Hill End Gold Limited (HEG) vs VertexNot sure if a thread like this has already been posted but I thought it would be useful to make obvious all the information available on the historical announcements of Hill End Gold who spent a massive amount of money over more than a decade from roughly 2002-2015 to get the project to where it is today. As VTX is a relatively new company IPO'd in early 2022 it doesn't have a great deal of announcements to go on so I found it fascinating looking over HEG's announcements to see the amount of work that went into shoring up the Hill End project we have today.
ASX link to historical announcements:
https://www.asx.com.au/asx/v2/statistics/announcements.do?by=asxCode&asxCode=&timeframe=Y&year=2004For those who aren't aware Hill End Gold Limited used to own 85% of the Hill End project and explored and drilled out the Reward, Red Hill and Hargrave deposits and also installed most of the infrastructure at the Reward deposit. They ended up pivoting into High Purity Aluminum when the gold market was at a low and ran out of equity options to progress the project forward in a major way. The Hill End Project was then packaged up, consolidated and spun out into the Vertex Minerals we have today.
A few comparisons:
HEG
- Drilled out the Reward 225,200 Oz @ 16g/t
- Drilled out Red Hill 80,000Oz @ 1.7g/t
- Drilled out Hargraves 178,000 Oz @ 2.4g/t
- Installed adits, access drives, and reward shaft.
- Had a market cap of over $100mill in 2008
- Only 85% project ownership
- Completed PFS on Hargraves, ore sorting studies and multiple studies at Reward.
- Completed extensive trial mining, met work and surface sampling of vein lodes.
- Spent north of $60million on the Hill End Project mostly in 2008,09 & 10.
VTX
- Inherits the above
- Now has 100% of project ownership and no royalties other than state.
- Has consolidated Hargraves EL
- Has produced a Fosters exploration target
- Further drilled Red Hill
- Further drilled Hargraves
- Has extended mining licenses for over 20 years
- Has completed a detailed PFS
- Has purchased a 120,000t pa right-sized plant.
- Completed Lidar studies.
- Has sorted out finance by signing a binding term sheet for US$10mill
- Is currently updating PFS and doing further optimization studies in the background while Gekko plant is being refurbished.
- Is looking to be producing gold within the next 6 months.
Also of note what could be added to the above is Declan Franzmann our NED was the engineer for HEG back in the day so we haven't lost the experience and knowledge from key HEG management that they would have gained while trial mining and exploring the ore body, which is very valuable imo.
Im no expert on HEG as I'm just doing some light research as I find VTX a very compelling investment considering its low market cap, high grade nature and the amount of good standing infrastructure in place for a quick start up so would love to hear if people have anything to add on the above.
Cheers
(20min delay)