This article is a sponsored feature from Mining.com.au partner Element79 Gold Corp. It is not financial advice. Talk to a registered financial expert before making investment decisions.
Canadian explorer Element79 Gold (CSE:ELEM) is not resting on its laurels, but instead gearing up to hit the ground running in Nevada, as well as eyeing other opportunities in the US’ leading gold-producing state.
Although the company recently announced force majeure to suspend payment obligations under the Lucero Project agreement with Condor Resources (TSX-V:CN) as it methodically works toward forging surface rights contracts with the local community in order to access Lucero in Arequipa, Peru, Element79 is still committed to advancing the past-producing mine, but at the same time has identified existing and new opportunities to keep moving forward.
In June, Element79 struck a deal with a private party to acquire the Gold Mountain Project in Nevada, and the acquisition closed last Friday (1 August 2025).
CEO James Tworek says the acquisition drives the company’s corporate shift in focus back to a Nevada-focused strategy, where the firm has had significant past successes.
The 284-hectare Gold Mountain Project is drill-ready, with permits in hand today, which means Element79 can prepare to start drilling sooner rather than later.
It also consolidates the company’s position within a well-known and highly prospective region, with meaningful upside potential, according to Tworek.
Element79 is also busy mapping out the 2025 program for its existing Nevada-based project – Elephant.
Tworek tells Mining.com.au Elephant was discovered and explored back in the early 2000s but had been sitting on the shelf in a portfolio held by Waterton Global Resource Management.
Element79 acquired it in 2021 and more recently was considering potential deals to monetise the asset.
“While we had been trying to do a deal and find counterparties to purchase it from us, now that we have chosen to refocus our corporate efforts and energies on a Nevada exploration strategy, the whole point here is that we already have a great project in our portfolio,” Tworek explains.
“It’s been de-risked through past and geochemistry and drilling, and has been holds some precious metals, including copper.
“So it’s a great opportunity for us to get a running start on a project with historical information, amass that information and form a development program on this one project that we do have.”
Element79 is laying out its 2025 work program that will include everything from magnetic resonance imaging, identifying drill targets and possibly some trenching.
The Elephant project comprises 196 claims spanning 3,758 acres. It is located just a few kilometres from historically significant mines like Fortitude and Copper Canyon.
Expanding presence in gold hotspot
Both the Elephant and Gold Mountain projects are located in the Battle Mountain area, which is part of the major gold producing northwest-southeast trending Battle Mountain-Eureka belt.
Nevada frequently ranks in the top five mining jurisdictions for investment attractiveness in the Fraser Institute’s Annual Survey of Mining Companies, last year coming in second just behind Utah.
The state provides over 70% of US gold production, ranking it fifth on the world stage producing over 6 million ounces each year.
Nevada hosts several large deposits with historical production of around 225 million ounces of gold. The industry accounts for over 3% of the state’s gross domestic product.
“The Battle Mountain trend is a significant producer of gold, silver and copper for a number of companies, global scale and smaller,” Tworek notes.
Newmont (NYSE:NEM), Barrick Mining (TSX:ABX) and Kinross Gold (NYSE:KGC) all have operations in the Battle Mountain district.
BHP (ASX:BHP) previously did some drilling on the Elephant Project, indicating the major potentially identified something worth chasing.
Meanwhile, Element79 is still working with the Chachas community to secure long-term surface rights access to the Lucero Gold and Silver Project in Peru.
The company has not been able to access the project for two years and Tworek tells Mining.com.au it will probably be another year before there is any “real tangible change” that allows Element79 to move forward at Lucero.
Element79 still believes in the exploration and production potential of the project, and has received support from the broader Chachas community and its leaders.
Formerly operated as the Shila mine from 1989 to 2005, Lucero spans 10,805 hectares in the Chila mountain range of Southern Peru.
The area contains several historic high-gradegold-silver mines that were operated from the late 1980s to 2005 with small-scale artisanal mining ongoing since 2005.
Between 1998 and 2005, Lucero reported annual production averaging about 20,000 ounces of gold and 435,000 ounces of silver at grades of 14.7 grams per tonne gold and 450g/t silver.
Recoveries from the ore processing facility during this time averaged 94.5% for gold and 85.5% for silver.
Community relations key in Peru
In a community of about 3,000 to 4,000 people, nearly 1,000 are artisanal miners.
“A healthy portion of the able-bodied adults in the community that wants to work in the mines, they are, and therefore they hold a lot of power and a lot of clout,” Tworek explains.
Artisanal miners are very active in Peru and the Peruvian government recently transferred the oversight of small-scale and artisanal mining from regional governments to the federal Ministry of Energy and Mines.
As part of this, the government is requiring small-scale and artisanal miners to have in place formalised agreements with the actual mineral right holders to increase transparency of what is being mined.
Tworek points to the substantial artisanal miner activity on Element79’s ground as a good indicator of the prospectivity of Lucero.
“When we were able to go up to the site in October 2023 we saw that there were 15 trucks on site,” he says.
“We have had reports from our community group that in 2024 there were upwards of 80 trucks on site in terms of total vehicle activity, which represents approximately a 5x increase in activity.
“Obviously with the increase in the price of gold and silver that has excited activity on site. This was a past-producing mine. It produced from 1989 to 2005 commercially at an average rate of 150 tonnes a day.
“It was then closed just because at the time, mid-2000s, gold was around C$600, if I’m not mistaken, and it cost the past operator upwards of C$1,000 an ounce to produce. So the bottom line is it was just uneconomical at that time for them to continue operating.”
There are 74 epithermal veins proven at the surface that have been identified in a NI 43-101 report, and only seven have ever been opened and worked. Less than 10% of these vein systems have been touched.
There are also over 16km of underground veins, of which roughly 9km has been mapped.
Assays and channel samples from underground workings in 2023 yielded up to 374.4g/t gold and 7,904g/t silver.
“So when you talk about the opportunity, to put this in context, this is 10,813 hectares of land. That’s something like 6,000 football fields and it’s contiguous,” Tworek says.
“You might have had to go for your multi-ounce-per-tonne gold in the 90s and the 2000s to make things work based on the resource value, but today you can get away with 8 to 10 grams per tonne quite comfortably.”
There are also 1.3 million tonnes of tailings left onsite from past production, with lab tests completed in 2011-12 showing average recoverable grades of 1.5g/t. One of the prior waste rock samples taken from the project measured as much as 10g/t.
To help with strengthening community relations over the past couple of years, Element79 has engaged in extensive outreach work including education programs focusing on topics such as environmental, economic and entrepreneurial.
“As we’re seeing through three years of community relationship building and ongoing monthly campaigns, these processes can be slow moving, and therefore it’s prudent to have other projects to work on simultaneously, hence the balance with Nevada projects and the immediate term corporate refocus there,” Tworek concludes.
Write to Angela East at Mining.com.au
Images: Mining.com.au & Element79 Gold
