How keen are Ottawa and Queen’s Park in working together to accelerate the approvals process that puts more mines into production? McEwen Mining will find out in the months to come.
The Toronto gold company has high hopes for its Grey Fox deposit, east of Timmins, which CEO Rob McEwen called a “cornerstone asset for us for years to come,” in a May 7 news release.
The Timmins-area miner recently released the latest batch of high-grade drill hits from an ongoing exploration program at Grey Fox that bolstered management’s confidence that the high-grade deposit only stands to get bigger.
Grey Fox is situated within McEwen’s Fox Complex, a highly prized piece of property, outside Matheson, that offers huge mineral upside and contains multiple existing and potential deposits in a well-worn area that has seen previous gold production.
In posting its first-quarter performance last week, McEwen Mining is calling for a significant bump in gold production at the Fox Complex with plans to increase production to 60,000 ounces by 2027 and between 120,000 and 150,000 ounces by 2030.
“This represents an increase of over 80 per cent above our current production,” said McEwen in a May 8 conference call to analysts and investors.
Grey Fox, a future robust mine-in-waiting, will be a big driver of this expansion. The company views its long-term potential as “pretty robust.”
To finance all of this, McEwen secured $110 million through a convertible note offering to support the transition from mining at the Froome Mine to the Stock Mine, that includes spending $71 million on development this year.
McEwen Mining has a batting order to bring individual deposits into production on the property. Once mining at the Stock deposit is underway later this year, Grey Fox will be next up.
In the conference call, McEwen said they’ve recently pocketed a government permit to begin drilling and blasting out a ramp leading underground at the Stock Mine.
Once they’ve broken through on the ramp by the third quarter, McEwen anticipates first gold production from Stock by year’s end, gradually increasing production from Stock to full capacity heading into 2026.
Meanwhile, Rob McEwen commented that the gold resource at Grey Fox has been “growing quite rapidly” with some good grades in their drill hits.
“Quite optimistic that this still has quite a bit more room to grow,” he said.
Grey Fox contains more than 1.5 million ounces in the indicated category, grading at 3.64 grams per tonne (g/t), and 458,000 ounces on the inferred side at 3.30 g/t.
For Grey Fox, a pre-feasibility study is being prepared for release later this year that will deliver a more detailed picture of the mine’s potential and how long it will take to put into production.
In last week’s conference call, management said the study will determine the mine construction and operating costs, what the “cheapest and the fastest” method of mining to access the deposit. Since the ore body comes to surface, part of their options include digging out a small open-pit to generate some cash flow
On the timeline to put Grey Fox in production, chief operating officer William Shaver said figuring how long the government permitting process will take is always a major factor.
Historically, he said, the permitting process takes three years, but based on feedback from the federal and provincial governments, and their desire to speed up the permitting process, the company is optimistic they can get that down to 18 months to two years.
