Clynt speaks
" It is an important place to be and we have every intention of consolidating and expanding our position in that space."
Alexco Resources does the hard, rare thing
Feb.09,2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5rFWElVRiA
" We have made the transition (to a producer). We are into and scaling up production.
Flame and Moth is still in development in 2021 and moving to production this month.
Milled 30,000 tonnes of material in 2021 as we developed and spooled up this operation.
Average grades were 720-730 g/t silver.We shipped 4,500t -5,000 t of concentrate-lead concentrate
is 85-90% revenue-16-17,000 g/t silver concentrate from Bermingham type deposits,which makes that concentrate hugely valuable.
We shipped in concentrate more than 600,000 ounces in the year during this spool up process.
Recoveries settling in at 93% silver.88-90% for the lead concentrate.
That is a lot to do in the course of a year.
In addition to that we have done 1.1 or 1.2 kilometres of underground development in our two mines.
We have a long haul stope online at Bermingham as we speak.At F and M the first stopes came online there earlier this year and
we will have another couple faces and stopes open in that mine in the next month or so.
The other part of it is the workforce,of course. A year ago we had maybe 60-70 people. We now have 170 people-
including contractors in our workforce.That's a fly in /fly out operation.There has been a huge amount of effort and work
and my hat is off to the team on site and our various managers that were able to bring us through this period.
Our ultimate aim is 400 tpd throug the mill and producing 4.5 million oz of silver.
That mill is spooling out towards that 400 tpd as we speak and hopefully in the first quarter we will be there at designed capacity
at a sustained level.
And then in addition to all of that,of course, we were doing exploration and we will talk about that as we move along here.
A hugely busy year at Alexco...a transformational year to the production status and once again a huge thank you to our staff
and employees who have under challenging conditions to brought us to this point.
Alexco is a Canadian primary silver play.75-80% of our revenues in our new mine plan here will be derived from silver.
As pure a silver play as there is in the business. There are not too many silver players left.
We are the only primary silver producer in Canada and we have a high beta to silver so that just exaserbates any volatilityin the silver market in terms of the value of the direction of the share price.
A lot of leverage in a small field in a pure play silver producer.
It is an important place to be and we have every intention of consolidating and expanding our position in that space.
Yeah,so,let me pivot into our exploration in 2021. We invested about 7 or 8,000m of exploration and that was primarily in this Bemingham deposit.
The Bermingham deposit,itself, is more than a million tonnes of better than 900 g/t material.
It had 40 odd million oz of silver in all categories and of that 33 million was indicated.
The work we did in 2021 has expanded that deposit by more than 40% in the indicated and 70% in the inferred -at higher grades.
It's been a very successful exploration period in 2021. That deposit size has increased from 40m oz to closing in on 70m oz.
If you look at the combined mine plan from the two deposits -in the indicated category of those mines we have about 70m oz and
there's another 20m inferred so we are creeping up on 95-98 million oz of silver in those two deposits.
Exploration has been hugely successful.
Getting to your question in terms of funding and growing that exploration,yes,we will be very competitive on the AISC curve once we are at design capacity and producing cash so future exploration will come from that future cash flow and we are looking forward to that.
Meantime,though,we are not going to interrupt our systematic exploration progression in this district.
Talks exploration team....experienced underground miners...environmental team for and withthe Fed Govt of Canada-diverse team of operators,explorers,environmental and finance people that have helped us get to this point.
Talks infrastructure...have very competitive energy costs with other operators around us that have helped in spur the Yukon Govt
to upgrade the roads and electric grid in our general area.
Talks First Nations-we are generating an historic mining district but the more important thing is that everyone is highly engaged
with our efforts at Keno Hill. We will clean up the historical liabilities that were incurred through a subsiduary of Alexco.
155m shares out. No debt. Comfortable with our capital structure as it stands.
Stock catalysts? That is really important especially as it goes to the growth of the company.
Short term catalysts are going to be sustainable 400tpd through the mill , cash self-sufficiency on a run rate of 4.5-5m oz Ag per year with consistent head grades of more than 800 grams per tonne.
Recognising that on the exploration side we have invested about 150,000 m of drilling in this district over the last eight or nine years.Of that,120,000m has gone into
infill drilling at F and M and Bermingham,primarily.We have done very little early stage exploration in this district.
Moving forward-srategically-we will be doing more early stage exploration of this district to see if we can find more of these 40,50,60+ million oz silver ore deposits.
We understand the geological environment in which they occur. More importantly we are going to be redoing our mine plan,adding these recent discoveries ,these 20 million ounces of additional resource that we now have at Bermingham.
There are going to be major,major issues going forward in 2022." Clynt Nauman