Aljustrel (Portugal)

Project Overview

The Aljustrel copper-zinc-lead-silver mine is located in Portugal and is 100% owned by Almina - Minas do Alentejo, S.A., a private company who purchased the mine from Lundin Mining Corporation in early 2009.

In 2014, in exchange for remuneration, Wheaton Precious Metals agreed to waive its rights to silver contained in copper concentrate at the Aljustrel mine but retains a stream on silver produced from the zinc and lead ores.

In 2018, the agreement with Almina was amended to increase production payments to 50% of the amounts received under concentrate sales agreements and fix silver payable rates for a period of two years and limit rate decreases thereafter. In Q2 2018, Aljustrel began processing zinc ores to produce zinc and lead concentrates containing silver payable to Wheaton.

Cotabambas (Peru)

Project Overview

The Cotabambas copper-gold-silver deposit is located in Peru, South America, and has been systematically explored since 1995. Cotabambas is located in the mountainous terrain of the high Andean Cordillera. Elevations on the property vary between approximately 3,000 and 4,000 metres. The region is characterized by deeply incised river valleys and canyons.

The Ccalla and Azulccacca zones of the Cotabambas deposit are porphyry copper deposits. The two host porphyries cover an area about 2.5 kilometres long and 1.5 kilometres wide. Mineralization occurs in hypogene, supergene enrichment and oxide zones within the host porphyries and surrounding diorites. A well-developed leached cap hosts the oxide mineralization. Sulphide mineralization consists of chalcopyrite and pyrite, and gold grades are strongly correlated to copper grades in the hypogene zone.

In June 2019, Panoro announced assay results from a recently completed drill program. The first phase of drilling at the Chaupec Target was composed of five drill holes totalling 997 metres of drilling. The five drill holes were completed at the northern end of the Chaupec target along approximately 1.2 km of strike. The drill results, with high grades of copper, gold, silver including grades of lead and zinc are confirming the potential presence of a new porphyry stock in the vicinity of the drilled area. In July 2020, Panoro announced plans for additional exploration work at the Chaupec and Gauclle Targets with an objective to identify near-surface, high-grade mineralization to provide additional early life feed to the proposed 80,000 tonne per day concentrator included in the PEA report.

Kutcho (Canada)

Project Overview

The Kutcho property is located approximately 100 kilometres east of Dease Lake in the Liard mining division of northern British Columbia, and consists of one mining lease and 46 mineral exploration claims covering an area of approximately 17,060 hectares. The site is accessible via a 900 metre long gravel airstrip located 10 kilometres from the deposit and a 100 kilometre long seasonal road from Dease Lake suitable for tracked and low-impact vehicles.

The Kutcho property lies within the King Salmon Allochthon, a narrow belt of Permo-triassic island arc volcanic rocks and Jurassic sediments, situated between two northerly-dipping thrust faults: the Nahlin fault to the north, and the King Salmon fault to the south. The belt of volcanic rocks is thickest in the area where it hosts the VMS deposits, partly due to primary deposition, but also to stratigraphic repetition by folding and possibly thrusting.

The Kutcho project is envisioned to be an underground mining operation, supplemented by a starter pit on the Main deposit during the construction phase, to extract ore from the Main and Esso deposits. Two underground mining methods are proposed: sublevel longhole stoping for areas where the dip is greater than 50°, and mechanized cut and fill with paste backfill in shallow dipping areas of less than 50°. A 2,500 tpd process plant is assumed to operate 365 days per year at 92% availability, with mill feed to be crushed, ground and subsequently subjected to copper and zinc flotation.

Los Filos (Mexico)

Project Overview

The Los Filos gold-silver mine is located 180 km south of Mexico City in the municipality of Eduardo Neri, Guerrero State, Mexico. The operation consists of two open pit mines (Los Filos and Bermejal) and one underground mine (at Los Filos), with common heap leach, wet plant and ancillary facilities to produce a final gold doré product on site.

Gold and silver are recovered from crushed and run-of-mine ore via a conventional, low-cost heap leach and ADR (adsorption-desorption-recovery) process. Infrastructure on site includes primary and secondary crushing plants with 18,000 tpd capacity, an overland conveyor system, agglomerator, two heap leach pads, two pregnant solution collection ponds, one recirculation pond and two contingency water ponds and an ADR plant and refinery.

The orebodies at Los Filos consist of iron-gold skarn with minor amounts of copper and silver at the intrusive-limestone contact. Orebodies also occur with endoskarn and are disseminated within the hydrothermally altered intrusive rocks. The mineralogy of the contact orebodies is predominantly iron oxides with gold, in associations with lesser quantities of copper, lead, zinc, and arsenic occurring in carbonates and oxides as well as sulfides.

The Los Filos expansion project is underway with plans to enlarge the Los Filos open pit, add a new pit (Guadalupe), develop a second underground mine (Bermejal) and construct a new carbon-in-leach plant to complement the existing heap leach facilities. A 2019 feasibility study estimated total capex of $213 million for the expansion.

Click here to view a Virtual Mine Tour of Los Filos 

Marmato (Colombia)

Project Overview

The Marmato Project, owned by Aris Gold, has excellent infrastructure as it is located by the Pan American Highway with access to Medellin to the North and Manizales to the South, and has access to the national electricity grid, which runs near the property. Marmato comprises the existing producing underground gold and silver mine (Upper Mine), which has been in operation since 1991 and the Marmato Deeps Zone (“MDZ”) project, both of which are covered by the Precious Metals Stream.

Mineralization within the Upper Mine consists of an epithermal low to intermediate sulfidation style and the MDZ is characterized by mesothermal vein/veinlet mineralization. The MDZ remains open at depth and to the east where recent drilling resulted in the discovery of the New Zone.

In August 2020, Aris filed a preliminary feasibility study ("PFS") technical report on the Marmato Project pursuant to National Instrument 43- 101 -Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. The study affirms the economic viability of the underground expansion of the Marmato Project. The company has updated its plan for the Upper Mine to incorporate an expansion of the existing 1,200 tpd processing plant to 1,500 tpd, to be completed over the next two years. The Prefeasibility study is focused on the development of mining operations in the MDZ, including construction of a new 4,000 tpd CIL processing plant and new dry stack tailings storage facilities. Mechanized mining, using an underground longhole stoping method, in the MDZ is expected to further increase production commencing by 2023.

Minto (Canada)

Project Overview

In June 2019, Capstone announced the sale of the Minto mine, which was on care and maintenance at the time, to Pembridge Resources PLC ("Pembridge"). Pembridge subsequently restarted operations in the third quarter of 2019.

The Minto copper-gold-silver mine located in Yukon, Canada, is an open pit and underground mining operation that commenced commercial production in 2007. Since 2007, the mine has undergone several successful expansions, more than doubling mill throughput levels from 1,563 tonnes per day to its current design throughput of 3,600 tonnes per day. The mill employs conventional crushing, grinding and flotation to produce copper and gravity concentrates with significant gold and silver credits. Concentrates are exported via the Port of Skagway, Alaska, to smelters in Asia for treatment and sale.

The Minto deposit is spread over a series of high grade areas interspersed with large deposits of low grade material. The mine plan was designed for the highest grade deposits to be mined sequentially in a series of small pits supplemented with additional ore from underground. Surface mining is complete with recent production coming from underground.

Navidad (Argentina)

Project Overview

The Navidad project is one of the largest undeveloped silver deposits in the world. Navidad is located in Chubut, Argentina and is made up of eight zones, seven of which should be amenable to mining in a series of open pits. Wheaton Precious Metals holds a debenture convertible into an agreement to purchase 12.5% of the life of mine silver production from the Loma de La Plata zone, which is one of the highest grade zones within the Navidad deposit and represents approximately 25% of the project’s measured and indicated silver resources. Loma de La Plata is silver-rich, but is sulphide-poor and contains very low levels of lead, zinc, and copper. Metallurgical testing has indicated that this zone is receptive to conventional flotation processing with forecast silver recoveries of approximately 72%.

There are material governmental and legal factors that affect the mineral resources at Navidad and the conversion of the mineral resources to mineral reserves. Legislation in place in the Province of Chubut currently prohibits open pit mining and the use of cyanide in the entire province. According to Pan American, no cyanide will be used to process the material anticipated to be mined at Navidad, but given the depth and orientation of the deposits, the economic mine plan involves open pit mining. Because of these governmental and legal factors, the otherwise economically viable portions of the deposit cannot be estimated as mineral reserves at this time.

Santo Domingo (Chile)

Project Overview

Santo Domingo is a first quartile copper-iron-gold project2 and Chile’s only fully-permitted greenfield project. The proposed open-pit mine is located 50 kilometres southwest of Codelco's El Salvador copper mine and 130 kilometres north-northeast of Copiapó, near the town of Diego de Almagro in Region III, Chile. Elevation at the site ranges from 1,000 to 1,280 metres above sea level, with relatively gentle topographic relief.

Santo Domingo is owned by Capstone, a Canadian base metals mining company focused on copper with two producing mines, the Cozamin copper-silver mine in Zacatecas State, Mexico and the Pinto Valley copper mine located in Arizona, US. In addition, Capstone owns the Santo Domingo project, a large scale, fully-permitted, copper-iron-gold project in Region III, Chile, as well as a portfolio of exploration properties. Capstone's strategy is to focus on the optimization of operations and assets in politically stable, mining friendly regions, centered in the Americas. Wheaton has precious metals streaming agreements with Capstone on both the Cozamin mine and the Santo Domingo project.

Capstone expects major construction to commence in late 2021 with the first full year of production forecast for 2024.

Stratoni (Greece)

Project Overview

The Stratoni mine is an underground lead-zinc-silver mine located approximately 4 kilometres from the coastal town of Stratoni in northern Greece. The mine is 100% owned by Hellas Gold S.A., which is 95% owned by Eldorado Gold Corporation and 5% owned by Aktor S.A., Greece's largest construction company. The deposit is a lead-zinc-silver carbonate replacement deposit that is hosted within marble of the Kerdilya Formation. The deposit is localized along the south dipping Stratoni Fault, a major structural feature and important mineralizing corridor in the centre of the Stratoni region. Stratoni has been in operation since September 2005 and produces high quality lead-silver and zinc concentrates. The mine has a capacity of 1,200 tonnes per day and utilizes conventional drift-and-fill mining methods.

In October 2015, in order to incentivize additional exploration and potentially extend the limited remaining mine life of Stratoni, Wheaton and Eldorado agreed to modify the Stratoni silver purchase agreement. The primary modification is to increase the production price per ounce of silver delivered to Wheaton over the fixed price by one of the following amounts: (i) $2.50 per ounce of silver delivered if 10,000 metres of drilling is completed outside of the existing ore body and within Wheaton’s defined area of interest (“Expansion Drilling”); (ii) $5.00 per ounce of silver delivered if 20,000 metres of Expansion Drilling is completed; and (iii) $7.00 per ounce of silver delivered if 30,000 metres of Expansion Drilling is completed. The third 10,000 metres of expansion drilling was completed during Q3 2020 and the delivery payment has been increased by $7.00 per ounce over the original fixed price

Click here to view a Virtual Mine Tour of Stratoni 

Toroparu (Republic of Guyana)

Project Overview

The Toroparu gold-copper project is located in the Republic of Guyana, South America. Discovered in 2007, the Toroparu Project has Proven and Probable mineral reserves of 4.1 million ounces of gold contained in 127 million tonnes of ore at a grade of 1.0 g/t Au. The Toroparu Project and surrounding gold anomalies lie at the edge of a large bending zone in the Puruni Shear Corridor, a regional feature that can be traced more than 100 kilometres into the prolific Venezuelan Gold District.

The project has its Environmental Authorization, Mineral Agreement and Fiscal Stability Agreement in place. A pre-feasibility study completed for the Toroparu Project in 2013 at US$1400/oz gold outlined the design of an open pit mine producing 228,000 ounces of gold per year over an initial 16-year mine life. Gran Colombia (formerly Gold X Mining) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Guyana Government giving Gran Colombia exclusive rights to develop the Kurupung Hydro Project, approximately 50 kilometres south of the Toroparu Project. Optimizing the project’s power supply by building the proposed run-of-river hydroelectric facility could significantly reduce the estimated operating cash cost.

A Preliminary Economic Assessment was announced in June 2019, which examined a project re-scope which included the Sona Hill satellite deposit and a modification of the processing strategy to start with gold-only production from a CIL circuit for the initial 10 years, followed by the addition of flotation processing capacity. As of May 2020, the licensing process for the Toroparu project has entered the final stage of regulatory review of all documentation under the updated Mining License Application submitted in October 2019.