Pretivm Resources Inc. (PVG)

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Pretium's Quartermain sets stage for high grade Brucejack gold mine

http://www.mineweb.com/mineweb/view/mineweb/en/page66?oid=140679&sn=Detail&pid=102055

Pretium's president and CEO takes Mineweb through the company's plans for its Brucejack mine a day after it released a new, improved resource estimate

Author: Kip Keen
Posted: Wednesday , 30 Nov 2011

HALIFAX, NS -
Because of higher gold grades, a new scoping study of the Brucejack project will be "much more robust," Robert Quartermain, Pretium Resources president and CEO, told Mineweb in a telephone interview on Tuesday.

Quartermain, speaking from Dubai, said he was making his way around financial centers in the Middle East and Europe on what he described as a thank-you tour to investors that put close to $300 million into Pretium through its IPO last year. Pretium's qualifying transaction was to buy the adjacent Brucejack and Snowfield projects in BC, Canada, from Silver Standard Resources, a company which Quartermain had headed up until recently.

It was almost exactly a year ago, Quartermain said, that he knocked on doors around the world showing off a handful of high grade intercepts from Brucejack, "the likes of which I had never before seen," to potential investors. They were intercepts he wanted to follow up on as part of taking on the larger Brucejack-Snowfield project which came with tens of millions of ounces gold in bulk tonnage resources.
As indicated by Pretium's sizeable IPO Quartermain's pitch was convincing.

Now, Quartermain gets to show-off the fruits of Pretium's labour a year later, a key part of which is the new five million ounce high-grade gold resource at Brucejack, which Pretium announced Monday. It is what Quartermain has described as Pretium's near-term thrust; two bulk tonnage projects, one at Brucejack, and then the other at Snowfield stand as important but longer term projects for Pretium.

As reported on these pages Monday, Pretium turned out a resource that in terms of grade and size is a rare sight: 9.3 million tonnes @ 16.92 gold and 105.6 g/t silver in the measured and indicated categories or five million ounces gold and 32 million ounces silver in contained metal. This nearly quintupled the number of gold ounces and doubled gold grades as compared to a now nine-month old resource estimate that had formed the basis of a Brucejack scoping study out this past June. In it Pretium outlined a 1,500-tonne-per-day underground mine that would produce 173,000 ounces gold a year in the first ten years of operation.

But how will that scope change with a five million ounce high-grade gold deposit?

Quartermain could not be pinned down on specifics, but he did nonetheless map out the next major steps Pretium would take in its quest to develop Brucejack as a mining project. He also hinted at economics that, all other things being equal, could only get better with improving grades and more ounces in play.

Quartermain said the new Brucejack high-grade resource would first be plugged into the same framework that was used in the previous scoping study, which means that 1,500 tonnes per day will stand as throughput in an updated scoping study expected out in early 2012. However, more ounces would clearly extend mine-life beyond the 16 years previously envisioned and higher grades would presumably increase gold output.
Quartermain wouldn't guess by how much, but noted that the average mill feed had been set at less than 10 g/t gold. The new resource, with higher grades, suggests the new mill feed is also set to get significantly better grade-wise. One "could do some calculation around that," Quartermain said, referring to the grades suggested by the new resource estimate.

Could the gold grade of mill feed double as it did in the new resource estimate? Quartermain didn't say, but if it did then Brucejack gold output would jump to more than 300,000 ounces a year.

Whatever the case may be, with overall better grade, the new scoping study would "rerate the best cash-flow scenario," Quartermain said.

He also said that in the new scoping study Pretium would optimize how to mine bonanza gold pockets where it has hit intercepts that graded in the multi-kilogram per tonne gold range. Mine-wise these could lead to a "pretty good first few years," Quartermain said.

But the full effect of the new Brucejack resource estimate will have to wait a bit longer. Quartermain said Pretium would use the scoping study to figure out how the Brucejack project might best be scaled up to greater throughput as a mine. It is clear that Pretium, with a much larger resource, has such room to manoeuvre in outlining a higher grade mining project. That would come in a feasibility study, Quartermain said, to which Pretium would most likely proceed to directly after putting together the next scoping study. He said Pretium could skip a prefeasibility stage as a previous operator had already produced high-quality data on an underground mining scenario at Brucejack.