Levon Resources Ltd.
With any luck – which everyone in the mining business needs – by the time you read this, Ron Tremblay, president/CEO of Levon Resources Ltd., could be kite surfing daily at his home in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. “We’ll see what happens,” he says. “I’ve been working nonstop for two-and-a-half years with no holidays. I’m ready for a break.
That’s my personal goal – to take a few months off.”
Although that sounds tempting, Tremblay will not be doing it until a big mining company buys his company’s find in Cordero, Mexico, which is approximately 220 kilometers south of Chihuahua, Mexico.
“They’re all pounding on the door – it could be very interesting,” Tremblay says of the mining companies. “It’s going to be a major, major deal. We’ve got all of the major mining companies circling around – all heading down there in the next little while – and it should be very interesting. They’re going to like what they see – everybody who has been there so far likes what they see. It’s been an exciting project.”
What mining companies are going to see are the results of a $20 million drilling program that began in 2009. Another mine in the area, Peñasquito, is now the largest silver deposit in the world, and Tremblay thinks his company’s find in Cordero could be bigger.
“Peñasquito has got over 1.2 billion ounces of silver and counting, and they have about 17 million ounces of gold and counting, and billions of tons of lead and zinc,” Tremblay asserts. “That’s why these guys are so hot on Cordero, because we have a good chance of finding another one that could be even bigger.” The first sale of the Peñasquito mine was for $1.2 billion, but six months later, the mid-tier company that bought it was sold again for $9.6 billion primarily for the Peñasquito deposit.
The Source
The reason Tremblay thinks the Cordero project could be bigger than the Peñasquito mine is that Peñasquito only has two intrusive centers and Cordero has six. “These are volcanic intrusives that are pushed up from down below from volcanic activity, and in this case, it appears it’s a gaseous activity,” he says.
The Cordero dome exploded millennia ago and spread precious metals around the area on the surface. “That’s where small miners have been mining veins – which are actually stringer zones that come up from down below – where there must be a massive pumping system that pumped all this material up, and it came up through the dome and exploded and deposited all around the dome,” Tremblay continues. “Everybody knew about that, but didn’t realize there were all these intrusive centers still buried that never exploded, and consequently the metal is still down below.”
Mexico has been famous for its silver vein mining for a long time. “Everybody has known there are all these silver veins there, but nobody had found their source, where they are coming from and what’s causing them,” Tremblay points out. “All they’ve done is mine the veins.”
But Tom Patton was the one to figure out when he was president and CEO of Western Silver Corp. that these veins were stringer zones being pushed up and filling up with metal from down below. Patton’s work resulted in the discovery of Peñasquito.
The Find
Tremblay became involved with the Cordero project when he invested $250,000 in Valley High Ventures, which had the Cordero site but not the capital needed to explore it. “It was right when the whole market was melting down – January of 2009, when the whole market was in the toilet,” Tremblay remembers. “Nobody could raise any money. Nobody could do anything. The whole world was running scared.”
So after examining the site, Levon Resources entered into a joint venture with Valley High and explored the site. The results of the preliminary economic assessment of the site should be completed by August 2011.
“We find projects and take them to a stage until they are attractive to a major mining company, and then they gobble us up,” Tremblay explains. “I don’t think I want to operate a mine – that sounds like a nightmare to me. That’s a job for the big boys, especially something of this size and magnitude.” EMI