¶ Intro / Opening
Hello and welcome to Kitco Mining with me, Paul Harris, here at the 2026 Prospectors and Developers Association conference in Toronto. We are talking about gold exploration in Europe and joining me is Chris Taylor, CEO of Aquitaine Metals. Chris, welcome back to Kitco. It's good to see you, Paul. Likewise, Chris, it's been a long while. You've been uh under the radar for quite a while.
Um you need no introduction for most people following this space, but for those who are new to the space, uh why don't you give us a little bit of a potted history about you?
Uh well I I suppose you want to talk about exploration and mining, not uh the dogs that I have or that I live in Alberta part-time, uh, all this stuff. So um well, I'm a black belt as well. Yeah, well, not a black belt, but I do do karate. Um uh so uh I am Chris Taylor.
I was the president and CEO of Great Bear Resources, and so Great Bear was sold to Kin Ross a few years back for almost two billion dollars, I guess, with the royalty company that we sold at the same time, it was a two billion dollar sale.
And that Great Bear was uh obviously a fantastic exploration success. You sold it pre-resource?
Oh yeah. Um and that's always uh part of the balance when you do these sort of uh transactions is figuring out what the optimal time for shareholders is. So you want
¶ Why Aquitaine Metals
to minimize dilution and maximize value at a good point in time.
And one of the things you've been doing since then, uh, as I mentioned, uh CEO of Aquitaine Medals, you became you were appointed a little over a year ago now. Um I imagine you would have had your pick of opportunities after Great Bear. So what attracted you to Aquitaine?
Well, frankly, uh I I was under a bit of pressure if I got uh busy with something again to do something that could be bigger than Great Bear uh in terms of potential resources and um you know just the quality of the deposit or deposits. And this project just stood head and shoulders above everything else I looked at. And I did look at uh I would say probably over a hundred different projects, all of which were pretty good in one way or another. This one simply had the grade and size
¶ Limousin Project History
uh potential uh that I hadn't seen anywhere else.
Okay. Now Aquitaine has the Limousin Gold Project in Nouvelle Aquitaine in France. Uh apologies if I murdered the pronunciation there. Thank you. Very kind of you. Um what is the history of the project and what what are you looking for there?
Uh so uh the historical production here was mostly gold, high-grade gold. Um there was mining 2,500 years ago by the Celtic tribes. Uh so we've identified uh over a thousand different mining sites from these Celts uh on our project. And the project itself, it's a large area we're exploring. It's over 330 square kilometers, and uh that means that uh what we have is over a thousand different targets where we know that there was high grade gold in the near surface.
And uh after that period of time, uh there was Kojima mining that was uh busy in this area, the French company, uh largely in the late 1980s to 2002. So there were mines in production on the property then. Uh they produced about a million ounces at about half an ounce per ton, with a cutoff grade of about uh 12 grams per ton underground and a cutoff grade of about six grams per ton in the open pit.
So you can see uh what attracted me to this area was um if you look at the total uh size of the mineralized system, you can imagine what might be there if the cutoff grades were at current uh economic levels.
Now you're currently private, so I can ask you this question in terms of you know, a thumbsack, what's the potential size of the price here?
Well, I have to be careful because uh we do plan to go public with the gold asset later in this year, uh, but it's certainly
¶ Data and Early Hits
many uh millions of ounces, is what we see here for total potential.
Now, with a thousand sort of targets to you know work through, I imagine being a private company helps because you can focus on the task in hand rather than perhaps often the distraction of marketing promotion that etc. You have to do as a public company.
Absolutely, and like we we have a lot of data. Um, because Arano was um well, it was Kojima, which became Arano, and uh our guys bought a data set off of Arano when they got busy with the project, even before I got involved. The estimated value, the replacement value of that data set's like $400 million. Like it's production records, drilling, uh, face samples, underground samples, everything. Like um, so it's a really extensive data set.
What that means is that when we go in and we drill, uh we just put out results. I guess it was last week, and for instance, um I was mentioning like what was the total mineralized envelope, uh what did it look like? So we drilled 70 meters above some of the historical workings, and we hit uh a meter and a half of about 350 grams within uh 15 meters. And that's gold, not silver. Yeah, that's gold. Uh and uh within an envelope, yeah, good question.
Within an envelope of about uh I think it was 34 grams, 35 grams over about 15 and a half meters. So it shows you what's there,
¶ Phase One Drilling Plan
uh, which was left in the ground. It's uh it's amazing.
Wow. Now, as you mentioned, phase one drilling is underway. How much are you drilling and what what's the goal with this uh initial program?
Well, we're finishing up about 10,000 meters right now, and the goal was to test the historical data. Like, is it accurate? Uh are the gold zones wherever we thought they were, do they extend beyond uh where the historical mining up to 2002 was mining? And the answers to those questions has been yes, and with all the cases. So phase one is gonna finish up over the short term, but we're funded to do basically the same thing again, two drill rigs, another 10,000 meters
¶ Phase Two Priorities
during 2026. We're just not gonna stop. We're gonna keep going.
And with that sort of second phase, that follow-up, what what would be the plan or the aim of that?
Well, what we uh, because there's so many targets available on the project, we need to uh determine which ones are a priority. Like you can't just go randomly drilling all over the place. One of the things that we care a great deal about is consulting with the local population. And so um, we're fortunate because many of the historical uh miners, the guys that were working there uh up until 2002, they actually bought farms right around the mine working.
So these are guys that are great to talk to, and the community largely is quite interested in the economic uh activity to come back. So, what we want to do is continue that consultation process, figure out what the local people's priorities are, and uh figure out the areas that we want to target initially. And there's also on the project, it sounds like a bit of a mouthful, so apologize for this right away.
Uh, but as we're drilling, we find a lot of other interesting accessory minerals that come along with the gold. There's a lot of silver, and there's uh antimony and uh copper-lead zinc. So there's actually a cross-cutting generation of massive sulfide, which is uh high-grade copper-lead zinc, which cuts across the gold system. So it actually makes the project quite amenable to the EU uh critical metals focus, and that's something that we need to focus on in the second phase of drilling as well.
I want to touch on that in in just a moment, but uh before we get to that, Chris, um you obviously had great success drilling at Great Bear and expanding that project, you know, to the extent that you got a good successful bid for the company. Is there anything you can sort of bring from that experience at Great Bear to what you're doing at Limousine? Are there similarities among you know between the deposits and how you're planning to effectively build ounces at the new opportunity?
Well, you know, this is a it's actually a great question, Paul, because um some of the results that we just came out with are very similar to the best stuff that we had at the LP fault discovery at Great Bear. And so what we want to do is the same sort of process is science first, you know, let that lead us down the road of where we should be following up on. Uh collect very good quality data. There's very, very qualified French geologists that we're working with.
Like there's about 40 people working on the project. Almost everybody's a French citizen. And so these are highly educated. We'll keep working with them, we'll keep letting the data drive the discovery process. And like what we need to do is prioritize because it's just a wealth of uh targets. And the best thing to do is start
¶ AI Guided Targeting
where you have the most existing data and work out from those areas.
Now, um, a number of companies I speak to, a number of exploration companies I speak to increasingly are using AI to help with that process. Uh, with the wealth of historical data you have, in addition to the drilling data you're now generating, um, that would seem to be a good opportunity to see what that's absolutely.
Uh I've been working with uh Steve DeJoung's company, Verify. I'm sure you've talked to them before. And yeah, so we actually brought uh Steve's guys and um uh uh JP Paymal, uh the the delete AI developer over to France. We met some government officials together, and they're working on that data set that I mentioned that we uh that we purchased from Arano, and that's like $400 million worth of data. So some of the results that have come out of this have been amazing.
Like we can actually see the um by doing the the AI modeling um with the verify system, we can see that we had um sub-horizontal fluid flow through these big fault structures. There's about 200 kilometers aggregate length of these gold-bearing fault structures, and what what we can see using the verify is where the mineralization migrated along these structures, and it helps us focus along with where the Gallic mining occurred on the areas that we want to target.
It's been a very powerful tool so far.
Okay, for people that aren't technical, Chris, what is sub-horizontal fluid for?
Uh well, everybody uh when you when you typically look at news releases and other things that are generated by explorer exploration companies, uh, usually they say, well, we hit it here, we're just gonna drill down below, we're just gonna drill down below. But these orogenic gold systems like we have at the Limousin project, um, a lot of the mineralization occurs at low angles, maybe a 15-degree plunge within the fault planes that hold the gold.
And so um that's what I mean by that is that you end up following instead of just going vertically, you go like this, down diagonally within the fault structures. And so
¶ Why Mine in France
far that's been bang on. We've been hitting gold everywhere we drill.
Okay, excellent. Now, many of our viewers may be surprised to hear about gold expiration in France. It's not necessarily the first jurisdiction or the second or the third or even the tenth that comes to mind. Yeah, um, so so tell us about that. What is the gold potential or the gold opportunity of France?
Um it's it's it's really beyond just gold. Like uh France, it's amazing. When you look at the data, uh the Massif Central area, uh, the Armoritian uh Massif area, uh, these areas are very well endowed with with high-grade mineral deposits. And because the French scientists are so good, they have decades of exploration data that the BRGM, their geological survey, has collected, and there is mineralization across the gamut of elements that you might be interested in in today's crazy world.
Uh so even a gold project like ours has accessory antimony, for instance, and that's something that's very interesting to the state. But in the country, there's tungsten deposits, antimony deposits, gallium, germanium, uh, there's copper deposits, other polymetallic massive sulfides. Um, it's really nice to have gold available because gold basically pays the bills. So we talk about gold a lot, but even our project has high-grade polymetallic sulfides.
Given that, Chris, why did exploration and mining stop effectively in France?
I think like lower gold prices around 2002. Uh, I had just finished university at that time, and uh I remember gold being in a few hundred bucks an ounce range. And there's some other factors that occurred here. Uh like largely um there was a different priority on the gold mining here. Largely it was uh coal miners that were being brought in instead of having them retire, they were being trained in gold mining and they were being worked until retirement.
So the project was unusual in the sense that it had a declining workforce over time after a certain point, and it was uh it was making money, uh, but it was being run by a state-affiliated organization that
¶ EU Critical Metals Push
was mostly interested in having people work, right?
Okay. Well, let's get to a point you touched upon about the critical minerals narrative in the European Union and of course France as a key member of that. Um obviously being able to or having these massive sulfur minerals in Timony, Sibnite, uh sort of copper, lead, zinc, etc. Um obviously very, very current, very much the zeitgeist. Uh to what extent is that translating into, let's say, public policy support for the development or reinvigoration of the mining sector in France?
But like it's actually very strong. What we see is very strong support from every level of government that we talk to. And uh there is this EU critical metals mandate where they want to produce about 10% of their critical materials in the territory of the EU. And so that's a huge transformation. Right now, I think they're at about 3% is what they're actually pulling out of the ground. So they've got to add 7%. And the target for that, I think it's by 2030.
There's no way they're gonna make that target. But that policy is extending to all these different EU member states, but the French government itself as well recognizes that in the geopolitical landscape that we're dealing with now, the more material that you can generate close to home, near there's a big manufacturing industry in France. Like there's a military manufacturing industry, an aviation manufacturing industry, there's a bunch of other industry.
And if you can find materials that are in the ground and in very close locations for supply to these activities, uh it's ideal, you know, for future security, economic security, and other um national security as well.
To what extent is that? Does that, or will that translate into again public policy that will help you advance and permit the project here in the United States as fast forwarding one, this funding mechanism, etc. Canada's doing similar things, uh similar things happening in France?
There there are, uh in fact, and uh even uh at the French level, uh there's dedicated uh funds in France available for developing projects that are along these lines. And you can also see uh direct French and ball the uh sort of investment involvement with some of the lithium uh that they're uh drilling out now that they want to bring into production. And so there's opportunities as the projects become more advanced.
This is really our job with Aquitan, is uh as the project gets more advanced and it goes to resource and ultimately economic studies, and these become resources that are available to the state, uh, the interest level is very high. And so there is funding available
¶ Funding and Going Public
from the French level and from the EU level for these projects.
Okay. Now you raised seven and a half million US dollars in I think August last year. Um what what's the sort of cash balance of the company? To what extent are you financed? Uh you know, you're doing the phase one drilling now, you said you're financed for phase two. Uh how do things stand on terms of the balance sheet?
Well, when I talked to our CFO about a month ago, we had uh in Canadian dollar terms about $15 million in the bank, which would see us through with two drill rigs drilling all the way in through 2026. Um but we do plan to bring uh the gold asset into the public sphere later this year, and obviously there is an opportunity at that time to consider other investments.
I really would like uh to increase uh the scale of the project because what we're seeing is a lot of good uh science, got it a lot of good local collaboration, and we're building much better relationships with the local population over time. And so I think uh what we could do is um expand the project uh at that time and raise a bit more money.
Okay, so plans to go public. Um will that be in the Canadian market? Would that be in the US market?
Uh probably in the Canadian market to begin with. I would also like to see a European listing. Uh that would be ideal because I'd like to increase the European shareholder base in the company over time as it becomes more advanced. And so, but for starting things out, I think uh a Toronto listing is probably the best way to go.
And any indication of what time of year you'll be doing this, or is that still up for discussion?
I'd say uh I don't want to put my foot in my mouth or have to retract anything, but uh let's talk about the fall in general terms.
Okay, well, I wish you the best of luck with that. Chris Taylor, thank you very much for joining me today. It's great to talk again, thank you. Likewise, Chris, and this is Paul Harris for Kitco Mining at the 2026 Prospectors and Developers Association meeting. And if you like what you see, don't forget to hit that subscribe button