TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – The Peru government has approved the mill construction permit for Hochschild Mining's 60%-owned Inmaculada advanced gold/silver project.
The company on Friday said this represented completion of the final stage of the project's construction permitting process with commissioning on track for the fourth quarter of 2014.
The processing plant is now set to start construction, with the project's total initial capital expenditure maintained at $370-million for a 3 500 t/d underground operation with total average yearly production of 12-million silver-equivalent ounces from the single Angela vein.
The project, which is located close to Hochschild's other operations in the south-west of Peru, is set to be the company's lowest-cost operation and would also require no additional central administration cost.
Further, exploration was also progressing at the property, which consists of 40 mining concessions with measured and indicated resources currently estimated at almost 90-million silver-equivalent ounces.
Hochschild said it strongly believes that the mineable resource base could be expanded significantly by upgrading the inferred mineral resources in the south-west and north-east extensions of the Angela vein into the reserve category through more definition drilling work.
In addition, the Inmaculada district hosts more than 25 km of gold-/silver-bearing quartz veins of the low-sulphidation type, which remain largely untested.