A Toronto junior miner has signed a strategic partnership with a Sudbury contract miner to redevelop a former Kirkland Lake-area gold mine.
Orefinders Resources announced that SCR Mining and Tunnelling will be preparing the Mirado Mine site, conducting contract mining, and hauling materials to local mills for processing.
The 2,400-hectare property, located 35 kilometres southeast of Kirkland Lake, contains three former mines, including the Mirado.
SCR is already a significant shareholder in Orefinders and worked in the planning and execution of a bulk sample project on the project, last January. SCR was co-founded by Claude and Richard Seguin in 1994.
With a mining history that dates back to the 1940s, part of the Mirado property was pre-stripped and mined by open pit down to a depth of 30 metres. Material was removed from the pit and stockpiled on surface.
Last year, Orefinders began crushing and shipping that material to Quebec for processing, generating revenue from the 1,414 ounces of recovered gold sold.
Last March, Orefinders said a preliminary economic assessment would determine whether a high-grade near-surface gold resource in its South Zone of the open pit can be potentially put into production.
“Our plan is to put Mirado's open pit back into production in the near term with minimal capital expenditures as we require no mill or tailings facilities on site,” said Orefinders CEO Stephen Stewart in a May 17 news release.
“SCR provides a turn-key operations solution for the Mirado Mine and their contribution to date has been invaluable. Accordingly, we are pleased to confirm this relationship going forward. With the completion of our updated NI 43-101 resource calculation and preliminary economic assessment on the horizon, Orefinders will look to expedite all facets of this project jointly with SCR's consultation.”
