down there so um in terms of continuity it really depends on which horizon you're at whether you got the oxide or or the sulfide horizon but it's the the way to look at these crds is is look at like a like a flat lying bed so and like quite often you see deposits which are vein like uh So you're just kind of chasing these veins.

22:06In our case, it's kind of like a flat lying bed that's just sitting on like on there on the let's just say if you're in the surface, but underground. And so you're just kind of testing all this flatbed and just so it's very consistent typically. And that's what we've been finding mostly. Okay.

22:27Derek Iwanaka: Okay. And then just a couple, you know, last questions that you guys noted, you doubled your land position. I'm looking at your district claims here and just trying to get a sense of how, you know, everybody uses the term district scale, but where are you guys, your exploration target outline does look quite small in comparison to what you guys have as far as this, you know, package around the great Western fault. Do you want to talk about what should people know when they're looking at what you guys have there. Yeah, I'll just leave it at that. Okay. I hope or encourage anybody that's listening to just check out our website and on our presentation, slide 10 is the one to kind of look at.

23:11So there's a red ellipsoid that's just showing the area that we're drilling right now. And that area alone is what we're trying to define about 100 million ounces of silver. I suspect that that mineralization is going to continue up northward. It might even continue down southward as well. But essentially, if you follow along that Great Western Fault, the Great Western Fault is known as that conduit. So that was the crack in the earth, you know, billions of years or millions of years ago. And when that crack formed, all these hot metals came up towards the surface. And that's how they formed these different deposits and so we just have the prince mine which is um illustrated on that particular map but there's a mine called castleton which is just north of us and then there's a whole bunch of mines all around there so a lot of that mineralization started from that great western fault so if possible we'd like to be able to continue up with exploration to the north we just staked up like i like you pointed out we effectively doubled our land position and we think that mineralization is going to go right up to the north.

24:19So, you know, if we have 200 or 100 million ounces in that one ellipsoid and that continues onward, you know, this, like, like I said, it could become a district play here.

24:30Derek Iwanaka: Okay. And you do have, so you, it looks like you've got kind of some neighbors, one, uh, mostly to the east, right. That as you would move up towards Treasure Hill there, and those are just on, um, I guess it just says third party patented claims. Yeah, those were all past mines. So if you're looking at that map, there's the Castleton Mill mine, and then there's Treasure Hill, and there's Eli Valley mine. So there's mines all over the area. And so we're quite certain that that mineralization continues up north. So we're going to try to acquire some more ground. But in the meantime, we have all this new ground in green on that map.

25:09And if we can drill that and that continues, You know, if you have 100 million ounces there and that continues right up, this thing could get into the hundreds of million ounces, maybe even billions of ounces relatively easy.

25:25Derek Iwanaka: Last question, Derek. Well, it's never a last question. Two quick ones. That's okay. Keep going. Two quick ones. So valuation, you guys are small micro cap right now. Maybe not micro, but around that$20 million mark. And, you know, if you are able to put that, you know, 100 million ounce equivalent, you know, that, as you noted, that should generate some eyeballs just for someone who's investing. If they want to invest in Prince Silver, what what are they getting? You know, are they getting an aggressive exploration company? Are they getting somebody that's going to have to go back and read to the market every, you know, drill campaign?

26:02Derek Iwanaka: Like, what do you what do you want this to be? I guess. And yeah, what are they getting with Prince? So my goal, and I think the company wants to do is, let's get to the 100 million ounces of silver. And that puts us on the map. And I think if you look at our peer group, all the companies that have 100 million, well, not all, but most of the companies that have 100 million ounces of silver or more inventory on the books, their market caps are going to be well in excess of$100 million market cap. and some of them are as much as a billion and a half dollars. So if you look at that and say, well, we're sitting down at 20 million, 25 million, I'd say we're kind of like a spring waiting to explode if we can get that resource to come together and we can catch up to some of these other companies.

26:53Derek Iwanaka: Because a lot of companies say they're going to do things and we just have to actually deliver. And that's been the hardest thing for any company out there is to deliver. And you can wave your arms as much as you want and yell at the top of your lungs on a podium. But until you actually deliver, you really don't know. And so that's what I think we have to do is we just have to execute. And I'm happy to do that. And the drilling is going well. So I think we are going to be able to deliver that later on this year. And then I think that would really set us apart. Once we get into that kind of echelon of getting into the$100 million plus market cap, that's going to make it a lot easier for us to raise money.

27:37Yes, as an exploration company, we're always going to have to come back to the market to raise additional funds, but I hope it's going to be at a much higher price. And if you look at our past financings, every single one of them has been at a higher price. Now, the last one was at 70 cents and we're sitting at below 40 cents. So we got a lot of catching up to do, but if we can get that resource to come together, I think we can get well and above 70 cents again and hopefully get up into the dollar range or so with a good resource. And that seems achievable if you look at our peer group or peer group that has resources.

28:16Yeah.

28:16Derek Iwanaka: And are you financed for the rest of the year through the MRE, through the drill campaign? For the drilling that we're doing and getting the resource estimate, we are financed to get that completed. We're also financed to get the metallurgical study completed for this phase, at least. Ultimately, we may have to do more work, which I'm sorry, we will have to do more work for metallurgy. But if we can get with the end of this metallurgical phase, if we can get to a point where we're seeing meaningful recoveries of the silver, the gold and the manganese and lead and sinks. And then I think that's going to really put us in a good spot because manganese sometimes can be an issue with recoveries.

29:01And if we can solve that, we're going to be in a really good place.

29:05Derek Iwanaka: All right, Derek, thanks so much for coming by today. If people want to learn more or if they want to, you know, inbounds to you guys, where should they go? What should they do? Best plan is to go on our website. So www.princesilvercorp.com. We have an AI chatbot on there, so you can chat with that. But there's also a number and there's an email on there that you can reach us. I think it's info at PrinceSilverCorp.com. So if you reach out with that, you can contact me. And I'm a real human being. I can chat with you. But the chatbot, I have to say, is pretty damn good. So you can test it with all the questions you can think of.

29:43And generally, we'll come up with some pretty good answers.

29:45Derek Iwanaka: Nice. Well, you, as your corporate development and IR background, I imagine you're no stranger to inbound. So that's a good thing. Yeah. No, I'm very happy to accept them and look forward to hopefully seeing a big influx of emails coming from your listeners. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Derek. Appreciate it. Awesome. Thank you, Ian. That is CEO and Director, Mr. Derek Iwanaka of Prince Silver. Prince Silver trades on the CSE with the symbol PRNC and on the OTCQX with the symbol PRNCF.

30:28Derek Iwanaka: The information presented should not be considered investment advice. Mining Stock Daily and its affiliates are not responsible for any loss arising from any investment decision in connection with the material presented herein. Please do your own research or speak with a licensed financial representative before making any investment. Thank you.