Noble Mineral Exploration Inc. (TSX-V:NOB, FRANKFURT: NB7, OTCQB:NLPXF) announced that it has entered into a binding Letter of Intent to acquire the Lucas Gold Project from Canada Nickel Company Inc. (CNC). The transaction involves Noble issuing 5,000,000 units to CNC, each unit valued at $0.06 and consisting of one common share and one-half non-transferable common share purchase warrant exercisable at $0.15 per share for two years. Additionally, CNC will retain a Back-in Right to purchase a 25% interest in the property at any time after the Trigger Date, defined as the earlier of 36 months from closing, when at least $5 million in exploration expenditures have been incurred, or upon a sale or change of control of Noble. The Back-in Right would require a payment equal to four times the exploration expenditures incurred by Noble.
The Lucas Gold Project is located approximately 30 km north of Timmins, Ontario, a region renowned for over 75 million ounces of gold production, and 20 km northeast of the Kidd Creek Mine, which has produced over 150 million tonnes of ore in 58 years. The project is also about 20 km east of the Crawford Nickel Resource being developed by CNC. Access is via paved Highway 655, with full infrastructure and services available in Timmins, including power and water. Noble has a Memorandum of Understanding with local First Nations.
In 2018, Noble completed 15 diamond drill holes totaling 3,184 meters, covering approximately 650 meters of the 1,700-meter gold-mineralized structure identified from geophysical surveys. The company located 37 historical drill-hole collars and twinned three of them. No further work has been done since 2018. The Lucas Gold Project has six discrete IP anomalous trends requiring follow-up exploration, with only one trend tested by drilling to date. Gold mineralization is interpreted to be structurally controlled, occurring as discrete lenses within a pyrite-plus-gold mineralized tuffaceous unit.
Vance White, President and CEO of Noble, stated, "We are very pleased to be proceeding with the repurchase of an excellent gold prospect on which we know from past work carried out by Noble of an existing gold zone but also a number of untested parallel zones." Future work plans include drilling on the initial IP anomaly to further define gold mineralization and testing the other five undrilled IP anomalies.
The transaction remains subject to negotiation of a definitive agreement and compliance with legal and TSX Venture Exchange requirements. Qualified persons Stephen J. Balch, P.Geo. (ON), VP Exploration of CNC, and Wayne Holmstead, P.Geo. (ON), have reviewed and approved the technical information in this release on behalf of their respective companies.
