The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Focused on finalizing Livengood gold mine study by October North of 60 Mining News – January 15, 2021
The 11.5-million-ounce Money Knob gold deposit at Livengood lies alongside the paved Elliott Highway and Trans-Alaska Pipeline System about 70 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska.
International Tower Hill Mines Ltd. Jan. 12 announced that its board of directors has approved a 2021 budget of US$5.6 million for a work program that will primarily be focused on the completion of a prefeasibility study that details the economic and engineering parameters of developing a mine at its 11.5-million-ounce Livengood gold project in Alaska.
The new PFS will follow up on a similar study completed in 2017 that outlined plans for a 52,600-metric-ton-per-day mill at Livengood that would produce 6.8 million ounces of gold over a 23-year mine life, or roughly 294,100 oz annually.
The mine envisioned in the 2017 study was based on 392 million metric tons of reserves averaging 0.71 grams per metric ton (9 million oz) gold. Overall, the Money Knob deposit at Livengood hosts 525 million metric tons of measured and indicated resource averaging 0.68 g/t (11.5 million oz) gold.
The all-in cost to produce an ounce of gold in the 2017 PFS, however, was estimated to be US$1,247. With the goal of bringing costs down, the Tower Hill Mines team has focused its efforts on studies to optimize the economics of mining this world-class gold deposit lying alongside a paved highway about 70 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska. This optimization work has primarily focused on metallurgical studies aimed at optimizing gold recoveries and refining the project flowsheet.
Now, with the price of gold nearing US$2,000/oz and predicted to move higher as central banks and governments inject unprecedented amounts of cash into a global economy affected by COVID-19, Tower Hill Mines is incorporating the results of the optimization work into an updated PFS for establishing a mine at Livengood.
"The gold market's continued strength gives us strong motivation to advance our work to establish the best foundation to support future development" said Karl Hanneman, CEO. "The 11.5-million-ounce gold resource at the Livengood Gold Project is in a premier jurisdiction and the large resource size gives our project high leverage to the gold price."
Tower Hill Mines initiated the new Livengood prefeasibility study last July and says the comprehensive study for developing a mine at the large, highway-accessible gold project will be completed in October of this year.
Over his more than 16 years of covering mining and mineral exploration, Shane has become renowned for his ability to report on the sector in a way that is technically sound enough to inform industry insiders while being easy to understand by a wider audience.
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