March 2017 | Business View Magazine

56 57 claim of 16 hectares in the middle of the Corde- ro resource for approximately $2 million, which gave the company 100 percent of the resource. “Then we started drilling, after adding about 30 percent to the resource, and we’ve come up with a resource of about 1.2 billion silver ounce equivalent,” Tremblay says. “The net value of that would be about six or seven billion dollars at $25 silver.” However, because the price of silver dropped, it was not commercially economical, so Trem- blay decided to shut the project down, putting it on temporary care and maintenance. “We’ve got about ten people down there, looking af- ter everything, and keeping everything in good shape,” he says. “It’s all locked up.We have a drill sitting in one of our warehouses; we’ve got all of our core boxed and properly stored in the warehouses.We’ve got 272 holes; about 137,000 meters of core sitting there. It’s all in steel buildings that we built there; it’s all cat- alogued and photographed and well set up. We’re in really good shape; it just didn’t make sense to continue spending money there with the metal prices where they are. It’s in an ad- vanced exploration stage; we’ve drilled it, we have more infill drilling to do.We plan to do some infill drilling of roughly 25 holes in the core of the resource to improve the IRR (Internal Rate of Return) and the grade, overall.We believe we can do that in the core area because it’s very rich area, judging from the sampling that we’ve done. So,we’re planning on starting that once the silver price gets back over about $20.” Silver is used in a lot of products –medical, electronics, photography, solar panels –plus it’s a precious metal utilized extensively in jewel- ry. And as the number of people in the world keeps growing and populations in places such as China, India, South America, and Mexico, become more middle-class, the demand for the metal will likely grow. “Mining always goes in cycles,” Tremblay explains. “And the one thing about metals - you’ve got to dig it out of the ground and you’ve got to process it. That costs Levon Resources, Ltd. Mining always goes in cycles. And the one thing about met- als - you’ve got to dig it out of the ground and you’ve got to process it. That costs money, it takes time, it takes energy, and it takes people; there’s no way around it. And as the costs continue to go up, the price of the metals continue to go up. ron tremblay president and CEO