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Silicon Metals picks up property with name that cannot be pronouncedBob Moriarty Over the past twenty some years I have run into some interesting companies. One contacted me last week and has become an advertiser. With less than a two-million-dollar market cap they could double their value just by adding a two-line phone. Every junior resource lottery ticket in Vancouver with a two-line phone is worth at least four million CAD. Silicon Metals (SI-C) is a new iteration of a company formed in 2020 to find and advance a gold project in BC. Those efforts failed. The direction and management changed. Morgan Good took over as CEO in early 2024 and looked around for a new opportunity. The company made a decision to move into the silicon or silica or quartz space and picked up a prospective project with an unpronounceable name about six weeks ago. The project called the Ptarmigan Silica property. Ptarmigan is one of those words that immediately identifies the speaker as one who either is familiar with the bird or not at all. Pago Pago, an island in the south Pacific is similar. Anyone who calls it Pago Pago has never been there. It seems a lot of islands in the Pacific have the letter N in the name. The cartographer making the first maps of that area ran out of the letter N. So, anyone who has been on the island calls it Pango Pango correctly but it is still spelled Pago Pago. I’ve run into the word Ptarmigan before at my peril. I proved hesitant to even try pronouncing it lest I make myself look like a fool. So, I waited until someone else used the word. Drop the P and you will be fine. It’s pronounced Tar ma gan. Because silica or silicon as the element is correctly termed is so different than mining other materials, I am going to have to do some education to help you understand the mineral and how it is processed. Unlike most metals, exploration for silica or more commonly known as quartz costs little. The most important issue is a combination of grade and the ability to increase the purity of the end product since the price is so variable. 99.5% - Clear Glass Grade USD $50-150/ Tonne The lowest grade quartz sand of 99.5% purity is commonly used to produce ordinary glass. That quartz is cheap and the shipping cost is more of an issue than price at the mine site. A slight upgrade to 99.8% purity would allow use to produce optical grade glass at twice the price of ordinary quartz. As you move up the grade scale to 99.95 and what is called four nines, 99.99 you soon increase the value of the material substantially. Four nines material is worth six to ten times the price of ordinary silica. In the table above, HPQ stands for High Purity Quartzite. The highest value for silicon is in the use of high end computer chips requiring four to five nines material. Now the value of the silica is ten to twenty times higher than the lowest grade material. My first question about mining and upgrading silica had to do with just how could you upgrade suitable material to four to five nines quality. The answer is both simple and different from what you might think. Like sulfide gold or silver, lead and zinc, you float the material. But with sulfide metals flotation you are forming a concentrate with the metals attaching to the surface of the reagent similar to how bubbles work in a washing machine to attract the dirt. In upgrading silica you are doing exactly the opposite. You are removing the impurities after crushing and grinding the quartz. What remains is the end product, not what is removed. The Ptarmigan silica project located in Central B.C. about 130 km east of Prince George. The original property was a 2,280 ha piece but in a press release released on November 5th the company announced increasing the size of the package by 40% or about an additional 919 ha. Two weeks ago the company announced mobilizing a work crew to the Ptarmigan property for initial channel sampling and mapping. Test results from 2010 of three samples showed values of 98.68, 98.44 and 99.52 percent SiO2. Now Silicon Metals needs to do testing to determine the potential for upgrading the material. Company management is both young and hungry. I spent a good bit of time on the phone with Morgan Good, CEO and his technical guru, Kyler Hardy. They are looking at other potential projects. I like the company a lot because with a $2 million market cap, there isn’t much lower they can go but no limit to how much higher they might see. Exploration and sampling is cheap so they will get a lot of throws of the dice. Based on what I heard, I went and bought some shares in the open market. For Americans the shares are going to be a bit difficult to buy since they do not have an OTC listing just yet so the shares are only available in Canada on the C Exchange. At the close Silicon Metals had a $1.92 million market cap in Canadian dollars. That seems absurdly cheap to me. In my conversations with them it seemed to me that they had a solid handle on what it would take to make the company a hit in the silicon space. They are absurdly cheap and worth buying for just that reason. Silicon Metals is an advertiser. I have bought shares in the open market and I almost certainly would participate in any upcoming private placement. Do your own due diligence since I am obviously biased. Silicon Metals Corp ### Bob Moriarty 321gold Ltd |
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