A base metal explorer working the River Valley area, east of Sudbury, is digging into the details of open-pit mining.
New Age Metals (formerly known as Pacific North West Capital) announced May 23 that it’s started a preliminary economic assessment (PEA) on its River Valley Platinum Group Metals (PGM) Project.
The Rockport-based company touts it as the “largest undeveloped primary PGM resource in North America.”
A PEA is a first phase economic study.
When it comes out in early 2019, it will provide a mine plan and schedule and outline the capital and operating cost estimates, net rate of return, among other things.
The company’s 12,000-acre River Valley Project is located in the Dana and Pardo townships, 60 kilometres east of Sudbury.
It consists of two mining leases containing the River Valley PGM Project and the River Valley Extension.
The company has been exploring on the property since acquiring it in 1998.
New Age’s stated objective is to develop a series of open pits to do bulk mining over a 16-kilometre-long strike length of mineralization.
Early plans call for the site to have a crusher and concentrator, with the concentrated material shipped to Sudbury for further processing.
The River Valley Project is a deposit with measured and indicated resource of 160 million tonnes at 0.44 grams per tonne (g/t) of palladium, 0.17 g/t of platinum and 0.03 g/t of gold.
It amounts to almost 3.3 million ounces of PGMs and gold, and more than 2.7 million of platinum equivalent ounces.
The company is putting together a geophysics and drilling program this year looking to improve the deposit's numbers.
