It’s full speed ahead for Regency Silver Corp.’s next drilling program. The company recently announced the closing of its oversubscribed $4 million brokered private placement paving the way to commence drilling at its major gold/silver/copper find at the Dios Padre project in Sonora, Mexico.
Bruce Bragagnolo - CEO director and founder of Regency Silver Corporation - has led several other corporations through the exploration, IPO and production process. He recently discussed the company’s impressive results and plans with Business Edge News Magazine senior editor, Ernest Granson.
1. It’s been an exciting several years for you and for Regency silver. The company continues to advance after two years of successful drilling operations at its Dios Padre flagship property in Sonora, Mexico, and this past spring, you were appointed as CEO for Regency Silver. It must be quite gratifying to oversee leadership of the company as it progresses into this next stage.
BB: You know, it's a project that I've always been very interested in - since 2017, when we first founded the company. It had a lot of potential back then because it was high grade silver in a breccia body, which is kind of unusual. It was very high grade; they were mining 750 grams of silver historically. And there were big stopes, these large, 60-foot-high chambers where they had been mining. So, it seemed very intriguing and it had been under option to some very important silver companies, like Silver Standard and First Majestic. But they had drilled the deposit like it was a vertical plug, rather than something that angled off. It was the advancements in modern software that helped us determine there was a source of the mineralization towards the north. We drilled our first hole back in 2022 and hit on that very first hole. The results, I would say, are spectacular. They are amazing results from our first series of drilling so we’re pleased to be back drilling again. Centurion One Capital led our financing and managed to raise $4 million for us so we can get back drilling and we're very excited that.
2. Let's talk a bit more about the latest results and the current program. As you were just mentioning, based on the previous results, gold resources will be the main target which makes sense, considering the steady upswing in the price of gold right now and its strong outlook.
BB I think precious metals in general, like gold and silver, are looking very good right now. Silver is moving up. The general rule is that the price of the commodity has to be double what it costs to produce it. Gold is well beyond that now, and silver is also well beyond it, given the last few months.
It's very gratifying to see the prices move to a point where people are really taking interest. What has happened with Dios Padre is the historic silver mine is just the surface manifestation of the mineralization. We're going to have different gradients, so it's silver at the top of the system with gold interspersed with it. Then we have other levels - think of this as a series of levels, like floors on an elevator. On the top floor, we've got the silver with a bit of gold.
We should be able to find a silver gold transition zone, which is about 50-50, and we've been drilling into the gold rich zone with some silver. So, we have a lot of drilling to do. We have to drill up dip and we have to drill down dip. We’re drilling along strike with this next program. We have a very good idea where the gold level is so we'll be following that, and we can tell visually when we're hitting the system. It's a big system. It's 100 meters wide in some spots, but the real zone is about 50 meters. That's a significant gold zone,
3. What seems to be so striking about this breccia zone is the size. Could you elaborate a little bit more on that?
BB I haven't seen something with that width and grade in Mexico. If you look at gram meters, which is simply the grade times the width of the mineralized zone, we've got 296 gram meters at Dios Padre. I looked at the highest grade intercepts for, I think it was for all of North America, and there were only two higher than that in the last month. So, this a very high-grade wide zone. It's not something you're going to be drilling, and maybe drill out of it. This is a big wide zone with a lot of gold in it, and copper and silver too.
4. This discovery, is not necessarily a surprise is it considering the history of that area in Sonora? As the old cliche goes, “the best place to find a new mine is near an old mine.” So can give us a brief history of mining in this area and Regency Silver's play in particular.
BB I will tell you what was the surprise to us. We knew we had a copper target because we had an IP anomaly, which is induced polarization. You send a charge, an electric current, into the ground, and check to see how conductive or how resistive the rock is. That gives you an idea of the chargeability. If it's copper, it's going to go faster. So, we had this IP anomaly that looked a bit different by the silver mine. You don't usually find IP anomalies beside a silver mine, because it indicates there's sulfites present. It indicates pyrite, basically.
We drilled the hole right down through the IP anomaly, which looks like it's the halo on top of a big system. It's the gaseous phase of a porphyry. And then we hit the gold zone right where we thought we would hit it, about 410 meters. Even though we hit it, we couldn't tell how much gold was there. It wasn't dripping like Cadillac’s (Cadillac Mining Corp.), but it's very high grade, and we've had backup drilling to substantiate that.
It wasn't that obvious to the previous option holders. We own it 100% now, but it wasn't obvious to them. It's a bit different than the other mines in the area and there are some big mines in the area. There is Pinos Altos, there is La India, there is Mulatos, there's Dolores, all owned by bigger companies. It's a very prolific district. It's going to get more expiration spent on it over the next few years, I believe, because it is right in that Laramide Porphyry belt that extends from all the way up in the States, all the way through Culiacan. It's under explored.
5. What are you looking to prove here in this next set of drill holes you're going to make?
BB The target here is just to extend the zone along strike. When your last hole, which was hole 2321, intercepts 38 meters of 7.3 grams of gold, you're just going to keep following that. We're going to follow that along strike and eventually the model is going to tell us to go up dip towards the silver mine. We need to get an indication of where to do that. And that would be a big event for the company, because it would indicate we've got another level going up towards the silver mine. Right now, we've got two levels. We've got the silver mine and we've got the gold zone, and then we need to find something in between. I'm positive it's there in my view. We just have to find out where it is.
6. What is the time frame for this next drilling program or any future ones?
BB It's immediate. The drill is going to be on site next week September 25, 2025). We announced the drill program last week, and we'll be drilling immediately. By the end of the week, we should have a drill turning.
7. Regency Silver has also entered into option agreements over the past several years for other projects in Mexico. What can you tell us about those?
BB Well, I really like that district around San Dimas. There are issues down there with some titles which we're solving or trying to resolve. At some point we'll be getting back into that area. We really don't have the ability to work on too many projects right now, but that's an area that I really like, and I think it willl be a very prolific district for silver in Mexico and in the coming decade.
8. You mentioned that in order to properly evaluate the characteristics of the Dios Padre property you used Leapfrog geological modeling software. How does that technology compare to earlier types of technology when it comes to substantiating the property data?
BB Well, I've said this before. It's like writing in crayon versus a 4k television. It just gives you so much more information. The old software used to be a series of discs, kind of pointing in a general direction. With Leapfrog, when you input the information you get a 6 X 5 resource block. I always try to run a grade shell because that's where the value is. You just follow the grade. And in this instance, we just followed the grade shell, 45 degrees down dip. And there it was.
9. Regency Silver has clearly developed a specific mission as an exploration company - as pointed out on your website, and the strategy is to qualify those properties as potential takeover candidates. Can you take us through the reasoning behind this strategy?
BB I looked at the general market a few years back. The existing mines were doing okay, but they had to struggle for a number of years just to keep up with the cost of production. They're doing very well now, but that's only been the last year and a half, two years. Producers are well underway. They're getting a good multiple now, and they're making a lot of money.
The developers really don't have the share capital yet. You can see it coming into the market, but they don't have the market cap to allow them to raise the equity required to build a mine. I've lived through this at Timmons Gold, my old company. We received no bump at all in our share price. We got no love from the market for the two years that it took us to build the mine. We had a $1 share price when we started building the mine, and despite the fact that we had raised money, that we were developing, that we were building, that things were progressing at the mine, we got no lift until we turned the crushers on at the mine. Then all of a sudden, we started to move up.
That Lassonde Curve (which illustrates the different stages of a mineral property’s life cycle) is absolutely accurate when it comes to where your share price goes. We want to take advantage of that first curve in the value setup. I found in the last cycle that the company developers that sold their projects did very well, and companies that kind of rode through the cycle and hit the down part of the cycle didn't do as well. Certainly, when people want to buy, we're there to sell. We've been extremely fortunate at Dios Padre. Luck has something to do with all this. Apart from having the experience and what we're looking at, luck is a very important factor in all this.
10. You have a successful track record in guiding two exploration companies into production companies. Based on the significant findings in the Dios Padre property, could you see yourself recommending the same route for Regency, and could you see committing yourself to that kind of journey again?
BB Well, we could do it. I just think that the financing, the market requirements, the time it takes is something that you don't take on lightly, but we could certainly do it, especially if the equity value was there in the company. But our preference would be to drill it and sell it, create value for our shareholders as quickly as possible, and then go do something else. There's lots of opportunities out there.
11. Considering the journey through which you led both Timmons Gold and Silver Mex, would you say that IPOs are the most advantageous goals to aim for when it comes to mining companies, whether it's exploration or production?
BB I prefer the IPO route, because you know where every single share is. You just get more certainty with an IPO. It also takes just as long to go through an RTO or an IPO. It's the same base disclosure documents. So, I prefer the IPO route. Some people prefer RTOs, but I'm a big fan of the IPO route. And I gotta say, it's become quite time consuming because of all the rules and regulations to do either one of them. I think we're actually quite restricted in our activities by the policies of the exchange and what we can do.
12. You have had an enormous amount of experience in the world of Mexican business. How would you rate that country's business environment, especially in your sector?
BB Well, it's improving. That's about all I can really say. It kind of hit rock bottom under the previous president, who wasn't a big fan of mining in general, but now it seems to be on the upswing. The new free trade agreement is being negotiated. I know that mining is a big topic of discussion and there have been the right noises made out of the Mexican government. For example, there was some discussion initially about banning pit mining in Mexico. That's no longer on the table. That's been eliminated from any discussion, so that's a very positive point.
Practically speaking, the copper industry of Mexico would come to a screeching halt if they ever decided to ban open pit mining, because the two biggest mines in the country are both copper mines - Cananea and La Caridad. It's a huge industry. If they want to grow the country, they have to allow open pit mining. But it looks like things are improving. I'd like to see some more action rather than talk. We'll see what happens on that front. The problem around the world these days is that mining is becoming more difficult. There's seems to be a reaction against it, but that's where all the metal comes from to build our infrastructure.
13. A few weeks ago, Regency silver closed a $4-million financing led by Centurion One Capital. You must be very pleased to see this substantial amount of confidence from your shareholder base.
BB Well, it was amazing. Centurion One did a marvelous job for us. They got us the capital we needed to get the drills turning again. Without drilling in news these days, you just don't get the attention of the market. They did it quickly, they did it efficiently, and they brought in a really good shareholder base. The people they brought in have been excellent.
14. You have spent several decades practicing securities law prior to moving into leadership roles in the mining sector. How did that prepare you for this kind of responsibility? And was that a goal that you had in mind during that legal stage in your career?
BB It wasn't really a goal that I had in mind when I was practicing law, but I did think that with the right amount of contacts in a country, and if I really rolled up my sleeves and got down to it, I could do a decent job of it. I got a little bored practicing law, so it was a welcome challenge to me. As it turns out, I've been told that I've got a pretty good eye for properties, so it's worked out pretty well.
15. Before we call it a wrap, is there anything you would like to add?
BB There is one thing that I might not have made absolutely clear here and that is I really feel that Dios Padre is going to be a big mine someday - the width, the grade, the multiple phases of mineralization. This is what makes a mine, and this, to me, is the best opportunity that I've seen in the country.
Regency Silver Corp. is listed on the TSXV- RSMX and OTCQB-RSMXF.
All photos: Regency Silver
