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Minto mine, Canada

11th March 2016

By: Sheila Barradas

Creamer Media Research Coordinator & Senior Deputy Editor

  

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Name: Minto mine.

Location: The Minto mine is located 240 km north of Whitehorse, in central Yukon, Canada.

Controlling: Capstone Mining.

Brief History: Mineral exploration on the Minto property has been conducted since 1971. The development of the mine began in May 2006, with first commercial production declared in October 2007, and a four-year mine life. The mine 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 operations. The mine has, thus, undergone a number of expansions, taking its operating throughput to 3 800 t/d and increasing its mine life to seven years.

Brief Description: Minto is a 3 800 t/d, copper/gold mine.
Products: Copper, with silver and gold by-products.

Geology/Mineralisation: The Minto mine is situated in the north-north-west-trending Carmacks Copperbelt along the eastern margin of the Yukon-Tanana composite terrain. The belt hosts several intrusion-related copper/gold mineralised hydrothermal systems. The Yukon-Tanana composite terrain is the eastern-most and largest of the pericratonic terrains accreted to the Paleozoic north-western margin of North America. It is considered to be the product of a continental arc and back-arc system, preserving meta-igneous and metasedimentary rocks of Permian age on top of a pre-Late Devonian metasedimentary basement.
The Minto property and surrounding area are underlain by plutonic rocks of the Granite Mountain batholith of early Mesozoic age.
The component of the batholith represented on the Minto property is the Minto pluton and is predominantly of granodiorite composition. Hypogene copper sulphide mineralisation at Minto is hosted wholly within this pluton in subhorizontal horizons of structurally prepared rock.
Reserves: Mineral reserves as at December 31, 2014, were estimated at 7.66-million tonnes, grading 1.17% of copper, 6 g/t of silver and 0.74 g/t of gold.

Resources: Measured and indicated resources as at December 31, 2014, were 47.96-million tonnes, grading 1.08% of copper, 4 g/t of silver and 0.40 g/t of gold. Inferred resources were estimated at 16.21-million tonnes, grading 0.92% of copper, 3 g/t of silver and 0.30 g/t of gold.

Mining Method: Conventional openpit and underground.
Major Infrastructure and Equipment: The Minto mine uses conventional openpit mining techniques and equipment for all its ore and waste extraction, and uses crushing, grinding and flotation to produce copper concentrates with gold and silver credits.

Shovels are used to load haul trucks that transport the rock to the crusher feeding the mill or to temporary stockpiles according to the grade characteristics of the ore. Waste rock is transported to waste-rock storage piles.
The ore is fed into the primary crusher and semiautogenous grinding mill, where it is crushed and ground to reduce particle size. The ore enters a number of flotation circuits where copper, gold and silver minerals are separated from other minerals. The concentrated ore is thickened and dewatered using thickeners and filters. The concentrate is then moved to the concentrated storage shed where it is loaded onto trucks and exported through the Port of Skagway, in Alaska, to overseas smelters for treatment and sale.
Prospects: Surface mining of the Minto North pit is expected to be completed in August, with the mill continuing to process Minto North material until the end of the first quarter of 2017. Underground mining will be paused in the first quarter of 2016 and the operation will be temporarily closed once all the ore from Minto North and the remaining stockpiles are processed by mid-2017. Future decisions will depend on several factors, most notably, an improvement in the copper market outlook.

Contact Person: VP investor relations and communications Cindy Burnett.
Contact Details:
Capstone Mining,
tel +1 604 684 8894,
fax +1 604 688 2180,
email info@capstonemining.com, and
website http://capstonemining.com.

Edited by Tracy Hancock
Creamer Media Contributing Editor

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