Royal Nickel stock surged 83 per cent

Rare is the story of a modern mining company that unexpectedly strikes a mother lode of gold.

But Toronto-based junior mining company Royal Nickel Corp. announced Sunday night that its employees in Australia at the Beta Hunt mine — which the company has been trying to sell since April — removed a golden boulder like few others in the world: Within a single cube of earth that measured roughly three meters wide, three meters long, and three meters deep, they found 9,000 ounces of gold including two large lumps — all told worth around $14 or $15 million at current prices. That’s equivalent to roughly 40 per cent of RNC’s $35 million market capitalization as of last week.

Distroscale

“It was a nickel mine for years and years,” said Mark Selby, chief executive of RNC. “But we bought it because there were a bunch of gold deposits sitting beneath it.”

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Royal Nickel stock surged 83 per cent to $0.16 on the Toronto Stock Exchange on Monday.

To put the latest find into perspective, the Beta Hunt mine normally produces ore that contains around two to four grams of gold per ton, considered a standard amount. But the latest find contained 2,000 grams of gold per tone, according to Selby.

They broke off one 95-kilogram stone that contained an estimated 2,440 ounces of gold, according to the company. He said it was so pure it did not need to be processed and was sent directly to the Perth Mint.

According to the World Gold Council , the “largest ever true gold nugget” weighed slightly more than 2,300 ounces. RNC’s specimen contains some quartz, however, so it may not count as an apple to apple comparison.

Trevor Turnbull, a mining analyst with Scotia Capital, said that while it’s not a pure gold nugget, its sheer size makes it unique and potentially very valuable.

“They’ll probably sell it as a museum piece and they’ll make a fair bit of money,” said Turnbull.

Photo by Royal Nickel Corp.

He said the real question, unanswerable without more information, is whether the gold comes from a vein that will quickly “pinch out or whether it stays wide.”

RNC purchased the Beta Hunt mine in 2016 for a mix of cash and its own shares worth around $12.5 million.

Located in Western Australia, about 600 kilometres from Perth, it had been a nickel mine since the 1970s. RNC has been trying to sell it since April so it can focus on raising $1 billion to build its planned Dumont nickel mine in Quebec.

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Selby, who lives in Toronto, said he heard the news when he woke up in the middle of the night last Monday to use the bathroom.

“I flip my phone on and find out,” he said. “I didn’t go back to bed. You don’t find 2,000-ounce hunks of gold very often, so it’s good to be lucky.”

The Australian news channel ABC reported that the miners were working underground, at around 500 meters below surface, in the Kambalda district.

Henry Dole, the miner credited with finding the gold, said “Never in my life have I seen anything like this. There were chunks of gold in the face, on the ground, truly unique I reckon,” according to the ABC news report.