Red Eagle Mining’s Santa Rosa gold mine is just down the road from Medellin, Colombia, but CEO Ian Slater’s path to full production leads through Lima.
A group of Peruvian mining families stepped up for a good chunk of the $11.3-million financing that Red Eagle just closed, Slater told me in a Tuesday phone interview.
STRACON GyM, the contractor building Santa Rosa, is based in Peru and earlier put about US$7-million in equity into Red Eagle -- the first time it’s taken an equity stake in a public company. That gave these Peruvian backers confidence in a mine being built and part-owned by people they know and trust, Slater explained.
STRACON also built Peru’s La Arena mine owned by Rio Alto Mining, which was swallowed by Tahoe Resources last year for more than $1 billion.
“We’re the only junior building a gold mine in the Andes right now,” Slater said.
It’s too early to celebrate. The first gold pour at Santa Rosa isn’t expected until September, with commercial production targeted before the end of the year. And building and ramping up production at a mine is no easy task - especially in a five-year time frame -- as numerous companies have shown. But even getting to this stage is an accomplishment in a bear market that has bloodied, bruised and killed off peers.
Red Eagle’s gold mine is now 60% complete and under budget on capex. That’s in part thanks to a Colombian peso that has moved from 1,900 pesos to US$1 when the feasibility study was done to 3,000 pesos to US$1.
In addition to favourable forex, lead items came in early and Red Eagle was able to hire the best engineers during a downturn that saw funding for construction projects dry up, Slater noted.
“It’s possible to come in under budget in this kind of market,” he said.
Red Eagle’s plan is to mine the San Ramon shear zone, then expand to other mineralized zones on areas Red Eagle has tied up on the larger Santa Rosa property. That’s where the latest financing comes in. Part of the proceeds will be used to drill and prove up the economics on the other shear zones.
The plan?
Red Eagle will begin production with a 1,000-tpd mill but is building for a 2,000tpd capacity. Estimated production for 2017 is 70,000 ounces of gold, but moving into other zones could boost that to 140,000 oz. eventually.
“We’re pretty confident those zones are economic but we have to prove it,” Slater says. “If we can speed that up, it’s well worth doing.”
The other use of the cash will be to develop Vetas, the gold play it won control of after a drawn-out hostile takeover of CB Gold last year. Slater says prior management was looking at an open-pittable scenario, but a nearby watershed is a red flag on the permitting side. Red Eagle is investigating lower-impact underground options with a much higher cutoff, as well as doing social and community work at Vetas.
CB Gold has a historical resource, but Slater says that will eventually be replaced with one using a different geological model. Most of the drilling was surface drilling, but he says a future work program will probably include some underground drilling.
He described Vetas as “an amazing property” that’s “hugely accretive” to Red Eagle shareholders. “They drilled about 70,000 metres on the property and hit veins 177 times. The average hit was about 30 g/t gold,” Slater says. So worth chasing despite the mine build at Santa Rosa, he adds.
While Vetas is located in the Ventana Gold area play about an 8-hour drive from Santa Rosa, there are synergies on the operational side between CG Gold and Red Eagle, says Slater. On the shareholder front, too: one of the CB Gold shareholders who tendered to Red Eagle was Vancouver mining tycoon Ross Beaty, who was already a Red Eagle shareholder and now owns about 6% of the stock.
Red Eagle owns 68% of CB Gold shares and has been adding to its stake since winning control. But it can’t take CB Gold private because that would require 2/3rds approval from minority shareholders, and Batero Gold owns 24% of all CB Gold shares, Slater explains.
“We have some other exciting high-grade gold targets in Colombia that we love, so the plan is to use CB as Red Eagle’s exploration arm in Colombia,” says Slater, who visits Colombia at least quarterly (COO Bob Bell lives in Medellin).
At Santa Rosa, one of the largest gold mining areas in Colombia during colonial times, it’s full speed ahead. A 200-metre decline is complete that will be used to access ore down to the reserve floor (current reserves are 405,000 ounces at 5.2 g/t Au, at a 2 g/t cutoff). There is plenty of exploration upside below that level and elsewhere on the property, according to the CEO.
“There are adits all over the hillside,” he says. “We’ve mapped and sampled 3,000 historic mines on our properties.” For most of those, artisinal miners exploited the oxides down to only about 20 metres depth, he adds.
Community work at Santa Rosa has included everything from a joint venture with the Canadian embassy to open a culinary school to sourcing local food and uniforms and using a local university for Red Eagle studies. Jobs, too, of course.
Slater, who was marketing in Europe last week, says the emergent gold bull market has generated a lot more phone calls and interest, including from generalist fund managers.
The pitch for investors: Slater notes that peer companies set to produce between 60,000 and 93,000 ounces of gold next year trade for cash flow and EBITDA multiples that are double, triple and more Red Eagle’s: “We’ll have to be revalued.”
Red Eagle Mining
Price: .58
Shares outstanding: 186.5 million
Market cap: $108 million
Cash: $25 million
