A wild theory and a bit of gold has sparked a 500% rally in this Canadian gold explorer
Quinton Todd Hennigh has spent 13 years scouring the Earth for clues to back a hunch: that the world's biggest gold resource has lost siblings elsewhere on the planet.
Now, the president of Novo Resources Corp. thinks he may have found a counterpart of South Africa's Witwatersrand in the ancient red rocks near Australia's northwest coast. In July, his company zeroed in on a gold find that's confounded geologists and sparked a 500-per-cent surge in the explorer's share price.
The first test on land south of the coastal town of Karratha looked good. Employing two men, a metal detector and a jack hammer, Vancouver-based Novo extracted gold nuggets as long as 4 centimetres from an exploration "trench" little more than a half-metre deep. That tiny sample hinted at ore grades that could be among the highest of any operating mine in the world.
Mr. Hennigh, who's worked as a geologist for Newmont Mining Corp. and Newcrest Mining Ltd., isn't screaming bonanza yet. "Can I say 100 per cent that this will turn into a mine right now? No, I don't know," he said in a phone interview, acknowledging that hard work remains to determine if watermelon-seed-like specks of gold can be economically mined.
Still, the potential upside is seen by some as huge.