The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Faulty mill motor the cause of unscheduled downtime at mine North of 60 Mining News – March 17, 2023
The Pogo gold mine in Alaska is expected to be shut down for approximately six weeks due to damage to a mill motor discovered during recent maintenance.
Northern Star Resources Ltd. March 15 announced a roughly six-week shutdown for unscheduled repairs at its Pogo gold mine in Alaska.
Toward the end of a routine mill shutdown that began last week, the Pogo team discovered damage to the ball mill motor, which tripped during restart.
Work has begun on the ball mill motor, but Northern Star anticipates it will take up to six weeks to complete the repairs.
Due to the extended downtime, the company expects gold output from the Interior Alaska mine to be 20,000 to 40,000 ounces less than previously anticipated for the company's fiscal year 2023, which ends on June 30.
Northern Star's original FY2023 production guidance for Pogo was 260,000 to 290,000 oz of gold.
During the first six months of FY2023, the Alaska operation produced 112,991 oz of gold, leaving roughly 150,000 oz to be produced between Jan. 1 and June 30.
Early last year, Northern Star completed upgrades that expanded the mill throughput capacity to 1.3 million metric tons per year, a 30% increase over the previous 1-million-metric-ton-per-year capacity.
Since completing the mill expansion, the Pogo Mine team has focused on improving mined ore grades to increase gold production at its Alaska operation.
It is currently unclear whether the mill repair downtime will provide an opportunity for underground mining initiatives to improve ore grades at the underground mine.
Northern Star said cost management initiatives have been introduced at Pogo, and team efforts have been prioritized toward repairing the mill so that gold production can safely resume as soon as possible. Based on current estimates, that would be around the end of April.
Despite the downtime at Pogo, Northern Star's companywide gold sales guidance of 1.56 million to 1.68 million oz for FY2023 remains unchanged.
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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