Western Nunavut gold mine turns a small profit
Company touts “first-ever positive earnings” of six cents per share
TMAC Resources Inc. poured its first gold bar from Hope Bay’s Doris North mine in 2017. Now, after some challenges in 2018, production is up and the company is showing its “first ever positive earnings.” (File photo)
About two years after its first gold bar was poured, TMAC Resources Inc., which operates the Hope Bay gold complex near Cambridge Bay in western Nunavut, announced on May 1 that it’s making some money.
Jason Neal, TMAC’s president and CEO, said TMAC “continues to grow our cashflow with record revenue of $67.9 million.”
This means the company can report its “first-ever positive earnings, which for the first quarter was $0.06 per share.”
So far, some 40,050 ounces of gold have been produced in the first quarter of 2019 and 39,200 ounces have been sold at an average realized gold price of $1,731 per ounce (or US$1,302 per ounce).
The cash costs of producing this gold come in at US$658 per ounce of gold sold.
TMAC has operated the Doris North gold mine at Hope Bay since early 2017, after acquiring the 1,600-square-kilometre property earlier from Newmont Mining Corp.
This map shows the location of TMAC’s Hope Bay complex. (File image)
The Hope Bay gold field, which is roughly 80 km long and 20 km wide, is located on the mainland about 65 km east of Bathurst Inlet, 150 km southwest of Cambridge Bay and 700 km northeast of Yellowknife.
Now that its regulatory permits for expansion are all in place, TMAC hopes to have mining operations underway at its Madrid North and Madrid South deposits by 2020, and at its Boston deposit by 2022.
Expansion into three new mines to the south of Doris North will likely trigger the production, potentially, of many millions of ounces of gold over the next 20 years.
The company has said the Madrid and Boston locations together contain more than 3.5 million ounces of gold, and that their measured and indicated mineral resource estimate for the entire Hope Bay project stands at about 4.91 million ounces, but the company continues to do exploratory drilling.
Wow, this is interesting. As the North Baffin negotiator, I ended up using my skills to work with all four regions of Nunavut, albeit only three are recognized officially at the moment. This belt, along with the others around George Lake and Izok Lake were the final pieces of the Inuit mineral ownership which is meant to eventually assist Inuit in all three regions to benefit. North Baffin helped Kitikmeot out in this are by providing over 800 square miles of sub-surface while South Baffin helped Kivalliq by providing 1600 square miles of sub-surface in the Rankin-Whale Cove-Baker Lake lands.
What this means, is that this dumb ESKIMO was involved and negotiated the ownership of Inuit sub-surface in the last four mines that have been developed. We always felt it would take 25-30 years (1 generation) to start to finally reap the benefits. It is also the time frame to teach a base foundation of young educated Inuit who can provide the leadership we seriously need today.
Those who have the power to envision the future can prepare their people for that future, which we did, but unfortunately we have had the wrong leadership since to actually implement this preparatory work. At the minimum, Nunavut Sivuniksavut has provided the base foundation of well-founded, self-identified and successful young Inuit who are confident and capable ambassadors.
I hadn’t imagined seeing four mines, albeit Meadowbank is on its’ last legs while Meladine is just beginning developed all on the IOL we worked so hard to own, as I argued that meaningless IOL sub-surface was in contradiction with the Preamble and objectives listed in the beginning…(Heh heh. I have many other tidbits of Eskimo IQ).
Anyways, there are more lands that will be developed in the future, some with terrestrial access to offshore resources. The overall approach was to ensure that we had a four or five-pronged approach to ensure Inuit had multiple ways to benefit from this agreement.
I dither, so I will end it there for now… there are stories to every IOL parcel, and every community within each of the four Inuit regions…North\South Baffin; Kivalliq; Kitikmeot.
Wow!
40,050 ounces of gold at $1,731 per ounce equals $69,326,550 of revenue. That’s lots of money.
The cost of producing that gold is half of that, so the profit was about $34.6 million.
That is about $1,000 profit for every Inuit in Nunavut.
Since, we are told, that works out to 6 cents per share, there must be about 577,000,000 shares.
How many shares do Inuit have?
Some southerners got shares for contributing their money, which they plan to get back.
Other southerners got salaries for contributing their time and experience.
Some Inuit are getting salaries for contributing their time and effort.
How many shares did Inuit receive for contributing the gold they owned, which they do not expect to get back?
All the dominant families in communities throughout Nunavut
who always get brand new vechiles and boats ?
The Inuit people who get brand new houses all the time ?
The people who get good jobs, in all walks of life, but are
very incompetent at what they do ?
A lot of this money comes from Nunavut itself.
It is not the fault of Southerners if local committees are
ripping off their own people, and it has been going on for
many years.
It seems from this report that the mine is expected to generate $100,000 of profit for every Inuk in Nunavut.
Except, every Inuk in Nunavut won’t get that money, because we don’t own any shares in the mine.
Maybe it’s time for us Inuit to learn to be miners. Then we could use Nunavut Trust money to pay for the startup costs of a gold mine that is truly ours.
No more, here’s a Skidoo, here’s a boat, here’s a Honda. We’ll buy our own toys.
Why does Kitikmeot is always wiping sh.t off our face, when are the people just going to get along??? or just stupid jealousy of our community, we try so hard for our people and we just get sh.t on. We love our community, when will they let us take care of it, tired of being the lose end and just get scraps, we are learning to fight for ourselves.