Freegold raising $10 million from upsized offering
Freegold Ventures Ltd. [FVL-TSX] said it is upsizing a previously announced private placement offering which is now expected to raise $10 million. Net proceeds are earmarked for general corporate and working capital purposes. That’s up from an earlier $5 million target.
The amended offering now consists of 25 million units priced at 40 cents per unit, each of which consists of one common share and one half of a common share purchase warrant. Each warrant can be used to acquire one common share for two years from the date of closing at an exercise price of 52 cents per warrant share. The offering is expected to close by March 26, 2024.
Freegold offers investors a window on copper and gold exploration in Alaska, a stable jurisdiction with a long mining history and significant mineral endowment that remains relatively underexplored.
Freegold’s asset portfolio includes the Golden Summit project which contains a bulk tonnage resource which has already been defined, and the Shorty Creek copper-gold porphyry discovery. Both are located in central Alaska not far from Fairbanks, a city with a population of roughly 100,000.
The flagship Golden Summit project consists of 50 patented claims and 94 unpatented federal claims (5,921 hectares) and is located on the north portion of the Fairbanks Mining District, a northeast-trending belt of lode and placer gold deposits that compose one of the largest gold-producing areas in the state of Alaska. The Fairbanks Mining District has produced over 9.5 million ounces of placer gold, of which 6.75 million ounces have been recovered from streams that drain the project.
In addition, over 506,000 ounces of lode gold were recovered from past producing mines on the project.
Freegold recently reported drill results from the Saddle Zone drilling as part of the 2023 exploration program at Golden Summit. The company said the 2023 program has been very successful in demonstrating significant expansion potential with drilling 250 metres west of the main Clearly/Dolphin zone, intersecting multiple zones with over 2.0 g/t of gold over a considerable width (2.12 g/t over 197.3 metres) within a broader interval of 1.76 g/t over 276.5 metres.
The company said the 2024 program will consist of drilling west of the main Dolphin/Cleary, where mineralization has the potential to be both higher grade and closer to the surface, testing an extensive 1.5-kilometre gold-in-soil geochemical anomaly west of the current resource. In the Saddle Zone, the 2024 program will primarily focus on testing the vein zones not explored in 2023.
Shorty Creek lies approximately 125 kilometres northwest of Fairbanks and 4.0 kilometres to the south of the abandoned mining town of Livengood. Freegold acquired the project after completing a data review, which suggested that the project had the potential to host a series of copper-gold-porphyry deposits. Shorty Creek hosts a cluster of magnetic anomalies commonly seen in porphyry districts.
Freegold shares advanced on the news, rising 3.6% or $0.015 to 43 cents. The shares trade in a 52-week range of 71 cents and 33 cents.