Higher gold prices has Landore Resources rethinking the size and scale of a proposed open-pit gold mine near Armstrong in northwestern Ontario.
The United Kingdom company has designed a drill program next month to break out to the east and west from an established gold deposit that already contains more than a million ounces.
In a Sept. 1 news release, Landore said last winter's preliminary economic assessment (PEA) for its BAM gold deposit was based on a US$1,560 gold price. Things have changed considerably with gold now hovering close to US$2,000.
That means reconsidering the five scenarios they've been mulling over through a pit optimization review.
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The BAM gold deposit is on the company's larger 30,500-hectare Junior Lake property, 75 kilometres northeast of Armstrong. Landore has been drilling there since 2015.
The site is about 10 kilometres from where a proposed hydro-electric station is slated to be built on the Little Jackfish River. CN's main line runs along the property's southern boundary.
The deposit sits in the middle of a mineral-rich greenstone belt that runs for 31 kilometres from east to west.
The last mineral resource estimate released over the winter identified 1,015,000 ounces of gold, of which 747,000 ounces of that in the indicated category with an average grade of 1.06 grams per tonne. A PEA placed a mine life scenario ranging from six to nine years.
Landore CEO Bill Humphries is of the firm belief that more exploration drilling could turn this into a "multi-million-ounce deposit."
The company is making arrangements to start a 14,000-metre fall-winter drilling program. Half of it is devoted to infill drilling, to transfer the inferred portion of the resource over to the indicated category.
The rest is to test the depth of a high-grade zone and drill off some targets to the east and west, identified in a soil sampling program.
Once the program winds up in March, Landore will publish a new mineral estimate on the deposit and prepare an updated PEA.
Besides gold, Junior Lake contains showings of nickel, copper, cobalt and platinum group metals.
In 2017, the BAM gold project won the Bernie Schnieder's Award for the Discovery of the Year, given out by the Northwestern Ontario Prospectors Assocation.
