A mineral exploration company is quietly raising dollars for its goal of reviving a small gold mine near Flin Flon.
Satori Resources, which owns the long-idle Tartan Lake mine, announced last month it is contemplating a private placement of flow-through shares to generate $300,000.
The funds would be used to finance exploration efforts at the Tartan mine site, the Toronto-based company said.
Earlier, in June, Satori announced it had raised $260,000 through a private placement of shares and by issuing flow-through shares.
Those funds were to be used for working capital and “to finance Canadian projects.” Satori owns 100 per cent of Tartan and identifies the site as its primary property.
Satori raised another $174,750 in August 2015 thanks to a separate private placement offering and issuance of flow-through shares.
To generate further dollars, Satori said this past May it was “assessing near-term revenue potential from tailings reprocessing” – extracting gold still trapped inside mine waste at the Tartan site, an idea the company had previously discussed.
Satori called Tartan a “large, under-explored property,” with past work have focused mainly on the mine site area, not the surrounding land.
The company said its future plans for the site include a preliminary economic assessment, ground geophysics and a drilling campaign, all of which are subject to financing availability.
Satori could still be a long way from its goal of restarting the mine. In January 2015, then-CEO Walter Henry estimated that Tartan needed between $7 million and $9 million, and 18 to 24 months of work, to reopen.
During its brief run, from May 1987 to November 1989, Tartan generated 45,000 ounces of gold. In today’s dollars, that much gold would be worth over $61 million.
According to Satori, an estimate of “indicated” tonnes cites another 130,000 ounces of gold at the site. A less reliable “inferred” estimate states there is another 240,000 ounces left.
But in mining, it takes money to make money – and Satori does not seem to have an abundance of it. After Henry stepped down as CEO of the company in April 2015, his replacement, Bruce Reid, agreed to decline a salary “during this time of re-structuring in an effort to reduce expenses and preserve the Tartan Lake Gold Mine project,” according to a company news release.
It’s not clear how many workers would be required if Tartan were to reopen. A previous estimate by one CEO pegged the number at 60 to 70.
It’s not for lack of trying that Tartan sits silent more than a quarter-century after its closure.
At one point executives were considering operating the mine in conjunction with a separate gold project near Denare Beach. Nothing ever happened with that property.
In the spring of 2014, according to reports, Satori was looking to grow medicinal marijuana inside the Tartan mine shaft and use the sales revenue to relaunch the mine. That too never happened.
Tartan is located about 12 km northeast of Flin Flon. Satori did not return a request for comment for this article.
