Mr. Herald: Solitario has been around for 16 years now, since 1994. It's been focused in Latin America during this entire period, and the two countries where we're working hardest in are Mexico and Peru. We've several advanced projects there in both base metals and gold, and we see 2010 as probably going to be a transformational year for Solitario in that the development on some of our joint venture projects has been accelerated. We're very pleased to see that. We're a well-capitalized firm with approximately 20 million in cash and securities, and no debt. We also have a low number of shares outstanding, 29.7 million shares outstanding and about 30.4 million fully diluted.
This year will be the most aggressive exploration year for us. Six projects will be drilled; two by our joint venture partners and four by Solitario independently. Historically, Solitario has been successful on the exploration front. We tend to look at early-stage gold and silver, and base metal projects with our projects located primarily in Peru and Mexico, and a fairly significant joint venture in Brazil on a platinum-palladium project.
TWST: Would you give us an insight into the properties you currently hold?
Mr. Herald: The one that I think is most important to our shareholders currently is a project we call Bongar‡ Zinc, in Peru. It's a high-grade zinc project that is joint-ventured with a company called Votorantim Metais, which a lot people are unfamiliar with. It's a private Brazilian firm. It's the third largest zinc producer in the world; in 2008 it had 19 billion in revenue. So this firm is really a large conglomerate that's capable of taking this project through development into production. At Bongar‡ this year we really reached a milestone - our partners decided to construct an 18-kilometer road into the mine site to conduct the initial underground exploration development of about 700 meters of planned underground workings to complete about 10,000 meters of surface drilling and to conduct advanced metallurgical testing. Now what makes this project, I think, valuable to us and to our shareholders particularly is that in this joint venture, Votorantim is earning a 70% interest. We'll retain 30%, but they have to spend all the money necessary to take this through feasibility without ever getting paid back. And then once they take it through feasibility and it moves into the construction phase, they will loan us our 30% of the funds necessary to put it into production. So it's a deal where it's essentially structured as a net profits royalty interest. We protect our shareholders' dilution with a deal like this. We think the property has great potential for a deposit in a range of 20 million tons of 10% combined lead and zinc, mainly zinc - 9% is probably the average zinc rate, 1% lead, about a half ounce per ton of silver. So this project is going to move into the development phase this year. More than likely, the feasibility phase will be in 2011. And then with any luck on the permitting and putting other pre-construction issues to bed, we may be able to begin construction late in 2012 or early 2013. So this project is moving forward, and it's really reached a new milestone.
The other project that I think is quite interesting to us is the platinum-palladium project in Brazil called Pedra Branca. And this again is joint-ventured, in which we're essentially carried to production by our partner, Anglo Platinum, which is the largest platinum producer in the world. Anglo funded the 2009 exploration program to the tune of about 1.5 million. They are currently evaluating whether to fund 2010 exploration, and we'll know that in the next probably two months. Both 2008 and 2009 were quite good, and we think this project has good potential for somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 million to 2 million ounces platinum plus palladium. And with the prices of platinum these days being in the neighborhood of 1,500 an ounce, palladium north of 400 an ounce, this project could have a pretty good future ahead of it.
And finally I'll talk quickly about four of the other projects that we're going to drill this year. One is called La Noria, which is in Northern Mexico. It is a copper oxide project. It's one of my favorites in that on surface, late in the fall of last year, we defined a zone that was 700 meters long and 200 meters wide that averaged 0.32% copper oxide at surface and has never been drilled. Probably in the middle of February we'll be drilling there. I think it could be a real exciting project for us. A gold project that we particularly like is called Cajatambo, and that's in Peru. Their work during the second half of 2009 led us to an extremely large gold anomaly that's over 3.5 kilometers or two miles long. It's about a kilometer and a half wide, very strong gold and silver numbers at surface, both in rocks and soils. And again, we did geophysics there and it looks like this target is associated with the margin of a very metalliferous area. So we'll be drilling there this year.
And the third project we call the Pachuca Real project in Mexico and was the largest silver producer in the world. The historic district produced over 1.4 billion ounces of silver and 7 million ounces of gold. And in the north district and about 30% of the old district, we have developed about 38 targets that we believe are quite good in terms of vein silver-gold targets. We're very close to a joint venture there. We've been talking with a number of companies, and two companies in particular are interested in trying to reach an arrangement with them. And hopefully sometime in the not-too-distant future we'll be able to announce a joint venture. We're not there yet. There is no guarantee we'll get there, but probably at some point in time. And we'd like to have a partner there because it's a big program. It's one that's maybe a little too big for us, and it'd be good to get another partner there to help fund the exploration.
Finally, the last project I'll mention is our La Promesa property, which is in central Peru. We discovered it in late 2008 and with further work in 2009 have identified a series of extremely high-grade veins - some of our assays have been in excess of 30 to 50 ounces per ton of silver, and 20% to 40% combined zinc and lead. And these are really spectacular grades. It also has a very high content of indium, which is used for flat screen TVs. Here we hope to get the project permitted in time to conduct drilling this summer. We think these targets are outstanding at La Promesa, and we also think there is a good potential to find other veins at surface area because we just haven't done enough work to fully explore the surface even.
So with these projects we think we have a great line-up of activities in 2010 that hopefully will move our share price forward. I think there will be a lot of interest in the news coming out of all of these projects, and it's certainly the most active year we've had in our history.
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