Vault Minerals is aiming for the fall of 2027 to resume mining at its mothballed White River gold mine.
But the restart date is contingent on the Australian company receiving a timely provincial approval to commence construction of a new tailings facility ahead of the start of any mining operations.
The company delivered an update on its underground Sugar Zone mine, 30 kilometres north of White River, in a July 28 report.
After suspending operations in the summer of 2023, Vault expects mine production and milling operations to restart in November 2027.
Vault is the name of two Australian mining companies — Silver Lake Resources and Red 5 — that merged in the summer of 2024. Sugar Zone is the combined company’s only gold asset outside of Australia.
Silver Lake acquired Sugar Zone in a CCAA sale of the former Harte Gold mine property in 2022, which had entered production with much fanfare in the fall of 2018.
Silver Lake operated the mine for a year and half before deciding to halt operations in August 2023 to take a back-to-basics approach to get a better handle on the area’s geology and figure out how to efficiently mine high-grade gold on the property as part of a new mine development plan.
During this downtime, the company has spent millions on new infrastructure, mobile mine equipment and on exploration drilling in and around two existing mining zones, dubbed the Sugar Zone and the Middle Zone.
From that exploration program, a new discovery was made nearby with the Sugar South zone. The company is confident it will evolve into a new mining front. Vault said the drill hits have been some of the highest grade recorded on the property.
Back in February, Vault revealed that its restart plan for Sugar Zone will involve a phase of underground development — a $55-million pre-production period — of between 9 and 12 months to create “multiple stoping fronts” to ensure development stays ahead of mining activity.
Vault said based on the provincial mines ministry’s current timeline for regulatory approval of this new tailings facility, underground mine development will start in July 2026.
The tailings facility is a structure designed to safely store mined waste materials — known as tailings — after minerals, like gold, have been extracted from the ore. These facilities are maintained and monitored to ensure there is no harm to the environment.
Vault said the waste rock generated from underground development of new stopes will be crushed, screened and used to construct the Southern Tailings Management Facility, which should be done by October of that year. The budget is about $18 million.
With 325,000 ounces of gold reserves, Vault said Sugar Zone has enough mineralized ore on hand to operate for seven years, producing 50,000 ounces a year. There’s another 1.28 million ounces in the background, classified in the resource category.
Vault claims there’s more gold to be discovered across its extensive 813-square-kilometre land package as the mine is only portion of a larger and very prospective area that sits on mineralized greenstone belt that it considers underexplored.
