Kinross Greenlights Manh Choh Gold Mine
silver. The study details a plan to truck high-grade ore mined from two pits at Manh Choh roughly 250 miles to Kinross’ Fort Knox Mine north of Fairbanks, Alaska. This ore is to be processed through the existing Kinross Alaska mill and the tailings stored on the Fort Knox property. With the addition of high-grade ore from Manh Choh, which will be roughly 10 times higher than ore currently being processed through the Kinross Alaska mill, the gold production at Fort Knox is expected to jump to 400,000 oz per year for the currently anticipated 4.5 years of mining at Manh Choh. Leveraging the existing facilities at Fort Knox eliminates the need to permit, finance, and build a mill and tailings facilities at Manh Choh. Operating what will essentially be a rock quarry operation will also significantly reduce the environmental disturbance and lowers the overall greenhouse gas emissions, compared to developing and operating new processing and tailings storage facilities onsite. While inflation has pushed up the costs originally estimated for both building and operating the Manh Choh Mine, so have the gold grades.
North of 60 Mining News Roughly 1 million ounces of gold-equivalent is expected to be mined from two small pits at the Manh Choh project in Alaska. With the recently completed feasibility study showing an economically robust project, Kinross Gold Corp. has officially decided to move forward with developing a mine at the Manh Choh gold-silver project near the Village of Tetlin. “At Manh Choh in Alaska, we completed a feasibility study ahead of schedule, and are proceeding with a project that we expect will add approximately 640,000 lower-cost gold ounces to our production profile over its life of mine in one of the world’s best mining jurisdictions,” said Kinross Gold President J. Paul Rollinson. Being developed under a joint venture between Kinross (70%) and Contango ORE Inc. (30%), the Manh Choh mine detailed in Kinross’ feasibility study is expected to produce roughly 1 million gold-equivalent oz, which includes the value of both the gold and silver recovered, over 4.5 years. This operation is based on 3.9 million metric tons of proven and probable reserves averaging 7.88 grams per metric ton (998,000 oz) gold and 13.6 g/t (1.7 million) oz
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August 2022 I The Alaska Miner I www.alaskaminers.org
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