Mark Isto
Analyst · CIBC. Please go ahead
Thanks, Tony. Starting on Slide 7, the Khoemacau project continued to advance since my mid-February site visit, just before the transaction was announced. Excavation of the central and north box cuts is advancing as shown in the photo. Brush cornering for the 35-kilometer access road is almost complete and the 240-person construction camp upgrade is complete and the camp occupied. Detailed design and engineering are reported to be 71% complete with certain long-lead items for the mill upgrade already purchased. Although still at an early stage, the project activities are progressing well. Moving to Slide 8, I’d like to discuss some of the recent development at several of our key operating properties. We’re very pleased to see during the quarter that amendments to the environmental assessment certificate at Mount Milligan were granted to allow access to additional surface water and groundwater sources until November 2021. Centerra expects that these additional sources should supply enough water to relieve constraints on the mill operations, which have been impacted since late 2017. As expected, water constrained this past quarter across Mount Milligan to maintain lower throughput that averaged 27,000 tons per day, well below the full capacity of 55,000 tons per day. As such, we expect lower sales in our first fiscal quarter of 2020. Centerra upgraded its pumping infrastructure and began drawing water from these additional sources at the beginning of April and throughput is steadily increasing as the water level increases in the tailings facility. Centerra expects the additional water captured from the spring mill will allow operations to ramp up to full capacity in May and maintain 55,000 tons per day through the remainder of this calendar year. Due to the unusual timing difference between production at Mount Milligan and the receipt of stream deliverables, we expect mill throughput increase will be reflected in stream deliveries approximately 5 months later, our second fiscal quarter of 2020. These additional water sources are intended to bridge the need in the medium term, so Centerra is also working on a regional water inventory to identify other potential sources that could provide additional water through the end of the mine life. Centerra expects to make formal applications and begin the regulatory review process later in calendar 2019. As a final comment, Centerra has reaffirmed previous 2019 calendar year production guidance for both gold and copper. Switching to Rainy River, good progress continued over the quarter with gold production of almost 62,000 ounces and New Gold reaffirmed the full year guidance range of 245,000 to 270,000 ounces. The processed ore grade of 1.2 grams per tons was lower this quarter due to a planned transition from Phase 1 into Phase 2 of the mine plan. Mining operations were primarily focused on waste stripping to expose ore from mining in the future quarters as well as providing material for plant tailings dam raises scheduled to begin during the second calendar quarter. Mill throughput for the quarter averaged almost 20,000 tons per calendar day, below the annual target of 22,000 to 24,000 tons per day, due in part to the buildup of ice and the crush, store, stockpile above the apron feeders. Average mill throughput returned to target levels at the end of the quarter, however. Mill availability for the quarter was a record 89%, despite planned downtime to replace the ball mill trunnion and other repairs. Gold recovery averaged 90% for the quarter, which is a significant improvement over the previous quarter when you consider the 16% lower average mill feed grade. New Gold is forecasting that recoveries will continue to improve to an average of 90% to 92% for the year. New Gold announced that work is underway on an optimization study to increase the life of mine cash flow from Rainy River with a target to complete an updated mine plan by the end of calendar 2019. In addition, a near mine exploration program to test potential targets is starting during the current calendar quarter. Finally, New Gold announced yesterday that excess water in the tailings facility from the melt of heavy snow pack caused them to temporarily suspend milling operations at Rainy River on April 24. New Gold is managing the excess water and expects full operations to resume within the next few days. Continuing on to Slide 9, I would like to provide some comments on Peñasquito and Cortez. At Peñasquito, our royalty production was notably lower during the quarter, primarily as a result of lower head grades, as guided by Goldcorp, while Newmont Goldcorp expects higher grades during the second half of 2019. Newmont Goldcorp reported Peñasquito’s Pyrite Leach project continued to perform well with recoveries trending higher through the quarter. While Newmont Goldcorp has not yet provided detailed guidance for any of the Goldcorp assets, they have talked about plans for Peñasquito at a high level. They had identified some opportunities and several focus areas, which include blast fragmentation, crusher capacity and the prioritization of improvements within the process plant. We look forward to the guidance from Newmont Goldcorp on Peñasquito when they report their second quarter results and also to understand how these continuous improvement programs could benefit our royalty position. I also note Monday’s news about the temporary suspension of operations at Peñasquito due an illegal blockade by a trucking contractor and certain community members. Newmont Goldcorp has filed criminal complaints against the blockade leaders and is working with government authorities to resolve the situation, and notes that the miners’ union is supportive of its actions. The effect of this suspension on calendar 2019 production is currently unclear. At Cortez, a new technical report was published in March with an updated pipeline Crossroads production profile and reserve statement. 2P reserves at Crossroads at the end of 2018 were approximately 111 million tons at average grade of 1.02 grams per tons for a total of 3.6 million ounces, up about 400,000 ounces from year-end 2015. We have multiple royalties at Cortez, some of which overlap, that deliver approximately 4,000 royalty ounces in calendar 2018. Based on the production forecast received from Barrick for the various royalty areas, we expect our royalty ounces to increase significantly in calendar 2019 to approximately 17,000 ounces. And royalty production is expected to continue a trend upwards. However, Barrick and Newmont are currently working on an integrated model across the Nevada JV to optimize overflows and processing capacity, which may mean that near-term production estimates will change. We should have a better sense of the impact by the end of calendar year. I would like to wrap up on Slide 10 with a few short comments and some positive developments in our portfolio, most notably Andacollo, Pueblo Viejo and Wassa. At the Carmen de Andacollo mine in Chile, Teck is currently commissioning a recently installed sizer, which is designed to increase throughput by 10% to 55,000 tons per day, even with the harder ores at depth. The sizer is expected to be in operation in the second half of calendar 2019. As a reminder, we have a stream on 100% of the gold production from Andacollo, which resulted in deliveries of 9,900 ounces in the last quarter. At the Pueblo Viejo operation in the Dominican Republic, Barrick has announced that it has completed the expansion project scoping study and is now progressing towards a feasibility study. The expansion project target is to maintain annual production of approximately 800,000 ounces per year after 2022 and extend the mine life beyond 2035. What has changed, however, is that they are now considering a change from heap oxidation to tank oxidation, while they leverage Randgold’s experience with ultrafine grinding followed by oxidation. Because of Randgold’s experience with this approach at their African operations, Barrick expects the studies may be advanced and that the timing for a feasibility study could be moved forward. Finally, at the Wassa mine in Ghana, Golden Star announced a reserve increase of 23% at the end of 2018 due to strong results from underground definition drilling and a stope design optimization process. The increase in reserve in the upper levels of the mine suggests that there’s an excellent potential to increase the near-term production rate, which could be processed using the excess capacity at the Wassa mill. Recall that the Wassa mill has installed capacity of 7,500 tons per day compared to the 2019 production rate of 3,500 tons per day. That concludes my remarks. And I’ll now turn the call over to Bill to discuss our financial results.