Exploration winner Rob Waugh says there’s plenty more WA gold to be discovered

• Geologist Rob Waugh was involved in the discovery of BHP’s Nebo-Babel nickel-copper deposit
• He’s best known for leading Musgrave Minerals to a $200m buy-out by Ramelius Resources
• Now he chairs Caprice Resources and is on the boards of Future Battery Minerals and Horizon Minerals as they hunt for more gold in WA

Geologist and former Musgrave Minerals boss Rob Waugh has had a career spanning 35 years but is still hungry to be involved in more discoveries.

Earlier in his career, Waugh was known for being involved in the discovery and drill-out of BHP’s (ASX:BHP) Nebo-Babel nickel-copper deposit in Western Australia, something he described as an “amazing experience”.

He then ran Musgrave for 12 years, overseeing the high-grade Break of Day and Starlight discoveries at the Cue project.

“Successful explorers increase their probability of success,” Waugh told a Lowell Resources Fund (ASX:LRT) webinar on Friday.

“Everyone says, ‘oh, Rob, you’re lucky’. Absolutely, I’ve been lucky. I’ve been lucky my whole career, but you do have to try to improve your probability of being lucky.”

Waugh said luck was about taking chances and being counter-cyclical.

Musgrave picked up the Cue project from the former Silver Lake Resources in 2015 when the gold price was just A$1200 an ounce.

“Mines were shutting down everywhere. Everyone was getting rid of their non-core assets, low-value stuff,” Waugh said.

“This was a very small resource, 70,000 ounces over multiple deposits in a well-known district, but there was opportunity.

“We saw opportunity there – thin clay cover over many areas and not a lot of exploration in some of the areas that we thought had prospectivity.”

Musgrave was acquired by Ramelius Resources (ASX:RMS) two years ago in a deal worth around $200 million.

“You want to make discoveries where everybody wins. It’s not just you that wins,” Waugh said.

“You might get acquired. If you do get acquired, you want the acquirer to win. M&A, if it’s successful, is good for everybody that’s involved long term.”

Musgrave was able to raise more than $70 million during its life as a listed company and Waugh stressed the importance of access to capital.

“You can’t drill holes if you don’t have money – that’s why the current market is quite good for gold,” he said.

“Capital is available. People can drill holes. I would not be surprised if more discoveries happen over the next three years than we’ve seen in the last decade because of that money involved in the gold space.”

These days Waugh is non-executive chairman of Caprice Resources (ASX:CRS), and a non-executive director of Horizon Minerals (ASX:HRZ) and Future Battery Minerals (ASX:FBM).

He is also working on a private company, Scala Minerals, with former IGO executive Andrew Eddowes, that will likely be floated in “the not too distant future”.

Caprice Resources

Waugh’s involvement in Caprice is a bit of a no-brainer, given its Island gold project sits next door to Cue.

His competitive advantage in Cue was an understanding of the geology.

“Recently, we’re getting consistent sort of 10m intersections at around 10 grams per tonne,” he said.

Caprice recently kicked off a fully funded 20,000m drilling campaign, beginning with 7000m of high-impact extensional drilling at the Vadrians prospect as the company works towards an initial resource.

“We’re at that critical point where we’re understanding the geology, and so we think we’re sort of on the cusp of making that understanding come to fruition with the Vadrians discovery, and then lots of work going forward on testing similar positions we can see within the belt,” Waugh said.

The first batch of assays have been sent to the laboratory and Waugh estimates the first results will come back early next month.

Earlier this week, Caprice announced it had signed a low-cost earn-in agreement with Accelerate Resources to acquire up to 75% of the Comet project, along strike of Island, tripling Caprice’s footprint the region and providing it with around 40km of contiguous strike.

The project sits within the Tuckabianna complex and is adjacent to the 1.2Moz Tuckabianna and 1Moz Comet gold mines, previously mined by Westgold Resources.

Future Battery Minerals

FBM is a former lithium explorer which has pivoted to gold due to weak market conditions.

Waugh described FBM’s tenement package, which sits about 10km outside Coolgardie, as amazing.

“[We’ve got] 6km of prospective shear zone that has had a modest amount of exploration, but it’s only 10km from the Great Eastern Highway and Coolgardie,” he said.

Waugh said the tenements sat within a timber reserve, which had restricted access and may have prevented previous discoveries.

Drilling results reported last month within regolith included 20m at 0.55 grams per tonne gold from 28m, including 4m at 1.6g/t gold.

A new round of drilling to test the fresh rock below is underway.

“We’re seeing complex, regolith gold distribution,” Waugh said.

“That zone is sort of zero to 30m, where a lot of the previous drilling was. And then when you get down below that, we’re seeing quite a significant blanket of 1g/t gold, and then the expectation is that it’ll lead to some fresh rock source.

“So that’s what we’re doing at the moment, is testing that and having a better understanding of how that gold is distributed in the regolith and why it is that way.

“It’s understanding the regolith here and reasons why it wasn’t explored, so that gives you a competitive advantage, gets you the opportunity to get in there, and then it’s a matter of making those discoveries.”

Horizon Minerals

Horizon is the most advanced of Waugh’s new companies, having 1.8Moz in resources and cash generation via toll milling of ore from its Boorara deposit near Kalgoorlie.

But the company has plans to become a standalone 100,000oz per annum producer after merging with Poseidon Nickel to get access to the Black Swan nickel processing plant.

“It’s a faster and cheaper process to acquire that and convert that to gold than it is to get permitting,” Waugh said.

Earlier this week, Horizon reported a standout hit of 1.55m at 99.65g/t gold from 336.3m, including 0.4m at 350g/t gold and 0.35m at 64.29g/t gold at its Burbanks project, which is one of the deposits expected to provide feed to the centralised Black Swan plant.

A pre-feasibility study into the refurbishment of the plant is underway and due for completion this quarter.

Waugh is confident the company will be able to establish a five to seven-year mine plan.

“Mill space is really hard to get hold of in the district,” he said.

“At the moment, it’s not easy to put your feed in other people’s mills, so I think having another mill in this district with gold prices the way they are, will be a really important process in getting us to that point of production.”

At Stockhead, we tell it like it is. While Caprice Resources and Future Battery Minerals are Stockhead advertisers, they did not sponsor this article.