Canadian Copper Corp Acquires Chilean Exploration Assets

By setting its sight outside Canada’s borders, this upstart minerals concern hopes to grow its global asset base and resultant profitability.

Interra Copper Corp. IMIMF is a Canada-based junior exploration and development firm that had traditionally been engaged in the acquisition, exploration, and evaluation of natural resource properties in British Columbia, Canada.

According to Reuters, it has two mineral exploration properties — the Thane Property and the Chuck Creek Property. The Thane Property covers approximately 206 square kilometers in the Quesnel Terrane of north-central British Columbia, on-trend with Centerra Gold's Kemess and Mt. Milligan mines. The Chuck Creek Property covers 34 square kilometers in the Eagle Bay Assemblage of rocks and is surrounded on all sides by Taseko Mines' Yellowhead Property, which hosts a copper-gold volcanogenic sulfide deposit.

The company just expanded out-of-country by closing its acquisition of Alto Verde Copper, so President and CEO Chris Buncic sat down for a Smithweekly Research podcast to talk about the finer points of the deal — including new assets in Chile: the Tres Maria, Pitbull, and Zenaida Projects.

Buncic is bullish about Interra's close relationship with Freeport, the original owner of the newly-acquired exploration assets.

Buncic explained that Alto Verde Copper was a story that they pulled together in early 2021. The team of ex-Freeport executives was aware that Freeport was reducing its exploration in Chile to focus on its advanced-stage projects, so they decided to look at the company's exploration assets and potentially use those as a basis to create a new copper-focused company.

According to Buncic, they looked at about 32 different projects in Chile, cherry-picked the three that they thought had the most promise, and made a bid to Freeport. After the bid was accepted, the new concern raised some capital and spent the next several years advancing those projects technically, closing the acquisition, and building a team.

Now they have taken the company public via Interra Copper Corp, with Buncic as CEO. Buncic was CEO of Ascendant Resources up until May of 2021 and oversaw the operation of the El Mochito mine in Honduras as well as the Lagoa Salgada project in Portugal.

Deal Structure

"We first signed our LOI with Interra Copper back in December of 2022," Buncic continues, "and one of the things that it was contingent on was financing, so throughout January, we were hitting the market telling the story, and we raised just shy of CA$3 million."

After this, the company completed the definitive agreement with Interra and began trading in late March.

"You know we have a very healthy market cap," he said. "We've got a lot of room to rise on the back of strong marketing activities or strong success out of Chile and Canada in the future."

"The Alto Verde shares were rolled up at US$0.2512 to US$1 and combined with Interra at about 46% of the pro forma company pre-financing. We raised CA$2.9 million at CA$0.50  per Interra share with a CA$0.75 half warrant."
About the warrants, Buncic explains that each is a "three-year half warrant with an accelerator on it at CA$1.25, so after the stock trades above CA$1.25 for more than ten days straight, there is a quick accelerator so that we can get some extra cash in the door."

"I think the intent there was to give enough of a window to get through a lot of the market noise that's been part the problem for all these junior explorers the past 18 months but also make sure that there wasn't too much of a warrant overhang out there."

Buncic went on to say that Interra Copper has a tight share structure as a result., with only 22.5 million shares outstanding on a basic basis.

"You know we have a very healthy market cap," he said. "We've got a lot of room to rise on the back of strong marketing activities or strong success out of Chile and Canada in the future."

Tight Ties to Freeport

Buncic is bullish about Interra's close relationship with Freeport, the original owner of the newly-acquired exploration assets. "We have a very strong relationship with Freeport," he says, "and it's an ongoing relationship. We have three major executives that came from Freeport."

He continued, "We've got relationships, you know, up to the top levels, and so the goal here is to go back to Freeport and have further conversations around assets that we know they have because of our team and see what we can do in terms of advancing those discussions."

The Projects

Buncic claims that the principal project is Tres Maria.

He said, "When we took the project over from Freeport, we looked at their old data. They had some geophysics that they'd done that was a little bit dated, and the first thing we did was reinterpret that data using new computer techniques."

"We identified not just one target area on this 16,250-hectare property but, in fact, three," he explains. "They're all very sizable, so each of them on their own would be worthy of a project, and so looking at those three different areas, we said, 'okay, well let's go fly some UAV mag and let's go do some surface IP' and the results of those two studies with basically overlapping geophysics of different types really crystallized for us these anomalies that exist in the eastern central and western parts of this concession."

"We identified not just one target area on this 16 000 hectare property but, in fact, three," he explains. "They're all very sizable, so each of them on their own would be worthy of a project."

"It's a very large concession, and so the goal here, based on that analysis, is to follow up with a drill program that we've designed," Buncic continues. "We've got a 20-hole program — it's about 10,500 meters — and we'll do that in a phased approach. The first phase we are planning to kick off in the coming months and will focus on the eastern part where we have done the most work leading up to the kickoff of the drill program."

"As that's underway, we will focus on Pitbull a little bit . . . Pitbull is an earlier stage project where we've got 2,000 hectares up close to Teck's Quebrada Blanca mine . . .  up in the northern part of Chile, where there's a huge mineral endowment, and so we think we've got some great land there."

"When we were up there preparing our technical report, we took some ground samples . . .  the grab samples came back with very interesting numbers, north of one percent copper and north of two percent in some cases, so these are things that are all worth following up on. You can see the copper oxides on the surface so the plan at Pitbull is an initial geophysics program just to identify on that property where we think the most opportunity is."

"We can see from the surface there's an old riverbed which might be indicative of some faulting that's happening under the surface, so you know that's perspective too. After we finish a little bit of geophysics at Pitbull, we'll return back to Tres Marias and continue with the drill program. The goal here is to finish off the east drill off the central portion and the western portions." 

Ownership and Share Structure

Management, directors, and insiders own around 10.7% of shares (2.4 million shares). President, CEO, and Director of Interra Copper, Chris Buncic, owns 793,356 shares, and Director and COO Jason Nickel own around 200,000 shares.

A small number of shares, around 0.4%, are owned by institutions; the rest are owned by the general public. 

Interra Copper is based in Vancouver, Canada. It has a market cap of CA$18 million, 22.5 million shares outstanding, five million warrants, and 554,000 options. 

According to Market Watch, and trades at a 52-week range of between CA$0.28 and CA$0.92.

Disclosures:

1) Owen Ferguson wrote this article for Streetwise Reports LLC and provides services to Streetwise Reports as an independent contractor/employee. They or members of their household own securities of the following companies mentioned in the article: None. They or members of their household are paid by the following companies mentioned in this article: None. Their company has a financial relationship with the following companies referred to in this article: None.

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