Name: La India mine.

Location: The La India mine is located about 200 km east of Hermosillo in Sonora, Mexico.

Controlling Company: Agnico Eagle Mines.

Brief History: Agnico Eagle acquired the La India property from Grayd Resource Corporation in November 2011. Within 22 months, the company had completed the design, permitting, construction and start-up of the La India mine. Mining began in September 2013, with initial leaching the next month. The first gold from La India was poured in November 2013.

Brief Description: The La India mine is a collection of deposits grouped into three openpits – North, La India (Central) and Main – that will be mined over an estimated seven-year life, providing ore for a heap-leach pad located west of the North pit.

Geology/Mineralisation: The La India mine lies within an extensive ancient volcanic field. It is in an area dominated by outcrops of volcanic tuffs from different explosive volcanic events that were affected by large-scale north-north-west-striking faults and intruded by granodiorite and diorite stocks. Canyons cut through the uppermost layers to expose the Lower Series volcanic strata. The mineral occurrences are similar to several other gold/silver mineralisation centres recognised in the region, such as Alamos Gold’s Mulatos gold mine, immediately east of the La India project, which has been a commercial gold producer since 2006.

La India lies in a large area of intrusion-related alteration dominated by high-sulphidation epithermal-style gold mineralisation. The gold mineralisation is confined to zones of argillitic alteration originally containing sulphides and subsequently oxidised. All of La India’s reserves are in oxidised material, amenable to heap leaching. Meanwhile, the gold system at Tarachi is best classified as a wallrock gold porphyry deposit comprising sheeted veins that deposited gold within the wallrock outside the source dacite porphyry intrusions, suggesting that it has the potential to grow into a much larger deposit.

Products: Gold.

Reserves: Total proven and probable reserves as at December 31, 2014, were estimated at 24.88-million tonnes grading 0.85 g/t of gold.

Resources: Measured and indicated reserves as at December 31, 2015, were estimated at 54.47-million tonnes grading 0.39 g/t of gold. Inferred resources were estimated at 82.56-million tonnes grading 0.37 g/t of gold.

Mining Method: Openpit.

Major Infrastructure and Equipment: The mine uses 11.5-m3-capacity CAT 992 front-end loaders and 90-t-capacity CAT 777 haul trucks to achieve a mining rate of about 16 000 t/d.

Three-stage crushing reduces the ore to 19 mm. Lime is added to the crushed ore to control the pH, and the ore is stacked in 8-m-high lifts.

The leach pad will have a capacity of up to 50-million dry tonnes, reaching an ultimate height of about 113 m.

Cyanide leach solution percolates through the heap to the lined solution-collection ditch that routes it to a double-lined pregnant collection pond. A zero-discharge water balance is maintained at the heap-leach facilities, with an event pond designed to contain the volume of solution that will be produced in the case of a 100 year/24 hour storm event.

The gold adsorption facility consists of two parallel trains of five 3.5 t carbon adsorption columns and a Zadra strip with electrowinning.

Gold/silver doré bars are produced in the refinery. The plant is designed to process leach flows from up to six-million dry tonnes of ore a year.

Prospects: In 2015, the focus is on expanding the resource halos around the current pits, testing the exploration potential between the Main and La India zones and exploring for additional bulk tonnage porphyry targets close to La India.

Contact: Corporate Communications.

Contact Details:
Agnico Eagle,
tel +1 416 847 8669,
fax +1 416 367 4681, and
email media@agnicoeagle.com.