Ewan Downie, CEO and Director of I-80 Gold Corp (TSX: IAU – NYSE: IAUX), joins us for a comprehensive roadmap to the future production, development, and exploration strategies and at the Ruby Hill, Granite Creek, McCoy Cove, and Buffalo Mountain Projects in Nevada.
We start off noting the keen investor interest in last year of newsflow from Ruby Hill from the discovery of bonanza-grade polymetallic CRD mineralization that was made at the Hilltop Zone, part of the Ruby Hill Project in central Nevada. This area has been one of the key areas of exploration for the company, returning attractive values of gold, silver, zinc, and lead in a series of drill intercepts. We do also focus on the other half of the Ruby Hill being gold dominated, and how the Ruby Deeps zone will be another major contributor to future production from this Project.
One of the key advantages that i-80 Gold has, is having the Ruby Hill processing center already permitted and most of the sunk cost and infrastructure in place, but that the likely path forward would be to convert this to a base metals processing center, and then eventually to truck the refractory gold ore from Ruby Deeps over to the Lone Tree processing center, in tandem with similar or from Granite Creek and Cove. This leads to a discussion about the next two years production growth really coming from Granite Creek ore from the OG Zone being trucked over to Nevada Gold Mines Twin Creeks processing facility, and that early in 2024 all the drilling to define the newer South Pacific Zone will come into play as that ore begins to add to the production profile.
Next we discuss the 40,000 meters of ongoing drilling at Cove planned to continue to expand high-grade gold resources there over the balance of the next 12+ months, and Ewan highlights their history exploring this deposit, and some of the recent high-grade and wide drill intercepts recently reported to the market. There will be a great deal of ongoing exploration newsflow on tap from the Cove Project well into next year, along with development work as this moves along the timeline into production by late next year or early 2025. We also spend a little time outlining the current studies the company is working on for a simple and potentially quite economic Buffalo Mountain oxide heap leach Project which could be trucked over to the leach pads at their Lone Tree Processing center in the medium-term.
Ewan expects to see substantial growth to the Company’s total current resources of 14.5 million ounces of gold, and an additional 180 million ounces of silver, as all the drilling underway is incorporated into different resource updates later this year.
If you have questions for Ewan regarding the ongoing work and strategy at i-80 Gold Corp, then please email Shad@kereport.com.
* In full disclosure, Shad is an existing shareholder of I-80 Gold Corp
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