Loading ...Rubicon botches gold mine start-up
HALIFAX, NS – Rubicon Minerals put the ramp-up of its high-profile Phoenix gold project on hold on Tuesday, describing trouble in reconciling its model of the deposit to reality underground.
“We regret the delay,” Michael Winship, Rubicon’s interim President and CEO, said in a conference call on Tuesday.
The move is no mere hiccup for Rubicon, but seriously calls into question how the Phoenix gold deposit, in the Red Lake district of Canada, will be mined and how much more money the company will need to get it into production.
The junior described a new strategy that, while putting mining to a halt, takes the deposit back to the drawing board for a new resource estimate and mine plan.
At issue: Comparison of underground mining and mine plan suggest to Rubicon the deposit is more complicated than expected.
It has long been known the deposit is highly variable in grade, with a heavy nugget effect and lacks continuity, but Winship said in the conference call that the grade is proving more variable and the structure of the deposit is more complex than anticipated, rendering long-hole stoping as a mining method ineffective.
In releasing an overview of sections of a trial stoping area, Winship said that you can see the mineralisation “moves around from sublevel to sublevel.”
Mined grade, in some areas, is coming out lower than planned with high internal dilution.
For Rubicon, it has serious implications.
The junior has put mining to a halt while it reassesses the deposit and reconfigures the resource and mining plan. Winship said the re-assessment will take half a year or so, with results anticipated in the second quarter of 2016.
The re-assessment will also help answer another question that now hangs over Rubicon’s head: how much more money will it take to get the deposit back into production?
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