Photo by: SSR Mining
Name: Seabee Gold Operation.
Location: The mine is located in Saskatchewan, Canada, about 125 km north-east of La Ronge.
Controlling Company: SSR Mining holds a 100% interest in the property through its wholly owned subsidiary, SGO Mining.
Brief Description: The property hosts the Seabee and Santoy mines, and a central milling facility located on the property near the Seabee mine.
Brief History: Commercial production at the Seabee mine started in 1991. The Santoy mine has been in continuous commercial production since 2014.
Ore from both mines is processed at the Seabee mill facility, which has been in operation since 1991. Going forward, the vast majority of ore processed at the mill is anticipated to be sourced from the Santoy mine.
SSR Mining acquired the Seabee Gold Operation on May 31, 2016, as a result of its acquisition of Claude Resources Inc.
Products: Gold.
Geology/Mineralisation: The Seabee Gold Operation is located within the northern portion of the Pine Lake greenstone belt. The belt has a strike length of more than 50 km and comprises a variety of geochemically distinct tholeiitic mafic volcanic rocks formed in juvenile island arc settings, along with contemporaneous mafic intrusive rocks, volcaniclastics, sediments and felsic intrusions of varying age.
Metamorphic grade across the Pine Lake greenstone belt ranges from upper greenschist to upper amphibolite, with Seabee hosted in the latter. The belt has been complexly folded by at least four major phases of deformation that are observed across the operation and elsewhere in the Glennie domain of the Proterozoic Trans-Hudson Orogen.
The Seabee Gold Operation can be subdivided into three main geological domains:
- The Seabee mine area is hosted within a coarsely layered mafic intrusion dominated by gabbro in the mine sequence.
- The Santoy mine area is hosted within a sequence of mafic volcano-sedimentary rocks separated by generally north–south-trending thrust faults.
- The Porky deposit area is a mineralised trend hosted along a 12-km-long openly folded unconformity, separating arenaceous sedimentary rocks of the Rae Lake synform to the north from mafic volcanic rocks of the Seabee mine area to the south.
Gold mineralisation at the Seabee mine is hosted within an extensive network of subparallel shear structures, which crosscut the Laonil Lake intrusive complex.
Gold mineralisation at the Santoy mine is hosted within calcsilicate-altered shearstructures with diopside-albite +/- titanite-bearing quartz veins, and occurs in gold/sulphide/chlorite/quartz veins in the shear zones, near or in the granodiorite and granite sills.
At the Porky deposit, the brittle-ductile lode gold system is hosted along a thick corridor of calcsilicate altered mafic volcanics and arenaceous sedimentary rocks that straddle a major unconformity along the southern margin of the Rae Lake synform.
Reserves: Total Proven and Probable mineral reserves, as at December 31, 2017, were estimated at 1.37-million tonnes with a grading of 9.88 g/t gold.
Resources: Total Measured and indicated resources as at December 31, 2017, were estimated at 1.97-million tonnes with an average grade of 10.74 g/t. Inferred mineral resources were estimated at 2.26-million tonnes with a grading of 9.29 g/t gold.
Mining Method: Access underground at the Santoy mine is provided from surface at the Santoy portal through a main ramp. Longitudinally retreating long-hole mining methods are currently used at the Santoy mine for the majority of production. For localised areas with minimal strike length, Alimak mining methods, or captive long-hole mining methods, are used to reduce lateral development costs. Once mined, where sequencing and access requirement dictate, stopes are backfilled with waste rock or cemented waste rock. The mining sequence will continue to proceed in several longitudinally retreating, bottom-up advancing mining fronts. Current practice for material handling will remain with ore being truck hauled to surface and then hauled 14 km to the mill located at the Seabee mine.
Major Infrastructure and Equipment: The remote location of the operation in northern Saskatchewan is sustained by air transport for the workforce and winter road access for supplies. The operation was initially developed and operated on diesel power and later connected to Saskatchewan grid power in 1992.
The major infrastructure at the Seabee Gold Operation site includes roads and an airstrip, powerhouse and electrical distribution system, mill buildings and related services facilities, the Seabee shaft and headframe, portals and ventilation raises, fuel storage, explosive storage, water supply and distribution, water management ponds
and water treatment plant, tailings management facilities, administrative buildings, and camp accommodation.
Processing
Processing throughput of 970 t/d was achieved in the fourth quarter of 2017, and is expected to increase to an average of 1 050 t/d by 2019 under the preliminary economic assessment (PEA) for the operation, published in 2017. The mill flowsheet is a conventional crushing and grinding circuit using gravity concentration and cyanide leaching with carbon-in-pulp for recovery and production of doré gold on site.
The newly installed gravity recovery circuit will increase the gravity gold recovery and reduce the limitations of the main cyanide leach circuit going forward.
Prospects: The PEA for the Seabee gold operation envisions underground mining until 2024, with average gold production of 100 000 oz/y over the period from 2018 to 2023.
The Santoy mine will provide the vast majority of the production anticipated in the PEA, including 100% of production after 2018.
Contact: Director – corporate finance David Wiens.
Contact Details:
SSR Mining
Tel +1 604 689 3846
Email invest@ssrmining.com
Website www.ssrmining.com