Canadian gold mine developer Artemis Gold has committed to additional investments as part of its Phase 1 development of the Blackwater mine, in British Columbia, to facilitate the potential fast-tracking of the Phase 2 expansion.

To support the additional investments, the company has amended the gold stream agreement with Wheaton Precious Metals to provide an additional $40-million in funding.

The additional investments during Phase 1 include additional structural steel and increased conveyor belt widths in the crushing circuits, as well as the introduction of variable speed drives to the ball mill. Electrical components have also been upgraded to facilitate the Phase 2 requirements and to include optionality in relation to the use of redundancy back-up power sources.

Other optimisations include upsizing of the oxygen plant coupled with down-shaft-sparging of oxygen to the pre-leach and carbon-in-leach (CIL) trains, along with the optimisation of the CIL layout in order to facilitate non-intrusive expansion to Phase 2, as well as full conversion of the detoxification process to remove the need for tanker-supplied liquid sulphur dioxide.

These investments in the Phase 1 initial capital are expected to allow Artemis to further optimise throughput in the early years of operation. 

“We have been exploring these options internally for some time. This announcement is the logical next step and importantly provides the additional funding to further pursue these optimisations at a low cost of capital with a great partner in Wheaton, without a material dilution of the net asset value per share for shareholders,” says chairperson and CEO Steven Dean.

The amendment to the gold stream agreement has been achieved with a simple increase in the number of ounces to be delivered to Wheaton prior to the reduction in Wheaton’s stream participation from 8% to 4%. This mechanism is akin to a pre-pay and grants no additional stream percentage participation in Blackwater by Wheaton.

With the commitment of the additional $40-million funding under the gold stream, the optimised initial capital for Phase 1 construction of Blackwater is fully funded. In addition to receiving its initial $35.2-million deposit under the silver stream on June 9, the company has also now received its initial $10-million deposit under the amendment to the gold stream.

The initial capital to complete to first gold pour is now estimated to range between C$730-million and C$750-million, of which Artemis had incurred about C$150-million at the end of May.

The company’s cash balance at the end of May 2023 totalled C$47-million.

Overall project construction as of May 31, 2023, stood at 20% complete.