Canada’s newest gold mine starts commercial production

Pure Gold Mining (TSXV: PGM; LSE: PUR) has kicked off commercial production at its namesake mine in Red Lake, Ontario, eight months after pouring first gold.

The Toronto-based miner said the milestone, achieved on August 1, followed a successful commissioning period.

The Pure Gold mine, milling facilities, and other critical systems are now all operating in line with or rapidly approaching design capacity of 800 tonnes of ore per day on a sustainable basis, the company said.

The underground mine — at 9 grams gold per tonne one of the world’s highest-grade gold producers — uses a combination of longhole stoping, conventional cut-and-fill, and mechanized cut-and-fill mining methods.

Processing includes conventional crushing and grinding, followed by gravity concentration to recover free-milling gold, pre-oxidation, leaching, a carbon in pulp circuit and electrowinning, and then refining to produce dore gold.

Pure Gold announced last month it had achieved throughput of 509 tonnes per day in the June quarter and 577 tonnes per day in the month of June alone.

The company is developing the mine in a scalable, phased approach, with the first phase expected to produce one million ounces. This would generate over $2.3 billion (US$1.83 billion) in revenue over the next decade, the company has said, and over $1.2 billion (US$960 million) in pre-tax free cash flow.