During our site visit in Portugal we sat down with Paul Kuhn, CEO of Avrupa Minerals (AVU.V), Blackheath Resources’ (BHR.V) Joint Venture partner on the Covas Tungsten project in the Northern part of Portugal.
– What are your plans for Covas once Blackheath Resources reaches their 85% ownership? Will you contribute your 15% or would you prefer to dilute yourself and keep an NSR on the project?
Unless any of our projects are real monsters, we would prefer to dilute and retain a royalty, thus giving us the ability to work on further possibilities.
– What are this year’s plans for your Sabroso licenses? The project looks quite encouraging despite the relatively narrow veins. Are the veins close enough to each other to consider Sabroso to be a bulk tonnage project?
That is what we hope to attain by proving up lots of narrow, gold-bearing veins in a relatively small area. There will be other target areas on the license, as well as the surroundings, which may open up in the next year or so.
– Are you looking for more projects in Germany, or will Erzgebirge be the only one?
At this moment, we will stick to Erzgebirge. There are some other promising areas in Germany, but we need to be able to move the present project forward before getting involved in other projects. I am spending most of my time with Portugal and Kosovo at the moment, and those two regions is where our main focus is right now.
– What do you expect to happen with the licenses in the pyrite belt in Southern Portugal where Antofagasta is currently earning in on? I assume you’ll re-negotiate the earn-in agreement as it wouldn’t make a lot of sense at this moment for Antofagasta to proceed to a feasibility study to increase their ownership to a 75% interest?
First of all, we’ll have to finish another 1,200 meters of drilling and wait for the assay results. Once those will have been received, the technical committee will meet again and discuss the future exploration program on the license to move the project forward. This will take another few months, so I don’t expect a new deal on this exploration license before the end of next quarter.
-You also have some projects in Kosovo. Is there any progress update from that front?
We are actively exploring for base and precious metals in Kosovo, including at our recently-announced Slivovo discovery. Avrupa feels that the Kosovo program is now at a stage where we can successfully joint venture the work with a larger, more risk-tolerant company. In that light, we are in active joint venture discussions with a potential partner. Successfully reaching an agreement would be a real boon to the program.
Disclosure: The author currently has no position in Avrupa Minerals. Please see our disclaimer for current positions.
