Quinton Hennigh

Quinton Hennigh
Nationality	American
Occupation	Geologist, mining advisor, company director
Title	Geologic Adviser
Employer	Crescat Capital
Known for	Founding Novo Resources and New Found Gold; geologic adviser to Crescat Capital

Quinton Hennigh (American) is a geologist and mining industry advisor best known for identifying and developing early-stage gold exploration projects that later attracted significant institutional attention. He spent more than a decade working as a senior geologist at two of the world's largest gold mining companies before pivoting to the junior mining sector, where he founded and directed several exploration-stage companies. His most prominent ventures include Novo Resources Corp., which explored a conglomerate-hosted gold system in Western Australia's Pilbara region, and New Found Gold Corp., which announced high-grade gold intercepts in Newfoundland that drew broad coverage in the mining press. Since at least the mid-2010s he has also served as geologic adviser to Crescat Capital, a Denver-based asset management firm with a stated focus on natural resource investments.

Early Life

Hennigh was born and raised in the United States. Specific details regarding his place of birth and early upbringing have not been documented in publicly available Tier 1 or Tier 2 sources, and accordingly those particulars are omitted here.

Education

Hennigh holds a doctorate in geology. The precise institution and year of conferral have been referenced in company disclosure documents filed on SEDAR, Canada's securities filing platform, in connection with his roles as a director of Novo Resources Corp. and New Found Gold Corp., where his academic credentials were listed as part of the technical qualifications required under National Instrument 43-101. He is a qualified person as defined under NI 43-101, the Canadian regulatory standard governing scientific and technical disclosure for mineral projects.

Career

Newmont Mining and Newcrest Mining

Before entering the junior exploration sector, Hennigh spent several years as a senior geologist at Newmont Mining Corporation, one of the largest gold producers in the world by output. He subsequently held a comparable senior geologist role at Newcrest Mining, the Australian gold and copper producer. These positions gave him exposure to large-scale deposit geology, mine-site evaluation, and the technical due diligence practices that major mining companies apply to potential acquisitions and greenfield discoveries. His time at both companies covered exploration work across multiple jurisdictions, experience that informed his later focus on identifying under-explored geological settings in Australia and Canada.

Novo Resources Corp.

Novo Resources Corp. is a Vancouver-based junior mining company incorporated in British Columbia. Hennigh is a co-founder and has served as a director and, at various points, as executive chairman of the company. Novo's primary exploration focus has been the Pilbara region of Western Australia, where the company has investigated a geological hypothesis that ancient conglomerate rock units in the region host distributed alluvial and nuggety gold similar in style to the Witwatersrand Basin in South Africa, the most productive gold-bearing geological formation ever identified.

The Pilbara conglomerate gold thesis attracted considerable attention in the junior mining community after Novo announced surface sampling results at its Beatons Creek project in 2017 and 2018. The company's share price rose sharply during that period, drawing coverage from the Northern Miner and other mining trade publications, as well as commentary from institutional investors affiliated with Crescat Capital. However, subsequent bulk sampling and processing work at Beatons Creek produced results that fell below the grade levels that would support conventional open-pit mining economics at the gold prices prevailing at the time, and the company revised its technical outlook accordingly. Novo continued to hold exploration licenses across a large land package in the Pilbara, and the company pursued additional geological evaluation of its other conglomerate-hosted targets. As of the period covered by public filings on SEDAR, Novo had not placed any of its Pilbara properties into commercial production.

The Beatons Creek experience illustrated the inherent risk of conglomerate-hosted gold systems, which can show spectacular surface samples while producing uneven grade distribution at bulk mining scale. Hennigh remained publicly associated with the geological thesis underpinning Novo's exploration strategy and continued to speak at mining industry conferences about the Pilbara's prospectivity.

New Found Gold Corp.

New Found Gold Corp. is a St. John's, Newfoundland-based junior explorer whose primary asset is the Queensway project, located along the Trans-Labrador Highway corridor in central Newfoundland. Hennigh is a co-founder and has served as a director of the company since its formation. New Found Gold went public on the TSX Venture Exchange in 2020.

In late 2020 and through 2021, New Found Gold announced a series of drill results from Queensway that included intervals of exceptionally high-grade gold mineralization. One of the most-cited results reported 92.86 grams of gold per tonne over 19.0 metres in hole NFGC-19-01, a figure that drew immediate attention across the junior mining sector and was reported by multiple industry publications. The Queensway project sits within the Appalachian geological belt, in a structural setting that the company's technical team argued was analogous to other orogenic gold camps in eastern Canada and elsewhere. The high-grade nature of the Queensway intersections prompted comparisons, cautious in the technical literature and more enthusiastic in market commentary, to major past-producing or currently producing gold districts.

Institutional investors including Crescat Capital and Eric Sprott, one of Canada's most prominent resource investors, held disclosed positions in New Found Gold during its early drilling phase. The company's market capitalization expanded substantially during the 2020-2021 period of active drilling news flow, reflecting broad investor enthusiasm for the grade of the reported intersections. New Found Gold subsequently expanded its drill program and continued releasing results through the SEDAR filing system as required under continuous disclosure obligations applicable to TSX Venture Exchange issuers.

The Queensway project is situated in Newfoundland and Labrador, a province that has been identified in Canada's 2022 Critical Minerals Strategy as a priority jurisdiction for mineral exploration given its geological endowment and existing infrastructure. Gold is not itself classified as a critical mineral under that federal framework, but the broader policy environment of increased federal support for mineral exploration in Atlantic Canada provided a backdrop for the kind of junior exploration activity that New Found Gold represents.

Crescat Capital Advisory Role

Crescat Capital is a Denver, Colorado-based investment management firm that has publicly stated a macro-driven investment thesis centered in part on precious metals and mining equities. Hennigh has served as the firm's geologic adviser, a role in which he provides technical assessment of gold and silver exploration opportunities that the firm considers for investment in its precious metals fund. In that capacity he has co-authored investor letters and quarterly commentaries that discuss the geological merits of specific exploration projects, including properties held by companies in which Crescat has disclosed positions. His dual role as both an adviser to an investor and a director or founder of companies receiving investment from that investor has been a consistent feature of his professional profile that market participants and journalists covering the junior mining sector have noted in their reporting.

Other Directorships

In addition to his roles at Novo Resources and New Found Gold, Hennigh has held director or advisory positions at other junior mining companies at various stages of their development. These have included roles at companies exploring in North America and Australia. The full current list of his directorship positions can be found in continuous disclosure filings submitted to SEDAR by the respective issuers.

Recognition

Hennigh has been a featured speaker at the Beaver Creek Precious Metals Summit, an annual industry conference in Colorado that draws institutional investors, analysts, and mining executives. He has also presented at the Sprott Natural Resources Symposium and similar sector-focused events. His geological work on the Pilbara conglomerate gold system and the Queensway project in Newfoundland has been covered in the Northern Miner, Mining.com, and BNN Bloomberg, among other industry and financial media. The high-grade results at New Found Gold's Queensway project during 2020 and 2021 were among the most widely discussed drill results in the junior gold sector during that period.