A Gold Story In The Most Famous Town You Have Never Heard Of

I just travelled halfway around the world (literally) to Kazakhstan to meet with the team of Arras Minerals, ARK-TSXv. Junior golds had an AMAZING run from 3 years ago to 1 year ago, and now time and drill results is sifting the wheat from the chaff.

This story is as much a fun travelogue as it is geological sleuthing, but if you want to learn about a country few of us truly know anything about, read on.

I own Arras because after four years and $15 million worth of drilling—which included some pretty good drill holes—they hit a BEAUTY earlier this year—935 meters of 0.71% CuEq, from surface—and it ended in (still very good) mineralization.

By value, the hole is actually 2/3rd gold weighted. That is truly a stunning hole, and bodes very well for shareholders.

But I’ll explain more below, as not all is as it appears on surface.

Now, all their properties are in the far northeast section of Kazakhstan, on the very large and very flat steppe, close to the Russian border.

When I found out how easy it was to get there—two connecting Turkish Air flights from Vancouver to Istanbul to Astana, the Kazakh capital—I signed up for the property tour. All their properties surround the 100,000 person town of EKIBASTUZ, and that’s where their field office is located.

Anybody would look at a map and say that EKIBASTUZ is truly in the middle of nowhere, just south of Siberia, and nothing stops the wind for 1000 km–more remote than Timbuktu.

But that’s not true. In fact, Ekibastuz is the most famous town I had never heard of.

1) The Ekibastuz Gulag is where famous Russian author Alex Solzhenitsyn was in forced labour from 1950-53, and was the inspiration for his Nobel Prize in Literature for his book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. I read this book so many years ago (because it was short). Now the Gulag is gone, the town’s soccer stadium stands on its site.

2) Forced labor like Solzhenitsyn helped build the Bogatyr mine, which became the largest open coal mine in the world for a time. It still produces and has another few decades of life.

3) The 1150 kilovolt line from the mine was the largest AC power line in the world. It still runs. This one mine, in the middle of nowhere far NE Kazakhstan, now produces 40% of the country’s electricity—for one of the lowest prices, only 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour.

4) Bitcoin miners came to Ekibastuz from about 2017, boomed in 2021, and crashed in early 2022. At the peak, Kazakhstan ran close to a fifth of the entire world’s bitcoin mining.

5) Now that they’ve left, Kazakhstan has signed up NVIDIA and a US partner, Firebird, to build an AI data centre campus at Ekibastuz worth up to $10 billion. The first 125-megawatt building is due to switch on in mid-2027. NVDA CEO Jensen Huang makes his first trip to Kazakhstan on October 23, 2026—in just a few days.

This is the Bogatyr coal mine–with decades of life left.

I liken Ekibastuz to Saskatoon, which sits just below the Canadian Shield at the edge of the Canadian prairie. Ekibastuz is just south of Siberia at the edge of the Central Asian steppe—and they have very similar latitudes.

The difference is the Canadian prairie gets a lot more moisture than Kazakhstan, and the soil is much more productive for both crops and animals. The steppe here is flat, but bleak with few trees, and the grass doesn’t support much livestock. The farms you see every few kilometers are not prosperous looking at all. Herds of horses and cows are small.

It was weird to me looking for big copper/gold porphyries in a flat-as-far-as-you-can-see mid-continent; most (all?) the big mines are up and down the mountain ranges of the western Americas and Indonesian islands. Now the rocks in those coastal areas are only 1/3rd as old as the rocks here; this area WAS coastal some 350-450 million years ago.

Geologically, as you would expect, there isn’t much outcrop. Almost everything is under flat cover, though overburden tends to run just a few meters. The good news is that exploration is easy, fast and cheap. And the surface does give up some important data very quickly, just not to anybody without a trained eye.

But flying magnetics quickly points out some high priority places to send in the ground troops. And when Tim Barry and Darren Klinck set local geologists out to collect the 32,000 soil samples over the 10+ km Elemes trend, some great data came back with gold and copper and moly grades that warranted even further exploration.

Drilling started at the end of 2024 and continued each 9 month field season. They have hit some good holes in the last few years (from surface!!), but the gold market wasn’t great, and the stock really didn’t get rewarded.

These holes however, were good enough that they raised CAD$15 million non-brokered (with NO warrants!!), within their own network, before this big $25 M raise from the big glory hole in the spring of 2026, which got me into the play.

This was such a fun trip and I’ll go into some detail here but the main takeaway for those who want to read and run—there are some big faults in the fairway here that they don’t understand yet.

This first glory hole, t 935 m of 0.71 CuEq went from surface and ended in mineralization. But nearby there are faults that they think may only be offset a few hundred meters—but in which directions laterally or vertically, they’re unsure of yet.

For the Street, that puts up a barrier to valuing the stock for multi-billion ton potential for now. I didn’t understand that well enough before the trip, because honestly I thought the stock would do better than it has after such a good hole. That’s the price you pay for being a well intentioned but amateur junior mining investor.

I think the next time I buy stock is when they come out with a good hole that also gives them a much better orientation on the block faulting that is happening. They are drilling holes in Elemes North in many different directions, close to the EL26032 clanger from the spring to get a better handle on that. They can clearly see the fault in the core.

Now, will that hole be one of the many that are in at the lab now and will get reported before Christmas, or will investors have to wait until the 2027 program starting in late March ? I don’t know (Drilling shuts down for just over 100 days from Xmas – March due to cold weather and holidays.)

I want to stress the geological leverage that’s here though—porphyries appear in clusters in all the major belts in the world. The chance of there only being one here, in the 3300 km2 land package, are very low. History strongly suggests there will be MANY found here. There is one Kazakh owned producer, Bozshakol, already.

And the magnetics, soil sampling, high grade breccia tops (as was found in Arras’ big hole this spring) and relatively high grade gold (up 5-10 g/t Au) epithermal gold found consistently in the porphyry trends—are saying very loudly an economic deposit has a REALLY good shot at being found here. It’s not like hole 26-32 came out of nowhere.

Barry and Klinck think they’re sitting on at least three porphyry centers in the 10 km long Bereski trend alone.

A visit to the actual drill sites confirms that drilling is really good—but at just over 40 m per day it’s quite slow by western standards, and drill results are even slower (up to 120 days—assays get sent to Ireland and sometimes even farther). That’s not their fault; that’s the global backlog with all these juniors raising so much money since gold went from $2000-$5000 and copper went to $6.50.

They are doing a few things—three in fact—to speed up exploration. One is using the new XRF guns to test small bits of ground up core each meter. This gives reasonably accurate copper readings on the core as it comes out of the ground. These are becoming very popular in junior mining.

Second is a gold analysis technique called Portable PPB, to again provide a semi-accurate real time analysis for gold. It can give a rough idea on gold within 24 hours, only adding about $5 a sample, but allows the team to be more selective about what it sends to the lab.

Third is KGK drilling, which is a local name that is also known as top-of-bedrock sampling. A small drill quickly goes through the overburden to bedrock and only drills 1-2 meters at most but gives real core, not chips, and can help place where the big drills go.

And as I said, what was once the largest open pit coal mine in the world literally edges up against the town of Ekibastuz where the Arras office is, and is roughly 15km from where the Elemes trend is. That coal mine—Bogatyr—has decades of life left and right now provides 40% of the entire country’s electricity.

There is still $20M + in the till at Arras, and costs are cheap here. The cheap and abundant power from that coal mine really reduces the economic threshold for a mine, so Arras doesn’t need a hole like 26-32 to make it work–but that grade would be fabulously profitable at US$6.50/lb copper and 2.5 cents per kWh electricity.

That’s the geology part of the story. But here’s what a lot of Western investors won’t appreciate until they do some digging:

Kazakhstan is a gem of a jurisdiction. The Kazakhs are the indigenous people here since Genghis Khan. Government is basically a benign dictator who wants western business in as much as possible to counter Russia and China.

The capital city of Astana (which means—“the capital”) is only 250 km away, most of it on 4 lane highway. Astana is a WEIRD city of 1.7 million, one of the fastest growing cities in the world.

But the downtown and the public buildings have some of the most futuristic architecture I’ve ever seen—it really reminds me of Dubail that way. But the 95% of the city housing is massive apartment blocks—and they don’t look much different than the old Soviet style ones. They’re much more colourful, and the buildings near the core have some fancier trim, but it’s mostly mile after mile of rectangular 20-30 story buildings.

The heating is turned on by the government on October 1, and then the switch to air conditioning in the spring is also done by the government. So wear your wool socks if it’s cold around the edges of the season.

It’s clear tens of billions of dollars are still pouring into Astana every year—there were easily 100 cranes visible around the city.

They were able to stake this huge land package—with one block edging right up against the producing mine, Bozshakol, a mine owned by Kaz Minerals that produces 120,000 tonnes of copper and 100,000oz of gold per year. Issuance of these licence were completed in less than 3 months.

This part of the country is very sparsely populated, and like I said, that makes exploration quick and easy. Arras has 4 rigs going, at roughly $100/meter cost. That’s how much it cost 20 years ago in South America!
Founder Tim Barry saw this potential, calling this the most underexplored porphyry belt in the world.

They were able to get Teck to joint venture a chunk of it, near Bozshakol, who paid for a few holes and found great results—not barnburner numbers, but the core showed there was a well mineralized system.

Definitely a discovery—actually three discoveries.

But between the Teck merger, their focus on copper and high gold values, they still walked. Management is pretty confident they will find other JV partners for that land. Discoveries on the first pass of drilling!

But sticking with the geology, Arras’s Berezski trend (Bereszki=Elemes) now has The Big Hole to draw attention to what’s there—good. But the faulting needs to be better understood. All the indicators ARE there to suggest this is a big and high grade system., like the epithermal gold up top, the type of alteration and geology they’re seeing that, again, almost scream something big is right here.

Recently announced drilling hit 22.80m at 5.37g/t Au and 2m at 12.65g/t Au. CHA CHA CHA!

I suspect the stock stays stuck in this range until the faulting is figured out AND another amazing hole gets released.

But I do think the best is still ahead for Arras.

This coal mine right beside the town brings power and people to Arras as they need it. No power line that’s dozens of km long over mountains and thru valleys.

Conclusion—for now, I wait. It’s clear that Barry and Klinck are great stewards of capital. Kazakhstan is a cheap and fast place to operate in, and This money will go a long way. They’re doing the drilling methodically. The geologic model here is powerful but the faulting direction needs to be resolved. As that happens and the targets become obvious, the stock should respond.

Source: https://oilandgas-investments.com/2026/top-stories/a-gold-story-in-the-most-famous-town-you-have-never-heard-of/