First Mining Gold is working to develop precious metal resources in Ontario and Quebec. The Vancouver-based gold developer is currently focused on advancing two of the largest gold projects in Canada.
First Mining Gold Chief Executive Officer Daniel Wilton sat down with The Market Herald’s Simon Druker to discuss the company’s portfolio and its strategy.
TMH: First off, give us some background on your company and its exploration strategy…
DW: First Mining Gold as you say, project developer advancing a couple of the largest gold projects in Canada. Our Springpole Gold Project is well advanced through the environmental assessment process and the feasibility study process and we recently acquired the 5 million ounce plus Duparquet Gold project in Quebec last year. So our exploration strategy is a little bit different than a number of others, in part because we’re already starting with an enormous gold endowment in proven established resources inside our existing projects. Our strategy really is focused on how do we make that better and how do we demonstrate that outside of these existing resources, there are district scale exploration opportunities that can provide companies, producers with really a generational exploration opportunity and I think we have that at both of our larger projects in Canada.
TMH: Ok, one of those projects I touched on in the opening is the Springpole Gold Project in Northwestern Ontario, where you’ve just received new exploration results, share those with us…
DW: Those were actually really exploration results from our program in the fall and kind of kicking off our program in the winter. Some interesting results that came out of that. The most important one, if I had to point to it is that we’ve demonstrated really for the first time that there is continuity of mineralization outside of the main spring pool deposit. So it’s a project that a lot of people thought was what you see is what you get in terms of a large blob of mineralization. It’s a bit of an anomaly occurring in a greenstone belt like it does as a big intrusive ore body. So a lot of technical people, investors thought that that was really cut off. I think what we’ve demonstrated is there’s at least one parallel zone and I think we’re very confident that through further exploration near the existing deposit, we’re gonna be able to demonstrate other avenues for growth.
TMH: So you’ve extended the mineralization on that project…tell us what comes next there, you are working towards a feasibility study correct?
DW: Yes. So at Springpole, as I say we’re well advanced in the environmental assessment process. We have published a draft environmental assessment document about a year ago. So it’s now been reviewed by all of the regulators. We’ve got comments back, we’ve responded to most of those comments at this point. Still moving through ultimately looking to incorporate all of the comments from regulators, local communities, indigenous communities, into a final environmental assessment document that we would submit formally as the final middle of next year and in the meantime, really over the course of the last couple of years have been advancing in the feasibility study process to the point where we’re about 90% done the feasibility study, really only a couple of field work programs that we’d need to do and not of major size to be able to finish up really the last of the data collection for the feasibility study but a lot of very interesting optimization work that’s been done around defining a better and more robust tailing strategy.
Really identification and understanding of what we think the real environmental risks are around the project and looking for ways to mitigate those through design first and foremost. So understanding water quality, geochemistry, waste rock characterization, a lot of that work that’s really fundamental to the environmental assessment. Also really important for the feasibility study. So we think we will put out an updated economic study now that we’ve really, I think kind of honed in on what the scope of the project is going be going into the final, we’d like to put out an updated economic study probably as a pre-phase later this year and then targeting the full feasibility study to be done, call it late 2024 in time to have a fresh feasibility study for when we’re anticipating EA approval in 2025.
TMH: What about any upcoming exploration plans on your other assets?
DW: So actually what we announced this week is that we are initiating our first exploration program as First Mining Gold at our Duparquet project. So mobilizing for that and hope to have drills turning in the next couple of weeks. Very excited. It’s not scoped as a huge program right now, 5,000 metres but I think an opportunity to really demonstrate that we’re only starting to scratch the surface in terms of the resource upside that we see at Duparquet. So lots of what we’d call multipurpose drilling, so some investigating new zones, some confirming existing mineralization and confirming the updated geologic model that our team has built at Duparquet since we assumed ownership of it in late September and also an ability to collect metallurgical sample from all from the same drill holes. So lots going on there that we’re very excited to be getting on the ground and starting to demonstrate that we think that again, you’re at three and a half million ounces of indicated resource, million and a half plus of inferred as a starting point for an exploration development project. That’s pretty good, right? It puts it in a top 10 project by size in Canada. So we’re very excited about the direction we’re going with Duparquet.
TMH: Is there anything else on the horizon in the short or mid-term that your investors or our viewers should know?
DW: We call this a very catalyst rich next couple of years coming up and lots of progress towards really important milestones, starting to see some of this exploration results coming out both at Springpole and at Duparquet from our winter program and the program we’re initiating now. We’ve got a preliminary economic assessment, a first economic study underway at Duparquet which we’d like to have done before the end of the summer, potential pre-feasibility study update at Springpole and again moving forward toward starting to write up and finalize this final environmental assessment to be submitted around this time next year. So lots going on and I think not too far from the really critical major milestones that should signal really significant value regrading for us.
Daniel Wilton is the CEO of Vancouver-based First Mining Gold. The company trades on the TSX under the symbol FF. You can also visit www.firstmininggold.com for more information.
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