Today, West Red Lake Gold (WRLG.v WRLGF) outlined its 2024 plans at the Madsen Mine, including the key mine infrastructure and development projects that the company plans to undertake in the near to medium term with the funds from its recent financings.
With the goal to restart the high-grade Madsen Gold Mine in the second half of 2025, WRLG is working on a pre-feasibility study detailing the restart plan, targeted for release in early 2025.
Having identified the mine site projects of scale critical to the restart plan, WRLG will be commencing work on the critical path projects in the coming weeks and months, alongside the consistent drilling, exploration and engineering work that is informing the PFS study and outlining potential project enhancements in the future.
WRLG President & CEO Shane Williams, commented:
“With the funds raised in our recent financings, including $10 million in Canadian Development Expense flow-through funding, we are excited to get started on these important projects. With a year of work under our belts at Madsen, we know what needs to be procured, built, and developed at the mine site over the next six to twelve months to achieve our goal of restarting the mine in 2025. We look forward to keeping investors up to date on key milestones as this work progresses.”
Key Mine Infrastructure & Development Projects: - Connection Drift: 1,200m haulage way to connect the East & West portals/declines at the Madsen Mine to increase material hauling, efficiency, ventilation and safety
- $10M cost forecast expected to come from flow-through funds raised for use under the Canadian Development Expense category in the recent $33M financing
- Primary Crusher: Install a permanent primary crusher as part of the Madsen Mill which previously relied on a temporary leased crusher
- Test Mining: Initiate a test mining program to assess long hole stoping and cut-and-fill mining methods on the range of mining environments at Madsen
- Essential step in further de-risking the asset
- Bulk Sample: Analyze samples from the test mining program through a sample tower to determine representative grade of a bulk sample
- Camp: Procure and install a mine camp to house 100 workers at the Madsen mine site
- Mine Dry: Procure, install and staff a facility with showers, change areas and laundry where workers can transition into and out of work shifts
- Evaporators: Install 2 evaporator fans with the ability to manage 2,000 cubic meters of water daily, to increase overall water management capacity at the mine site
- Shaft Rehabilitation: Continue process of dewatering the mine & rehabilitating the existing shaft which is now certified to move people for the purpose of inspecting shaft conditions
Underground Drilling WRLG will continue consistent underground drilling work with plans to have two diamond drills operating regularly in a program totaling up to 39,000m over the remainder of 2024, with two primary objectives:
- Resource Definition Drilling: 70% of the drilling (~27,000m) will be used to increase resource confidence across all known resource domains (Austin, North Austin, South Austin and McVeigh) in support of the mine restart plan
- Resource Expansion Drilling: 30% of drilling (~12,000m) will test top targets for resource expansion, currently focused on the near surface North Austin Area
- As underground development progressed deeper, other expansion targets will become more accessible and will be incorporated into the drill schedule (Ex. Austin Extension target between 12 and 15 levels of mine & 8 Zone down plunge extension target)
WRLG's VP of Exploration, Will Robinson, commented:
“Our updated and refined geologic model has been performing well, as evidenced by our success reporting gold mineralization in both infill and expansion drill holes. We are keen to continue building confidence in the Madsen resource with definition holes ahead of our prefeasibility study, to continue expanding the North and South Austin zones where our drill holes have been stepping out from known domains in recent months, and to test additional high caliber targets close to existing underground infrastructure where historic drill intercepts suggest there is good potential to define additional mineralization, like the 8 Zone.”
Full News Release:
https://westredlakegold.com/west-red-lake-gold-outlines-2024-madsen-mine-plans/ Madsen Mine Details Having spent almost a year on site at Madsen, WRLG has accomplished a significant amount of work, including recruiting a management team with significant experience across corporate roles in mining, drilling almost 100 expansion holes and over 140 definition holes since 2023, increasing both confidence in known resource blocks to enable confident detailed mine plannig and testing near-resource targets with potential for new mineralization.
Located in Ontario's Red Lake Gold District, WRLG's 100% owned Madsen Mine boasts an NI 43-101 indicated resource of 1.65M oz of gold grading 7.4 g/t Gold, an inferred resource of 0.37Moz of gold grading 6.3g/t.
Significantly, WRLG secured the debt-free and fully permitted asset Madsen Mine for only $6M with a $273 million tax write-off and a new $350M 800+ tonne per day mill, despite its previous valuation of over a billion dollars, about 8x the current market cap of WRLG, due to previous mismanagement.
Notably, WRLG has done extensive work to identify the issues that arose at Madsen under the prior operator, including analyzing potential improvements, determining the time and cost of each improvement and assessing the best course of action going forward, and has applied this process across every aspect of the mine.
Most recently, WRLG reported underground drilling results from the North Austin Zone, which represents a new area of high-grade mineralization extending the current resource to the northeast:
https://westredlakegold.com/west-red-lake-gold-intersects-37-33-g-t-au-over-2-79m-and-5-26-g-t-au-over-9-0m-at-north-austin-zone-madsen-mine/ Posted on Behalf of West Red Lake Gold Mines Ltd.