The Phoenix gold project, once one of the hottest new gold projects in Canada’s Red Lake gold mining district, is set to rise again, CEO George Ogilvie said on Tuesday, announcing that a new conceptual mine plan would be ready in the third quarter.

The company previously planned to publish a new preliminary economic assessment (PEA) for Phoenix in the second half of this year, but has now narrowed it down to before the end of September.

“The new PEA will benefit from real, operational data collected during our recent test trial mining and bulk sampling programme, where we implemented actual mining techniques that could be utilised under a potential commercial production scenario while using our own processing facility,” said Ogilvie in a media statement, noting that the new PEA had the potential to show “strong economics”.

The meltdown of the Phoenix project stunned the industry, when the company downed tools at the Red Lake project in late 2015, following a series of damaging revelations. The geology was more complex than previously thought and an update to the resource estimate resulted in a significant downgrade in the contained gold ounces. At the height of interest in Rubicon and its Phoenix project, companies like Agnico Eagle and other high-profile investors were drawn to the project.

Following a restructure and the 2016 appointment of Ogilvie – a professional engineer who started his career in 1989 with AngloGold in South Africa where he was working in the ultra-deep mines of the Witwatersrand – new management have been working hard to derisk the project and advance it to commercial production.

Since 2016, the company has increased the measured and indicated resources by 456% and in March, published an updated mineral resource estimate. That estimate increased the mineral resources by 110% to 589 000 oz in the measured and indicated categories, compared with the 2018 indicated resource of 281 000 oz of gold. The grades decreased by 2% to 6.26 g/t gold.

As a result of the successful conversion of the measured and indicated resources, inferred resources decreased by 28% to 540 000 oz of gold, compared with 2018, while the inferred grades increased by 9% to 6.53 g/t gold.

Last year, the company also concluded test trial mining and a bulk sampling programme, which will be included in the new PEA.

During the programme, mill processing rates of 1 540 t/d and gold recoveries of 95.1% were achieved. The sublevel longhole stoping achieved an average external dilution of 8.7% on the three test stopes mined in total.

The new PEA should also benefit from the fact that the surface infrastructure is ready for operations and that the project has significant underground infrastructure.

“The company is well positioned to move the project back into production and the current robust Canadian gold price environment is favourable to the economics of the project,” said Ogilvie.

Rubicon controls the second largest land package in Red Lake consisting of more than 285 km² of prime, strategic exploration ground, and more than 900 km² of mineral property interests in the emerging Long Canyon gold district that straddles the Nevada-Utah border in the US.