William Shaver
Analyst · Alliance Global Partners. Your line is open
Thank you very much, Perry, and good morning. I am also happy to have been called upon to join the McEwen management team as COO. I’ve been here about three months, and in that time, have visited all of our operations, including Mexico and Argentina, and have been to each of the operating entities several times. We are happy to report that Q2 has been a safe quarter with 1 minor medical aid involving a diamond driller who had a cut to his hand that required some stitches. I might just comment in my visits around to the various sites. I’m reasonably happy with state of our environmental, social and reclamation matters as well as our safety programs. At the Fox Complex, we had a relatively good quarter, producing 11,200 gold equivalent ounces of record, apparently for the best quarter in three years. The cost per ton and per ounce were in line with budgets and expectations, and the mine was significantly ahead of schedule and tons of ore produced and most of the other measures for development, production drilling and backfilling. Exploration is also confirming lower extension of the ore at the Froome deposit, which will extend the mine life into late 2024 and/or early 2025. We are also fully engaged in debottlenecking the process plant, which we hope will improve no throughput, improve reliability and reduce unanticipated downtime. To that end, we’ve installed a new screen tower in the month of July, and have purchased a rebuilt cone crusher to improve reliability in this portion of the plant. The screen will direct the pine ore that is already the right size directly to the ball mill, thereby passing the cone crusher and improving the performance of the cone crusher and allowing more time for maintenance of this part of the plant. At the same time, we’re improving maintenance capability of the plant personnel. All of these things will increase the mill throughput, which will result in more gold production at a lower cost as we move forward. At Gold Bar, we had a tough quarter due to the carbonaceous ore that Perry mentioned. This was encountered in the pit. This ore, which is preg-robbing, cannot be placed on the leach pad as it attracts and keeps gold captured in this material. This impacted our productions and costs for the quarter. We were able to mitigate this situation to some extent by pivoting to other ore sources. We did carry out a 10-hole drilling program on an very intense basis to try to quantify the carbonaceous material, and we now have the results of that study. And we feel we have the situation under control in terms of understanding where we cannot mine. And we see – but we do see the impact of this continuing into Q3 in terms of our production. Part of our strategy is to move ahead more quickly on the Gold Bar South project. To that end, we have all of the permits now in hand, and we’ll be starting the access road and site development this month. This will allow us to have ore production from Gold Bar South in Q4. And – as you may know, the grade at Gold Bar South is generally a little bit better. And of course, the ore is very clean of deleterious elements. The stripping ratio at Gold Bar South will be lower and the ore haul is shorter, although the recovery may be lower long-term. And we plan to mine as much ore from Gold Bar South in Q4, and continue mining into 2023. And the plan is to concentrate on the best grades possible in Q4 and into 2023. In Mexico, we have completed the leaching as planned in the month of July. And I would say I’m happy to say that we’re carrying on with the remediation plan for the waste dumps and other parts of the site. And this work is going well and looks very, very good. We also have come up with a different approach to the processing of the leach pad material with a traditional mill in a manner which will reduce the CapEx significantly, and basically make that a project that we should be able to finance from a mixture of some of our present financing, a little bit better production from some of our operations. And this will – we’re in the midst of completing a study on this, and we anticipate that this might start in 2022 – 2023, rather. So in summary, I’m relatively happy with our progress to date. We have a good dedicated group of people working hard to do a little bit better. We have some critical personnel holes that we need to fill, and there’s some more process driven discipline that we need in the organization, but we’re in the midst of putting that into place. So with that, I’ll thank you very much. And now I’ll turn it over to Steve for some exciting exploration results, both in Timmins and at Los Azules. Thank you.