North of 60 Mining News - The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North

Victoria Gold Corp. Jan. 6 reported that its Eagle Gold Mine produced 42,174 ounces of gold during the final quarter of 2020. This strong quarterly output pushed the Yukon operation's second half production to 77,748 oz of gold, which topped the company's COVID-adjusted guidance of 72,000 to 77,000 oz for the final six months of 2020.

Including the 38,896 oz of gold recovered during non-commercial production over the first six months of 2020, Eagle produced 116,644 oz gold last year.

"Victoria's Eagle Gold Mine had a strong finish to the year with solid Q4 operational performance. Gold production of 77,748 ounces in H2, our first six months of commercial production, exceeded our revised guidance," said Victoria Gold President and CEO John McConnell.

The company declared commercial production at Eagle Gold on July 1, the first day of the third quarter, which offers the ability to easily benchmark the mine's commercial performance. At that time, Victoria forecast Eagle would produce 85,000 to 100,000 oz of gold during the second half of 2020, or an average of 42,500 to 50,000 oz per quarter.

The operation, however, produced 35,312 oz of gold during the third quarter due to bottlenecks in the production circuit.

Crews fixed the bottlenecks, which improved the availability of the processing circuit.

As a result, fourth quarter gold production was 20% higher than the third quarter and ore stacked on the heap leach pad increased by 21%.

Victoria said the ore stacking improved particularly well during the second half of November through the end of the year.

"Ore placement on the heap leach pad increased by more than 20% quarter over quarter including over 1 million tonnes of ore stacked on the pad in December," said McConnell.

Per Victoria's seasonal operations plan, ore stacking on the leach pad has now been curtailed for the 90 coldest days of the year, January through March.

During this three-month period, mining operations, primary crushing and stockpiling of ore, leaching and gold production will continue.

Victoria says the shutdown of the secondary crushing and stacking systems provides an excellent opportunity to finalize an optimization program to improve the availability of the processing circuit that began in the fall. Several specialty contractors have been mobilized to the site to complete this work.

If the weather cooperates, Victoria said 2021 ore stacking at Eagle may resume before the end of March.

Strict COVID-19 protocols are continuing to work well at the Eagle Mine.

"Effective health protection measures are continuing and have safeguarded employees and local residents and enabled mine operations to continue, with no suspected or confirmed cases of COVID-19 at site," said McConnell.

Author Bio

Shane Lasley, Publisher

Over his more than 16 years of covering mining and mineral exploration, Shane has become renowned for his ability to report on the sector in a way that is technically sound enough to inform industry insiders while being easy to understand by a wider audience.

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