One might be forgiven for wondering whether someone at Canadian gold-miner Agnico-Eagle Mines has a penchant for the number five.

The company has just poured the first gold bar at the first of five mines that it will commission over the next eighteen months, in order to grow production by five times between 2007 and 2010, and, if that weren't enough, CEO Sean Boyd waxes lyrical about the company's belief that probably three, and possibly four, of its projects contain more than five-million ounces of gold each.

Impressively, Toronto-based Agnico-Eagle expects to produce about 1,3-million ounces of gold a year between 2010 and 2017, compared with 230 992 oz of gold produced last year.

The company's LaRonde mine, in Quebec, contains Canada's largest gold deposit by reserves, which currently stand at around five-million ounces, Boyd said at the company's annual shareholders meeting on Friday.

A depth-extension project is under way at LaRonde, and is expected to start contributing to output at the mine by 2012.

On the greenfield front, the company poured the first gold at Goldex, also in Quebec, on May 7, and expects to reach full production of 175 000 oz/y by September.

After that, it plans to start producing at its Kittila mine, in Finland, towards the end of the third quarter of 2008, followed by a start-up at the Lapa project, in Canada, and the Pinos Altos gold/silver mine, in Mexico, in mid-2009.

The final – and fifth – new mine in the company's pipeline for now, is the giant Meadowbank project, in Canada's icy Nunavut territory, which is expected to come on line in January 2010, and currently has an estimated life-of-mine production rate of 360 000 oz/y over nine years.

MORE TO COME

Exploration is continuing at all the sites, and Agnico-Eagle is aiming to increase its total reserves to between 18-million and 20-million ounces this year, from 16,7-million ounces at the end of 2007.

Upside is expected at Pinos Altos, Goldex, Kittila and Meadowbank, which, together with LaRonde, are “large, wide open deposits that have the ability to grow”, Boyd said on Friday.

“We feel that we own several five-million-ounce deposits."

Both Kittila and Meadowbank already contain proven and probable reserves of almost five-million ounces each, and the company is hoping it can increase reserves at Pinos Altos to these levels as well.

Addressing shareholders, Boyd echoed comments made earlier in the week by the chairperson and acting CEO of the world's biggest producer of the yellow metal, Barrick Gold's Peter Munk, who bemoaned the lack of big new gold deposits being discovered.

The global mine supply of gold was more likely to be down than up in the medium term, and the scarcity of large new five-million-ounce-plus deposits made Agnico-Eagle's all the more valuable, Boyd commented.

The company is also one of few gold-miners which has never hedged any of its production, and Boyd told Mining Weekly Online earlier in the year that he intends to continue unhedged going forward.

Shares in Agnico-Eagle, which reported first-quarter net income of $28,9-million on Thursday afternoon, declined 1,14% on Friday, to C$66,68 a share by 13:34 in Toronto.