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Desmaraisville, Quebec – There
are a few places on this planet which, if you visit just once, you spend many
waking hours afterwards calculating how to get back there again. Paris is such a place, as is Wallace,
Idaho, as is Schaffhausen in Switzerland or Lijiang in China. Such
another place is Val-d’Or, Quebec,
about seven hours north of Toronto
on fat paved roads. If you like mining towns, Val-d’Or will get quickly
under your skin. Headframes dot the horizon, towering over the sub arctic
landscape like construction cranes in Beijing.
Much is going on here in
this camp in northwestern Quebec.
Agnico-Eagle (AEM), which traces its roots to Cobalt, Ontario, is sinking
shaft to 10,000 feet
at its LaRonde gold mine near Cadillac, developing its new Lapa Mine nearby,
and building a new headframe at its Goldex Mine on the outskirts of
Val-d’Or to boost hoisting tonnages. Abcourt Mines (ABI-V) is prepping
up a huge open-pit silver-zinc property a few miles north of
Val-d’Or. Falconbridge’s purchase of Noranda and its sprawling
mining and smelting complex a few miles west of here in Rouyn-Noranda has
energized the district as well. There is a bounce in people’s steps.
Val-d’Or means “Gold
Valley.” Notice
the Quebecois haven’t changed its name to Geenieville, or Ski-O-Rama.
You can hold your head high
here, anywhere along the 1,200-mile Cadillac Fault, if you are a miner of
precious metals, or of zinc or copper. The locals, and the provincial
government of Quebec,
are so supportive of mining that they’ll even move a town out of your
way if that’s what it takes to access the veins.
We are now two and one-half
hours north of Val-d’Or, in Desmaraisville, in a bull in camp just
built to house Metanor Resources’ (MTO-V)
first influx of seven dozen miners at Bachelor Lake. But this is not your
ordinary bull camp. Along with a fine selection of French and English
cuisine, a bottle of Georges Duboeuf Cote de Brouilly red, 2004 vintage,
awaits us, breathing on the paper placemats. Les Quebecois, we have
discovered, eat better than most Parisians. There’s non-smoking a
tavern across the paved highway, next to a convenience store that sells more
Budweiser than any other joint in Quebec. We are served fresh walleye
retrieved scant hours earlier from Bachelor
Lake. Except for the
mosquitoes, this is a great place to be.
It’s a great place
for a gold mine to be, too. Especially one with a proven production history,
a freshly de-watered shaft next to a 500 ton-per-day mill, sitting atop 210,000 ounces
measured and indicated, and another 80,000 inferred ounces of gold, with a
company whose market cap is about one-fourth the appraised value of the mine
and mill (absent any estimate of the value of all that gold they can pull out
of the ground and melt into dore for $325 an ounce and a net of 30 cents per
share).
In this game you bet
jockeys and you bet ponies, and we will get to those in a moment. In Quebec you can also
bet on the racetrack. Quebec
so encourages mining that your first 100,000 tons are tax-free, “a
batch sample” they call it hereabouts, and you get handsome rebates
when you hire people, or when you plunk your operating profits back into the
ground for new exploration and development. Here’s how the Quebec mining
incentive works: In addition to the first 100,000 tax-free tons, an
additional 52 cents are returned on expenses incurred during pre-production.
And when you get that rebate, you’re free to turn around and re-invest
it, and get another 52 cents back, and so on.
This idea of government
encouraging mining is a foreign concept to those of us in the Western United States who’ve toiled under the
likes of Bruce Babbitt and Christine Todd Whitman and Governors Dork
Kempthorne and Cease-Mining Andrus. Yes, Virginia, there are places on this
planet where they actually want you to
mine, and for you to profit from your endeavours, because miners’
wages bring new taxes to the provincial treasury, and new prosperity to the
community.
Metanor’s Bachelor Lake mine comprises 177 claims and two
concessions straddling a 100-kilometer radius of active gold mines sitting
atop 1.5 million ounces of reserves and resources. Ghislain
“Jesse” Morin is passionate in his belief that at least that much
additional gold can be discovered and proved-up at Bachelor Lake.
The consultant to, and former director of Metanor, has plotted an aggressive
exploration and development program for the mine’s lower reaches, down
from the 1700-foot level to the 2300-foot level, for starters, along with
setting up drill headings in Bachelor Lake’s existing drifts and
drifting along the 2300-level. The mine’s previous owners never spent a
farthing on exploration, Morin explains. Simply put: “The youngest
director on the board was 72 years old. They didn’t figure they had
that much time left.” Some 14,000 meters of
diamond-drilling from the 1700 on down suggest the Bachelor Lake
vein structure tends to widen, and to improve in grade, the deeper you go,
Morin said. But again, the former owners, who operated the property from
1983-1989, didn’t seem to care. Morin passionately does.
Shaft-deepening and mill
rehabilitation are scheduled for later this year and early next, with production commencing
by Q3 2007 at an annualized rate of 50,000 ounces by
year-end. Returning the mill to production will be a no-brainer. It was
gently mothballed in 1987; the ball mills are jacked up off their bearings,
and the baths and tanks were washed out down to bare metal. We have seen
dozens of idled concentrators advertised as “turnkey,” but this
one really is. Morin recently secured a new 900-horsepower double-drum hoist
for the mine, to replace the existing 700-hp Nordberg as operations deepen
and production increases to 750 tpd. A well-established mine developer and
millwright in the Val-d’Or region (properly the Abitibi Mining
District), Morin figures he can also boost gold recovery at Bachelor
Lake’s mill by tinkering with retention times in the tanks –
something he says his predecessors neglected to do.
Revenues from gold
production at Metanor’s 100%-owned Bachelor Lake will be ploughed into
the company’s other properties in northwestern Quebec and Ontario,
including the DuBuisson property smack alongside AEM’s Goldex in
Val-d’Or, which contains a total measured, indicated and inferred gold
resource of some 450,000
ounces and was mined back in the 1930s; the Opinaca
gold claims hard by James Bay next to Goldcorp’s Roberto Deposit, and
the Wahnapitei property in Sudbury, hard by Falconbridge’s Nickel Rim.
Watch MTO. They are an
absolute sleeper, sitting on some beautiful properties in one of the
planet’s most prolific and mining-friendly districts. And if that
Nordberg’s got half the horsepower of Jesse Morin, watch the ounces fly
into the till.
By
David
Bond,
editor
The Silver Valley
Mining Journal
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