How To Finance Your Mining Company. Part 1

I Love Pain.

This week I’m diving head-first into the murk, to take an unpleasant look at the slimy underbelly of the junior mining world. Yes, I’m talking about an ugly hidden world of prostitution, ritual humiliation, sadomasochism and betrayal, also known as junior mining finance.

For the last few years, trying to finance a junior ExploreCo has been a thankless task. Bumming for change outside Starbucks would’ve been more fun; at least that’s spiced up by the odd half-finished Americano and discarded smokes. No such luck in the finance world.

That’ll fund 30cm of RC

Faced with a world of apathetic investors who couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss about junior miners, how do you finance your resource company? How do you pay the lifestyle salaries, the bills, and keep the lights on through the down times without the pain of actually exploring for anything? Like an old C90 cassette on repeat, we blather on about hoping to raise $500k here, $250k there, while the world spins, uncaring and increasingly oblivious to our fiscal pain.

Not sure I’d have this on endless repeat.
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The Science of Sampling

& The Art Of Thinking On Your Feet

Eleven out of ten mining and exploration professionals, particularly geostatisticians, agree that the science of sampling is crucial to the discovery process. I’d suggest that everything we do as minerals’ industry geologists can be focused down into that single activity: sampling.

Every dollar we spend on logistics, geophysics, drilling, mapping and beer is spent to collect samples. It’s the ONLY way to check that there’s metal in the fascinating rocks you’ve described in your monthly reports. Geophysics won’t tell you, regardless of what those shifty geophysicists say. Satellites can’t tell you from 300km up, and mapping definitely won’t tell you.

Me (in the orange), 1984, Brittany, about to take a sample.
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The Ghost Train

A Tale Of Equipment Lost

Production is everything in mining. Sorry, I meant to say that safe production is everything. You can’t make money from a big hole in the ground if nothing useful is coming out of it and people are getting hurt.

Anyone who’s worked down a pit will eventually feel the pressure from higher up the food chain to produce more of whatever it is you’re mining. Sometimes the pressure will come from the stroppy, loud-mouthed chief mining engineer shouting at everyone when the mine is below quota. Or perhaps the plant head-grade will be changed constantly, necessitating closer geological control; a panicked attempt to get more ounces through the plant. I’ve experienced both.

Yup. That’s me alright.
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Trouble With Toilets

I spent last weekend lolling around in the sunshine at the Vancouver folk music festival, down at Vancouver’s dusty Jericho Beach Park. It’s a wonderfully scenic spot for a fun weekend of eclectic music, watched by an equally eclectic Pacific Northwest crowd. People who wouldn’t normally be seen dead in a tie-dye T-shirt dose themselves in patchouli oil and let their inner hippies out of the artisan-crafted, organic bamboo box for a couple of days. Unfortunately, on hot weekends there’s nowhere in the festival grounds to hide from the blazing sun, so most sane people eventually gravitate to the beer garden for a cold brew and the safety of the sun umbrellas.

The north side of the beer garden is the business end, lined with grey and blue plastic jiffy johns; on warm days, they turn into scorching hot chemical-scented saunas. God help anyone who’s unfortunate enough to get stuck in one.

Not my finest sartorial moment but at least I had cider.
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The Deep-Level Mine Geologist

Things Geologists Do. Part 2.

Earth scientists are a well-educated bunch, although we don’t always come across as clever when we’re 5 beers in to our cups. Most geologists –other than self-taught prospectors- have some form of university degree. Many of my colleagues were so enamored with the University study-drink-drink-more-study-repeat routine that they did what I did, and went back to university to earn a master’s degrees or doctorate on top of their undergrad’ degrees. Clever bunch, geologists. But eventually, assuming you have no wish to be an academic geologist or a waiter, reality bites and some sort of salaried earth science career is needed to fund the pub breaks.

A pint of beer.
I hate work but I have to fund this somehow.

In June 1984, much to my surprise, I graduated with a decent degree. A few months later I was poking forlornly around the City of London, knocking on doors and handing out a naively-bad resume to any mining company that would take it. I got my break when Anglo American interviewed me minutes after I walked into their head office looking for anyone from HR to talk to. A month later I was on a plane to Jo’burg to start a 3-year contract as a mine geologist in the deep-level gold mines in what was then the Western Transvaal (now Gauteng Province). After 2 days in the city signing paperwork, I was shipped off to the small mining town of Orkney, where I was billeted in the single mineworkers hostel and unceremoniously thrown into the deep end as a shaft geologist on Vaal Reefs 5 Shaft.

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Normal Service Will Be Resumed

at the end of Hadrian’s Wall

For the next week, give or take a day, my wife and I will be hobbling along the full 135km length of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England, pork pie in one hand and well-thumbed Ordnance Survey route map in the other.

Anybody seen a wall? I’ve lost my map.

As I’m sure you’ve already spotted, this raises 3 questions. Who was Hadrian? Why did he have a wall? Where is the wall? And why would I want to hike it? OK, that’s 4 questions.

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It’s On The Right

Have A Look. Over There —>—>—>

Blogging is a lonely business. I sit in the urbancrows eRookery (my home office), writing and posting, day in, day out with only my elderly, arthritic dog snoring at my feet to keep me company. But I know you’re out there. I know I’m not actually alone. I know lots of you are reading “What Is A Geologist?” and then moving on to something more interesting, back to your fun-filled lives watching Celebrity Big Brother, or Episode 4 of Chernobyl.

That’s why I love it when someone subscribes via the cryptic little window on the right, over there –have a look. I get all tingly thinking that something I’ve written might be making someone chuckle for a few seconds and forget the daily humdrum for a minute or two.

The eRookery, complete with wilty orchid.

Did you know there’s tons of other pieces on the urbancrows blog? A piece on Crystal Power, that delves way back to the origins of my interest in geology. Or how about the whole category about my interest in classical music, where Thomas Tallis (amongst others) gets a pump? Scared of being mugged by itinerant chickens? You’re not alone. Plus an entire category, The Mining Biz, devoted to demystifying the fog of terminology that clouds the junior mining business.

You have Nothing To Fear But Boredom

Take a look at the other categories before you head-off. You might be surprised at some of the amazingly dull stuff I’ve written. And I take requests too. Seriously. Fancy an irreverent look at a subject dear to your heart? Drop me a line through the Comments window and I might take you up on it.

Go on. Subscribe. It’s free and what’ve you got to lose? I promise not to spam you. You’ll only hear from me when I publish something new.

Keep Scrolling Down For The Fun Stuff.

How To Survive A Bad Market

Serious Advice For Resource Investors

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens.

“This is worse than a divorce. I’ve lost half my net worth and I still have a wife.”

Anonymous Stock Trader.

Some things are inevitable. Death. Taxes. Sagging testicles. Gout. And market downturns: 4 of the last 19 years have seen hefty declines on the big boards.

The junior resource markets are mired in the absolute worst of times. It’s hard to remember when raising money was so difficult. First-time resource investors could be forgiven for thinking that losing money is the new normal. Nose pressed to the glass of the fancy restaurant windows, they stare wistfully at the caviar-gobbling wealthy inside who avoided mining stocks and bought cannabis instead.

The promised land of ten-baggers.
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A Guide to Common Ore Minerals

Geology students are trained to identify the commonest rock- and ore-forming minerals. It’s a vital skill for professional geologist. Sulphides, silicates, oxides, phosphates; we slog through dozens of them in our petrology labs, learning to identify the important ones using properties like colour, hardness, lustre (the way it shines or doesn’t), cleavage (how they split), density and such. As a kid, I loved this aspect of geology and by my early teens I could already identify the most common economic minerals such as galena (lead), sphalerite (zinc), chalcopyrite (copper), hematite (iron) and the flashier oxides and carbonates like malachite, rhodocrosite and azurite.

I Was Conned

But lately I’ve had this nagging feeling that I was conned at University in my undergraduate days. I missed out on an entire earth-science discipline, and I’m still stewing over it. I touched on this feeling of disquiet in an earlier post (Crystal Power).

I was conned. Honest guv. Second row up, far right.

In a futile attempt to scratch the itch, I decided to take a deeper look at the mineral properties we should’ve been learning about; the ones that haven’t made the mainstream textbooks yet. More’s the pity because I think these could be far more diagnostic and helpful to field geologists, particularly geologists with inter-dimensional Kundalini issues or Chakratic aura problems.

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