Doug Ramshaw, President of Minera Alamos (TSX.V:MAI – OTCQX:MAIFF), joins us for a comprehensive operations and exploration update at the Santana Mine, and the exploration and development strategy this year at the Cerro De Oro gold project in Zacatecas, Mexico.
We start off by recapping the operational success in 2022, with the recent announcement on January 31st that the Company met its initial thresholds for commercial production at Santana during 2022 including criteria related to gold recoveries from the heap leach pad as well as monthly mining rates in the second half of 2022. We did also address the negative market reaction to the weaker Q4 production numbers over the Q3 numbers, but Doug unpacked that this had been telegraphed prior to that, and the reasons behind slowing things down in the last quarter of the year. We also discussed the drought conditions and water concerns, but that it seemed to be lost on the market that the company would not be moving forward with tripling the leach pads in an expansion at Santana this year, if management was concerned about a longer term water issue.
Next we got into the exploration strategy for 2023, both at Santa and Cerro De Oro, with a mix of true discovery drilling, resource expansion drilling, and infill drilling. With 10,000 meters of drilling slated at Santana, and 4,000 – 5,000 meters of still planned at Cerro de Oro, and reasonable turn around times at the assay labs, there will be a lot of exploration newsflow on tap for this year.
The company is still advancing permitting, engineering, metallurgical work, geological, and other geotechnical work to continue to de-risk the Cerro de Oro Gold Project as it moves down the pathway into production as the Company’s second operating gold mine next year. The big initiative for this year, will be to negotiate the funding package for Cerro de Oro, while waiting for the permits to come back, so the team can work to rapidly advance construction of this projected 60,000 ounce producing mine once the permits are in hand.
Please email us with any follow up questions for Doug regarding Minera Alamos. Our email addresses are Fleck@kereport.com and Shad@kereport.com.
- In full disclosure, Shad is a shareholder of Minera Alamos
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