Velocity Minerals

Kenneth Holmes, co-President and CEO of Velocity Minerals, a molybdenum mining company based in British Colombia, Canada, first came across mining companies whilst working in public companies and corporate finance.

“I’ve been involved both in management and in acting for public companies and one of the fellows I knew was the President of Velocity Minerals, Jerry Diakow ( Gerald Diakow, President, Director and CEO). He had been looking for some advanced-stage properties for quite a while,” Holmes says.

“He knew the property vendors we eventually made a deal with. They had this molybdenum deposit in northern British Columbia and we took a look and liked what we saw. Then it was just a matter of putting the right vehicle and financing package with it and getting listed in Toronto.”

This property was the Mount Haskin molybdenum project at Cassiar, B.C.

Mount Haskin
“Mount Haskin was the property that got our attention first because it had a historic deposit on it of about 13 million tonnes. It was originally partially drilled back in the late 60’s to early 70’s. It caught our attention because it was done by a private company, and the fellows in that company were very experienced miners,” Holmes says.

“As a result, we were confident that we could rely on their data. As a private company they wouldn’t be putting anything in their reports for promotional purposes, for example. Molybdenum had gone through a nice run and was selling north of $30 dollars a pound, and that really assisted in the economics of the deposit.”

Holmes explains that their first step at Mount Haskin was to “go back on to the property and do past confirmation drilling, which is what we did last year.”

In doing so, they made a very exciting discovery.

The Cassiar Moly project
“In the course of looking at Mount Haskin and digging up the past reports, we found the previous company also had the Cassiar Moly property. Basically these two properties straddle the little town of Cassia in Northern British Colombia,” Holmes says.

“We looked at the reports on that and found this extraordinary high-grade deposit, so last year when moly was at $30 dollars per pound, some of these grades would be the equivalent of almost $2,000 a tonne rock, that’s almost two ounce gold. When we noticed that we took a harder look and although there hadn’t been any deposit developed on it, the geological reports that we saw which had been done by very experienced people back in the 70’s we thought were reliable. Also since we’ve been there we have been able to show those high-grade occurrences that they had reported and, in fact, we are in the process of beginning to drill that property.”

Mount Haskin and the Cassiar Moly project are startlingly close to each other.

“They are like one single project because they are only 20 kilometres apart, but they are significantly different in their stages of development and basic geologies,” Holmes says.

“The two properties are close enough that if we can develop deposits on each on and we can probably process them both through one facility.“

The Next Step
Holmes explains that the drill programme Velocity Minerals did on Mount Haskin last year confirms the historic data they already had.

“We didn’t drill quite as much as we would have liked because the season ran short for us and we didn’t want to go and spend the extra money that comes with drilling there in the winter. We pulled up a bit but we still proved 11 million of the 13 million tonnes of previously reported resource. The great part is that we understand the geology there better than we used to, and there are potential extensions of this deposit in three different directions which we will probably drill next year,” he explains.

“Our focus this year has been on Cassiar Moly and we’ve also had some people on the ground doing some geo-camp sampling that is going to help us identify some drill targets for next year.”

Velocity minerals retain a keen interest in Mount Haskin, too.

“The thing that we like about Mount Haskin is that our 11 million tonnes are at almost 0.1 per cent and it is near surface. It’s amenable to an open pit if we can develop a sufficient tonnage there to justify a mine. We’d be able to start mining good rock within just a few metres of the surface,” Holmes says.

“Looking short term, we want to get the current work program done with Cassiar Moly because we’re hoping to find a whole lot more of the high grade. We’re hoping to be able to define continuity between the grades and start seeing some tonnage. Then looking long-term, we want to move both of our projects forward and we want to find some additional moly properties that fit our criteria for the portfolio.”

Holmes also mentions that in the medium term Velocity Minerals are likely to do more financing to facilitate this later goal.

“We’re really intent on trying to build a molybdenum company and we believe that there’s a market for that. We believe that there’s an opportunity here to become a mid-tier molybdenum asset acquirer and developer, then possibly even a producer if the right circumstances present themselves,” Holmes says.
And on that note, we couldn’t agree more.

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