Kaminak Gold named a TSX Venture 50 company

Eira Thomas has done it again.

Kaminak Gold Corporation, the Vancouver-based company of which Thomas is president and CEO, has been named a TSX Venture 50 company in 2015. Kaminak is one of the top 10 companies in the mining category of the award.  Every year, the TSX Venture 50 ranks the strongest companies on the TSX Venture Exchange by share price, trading volume, market capitalization and analyst coverage in each of the five major industry sectors that make up the exchange—mining, oil and gas, technology and life sciences, diversified industries and clean technology. Over the past year, Kaminak and the 49 other winning companies have had strong growth and major returns to their shareholders and are actively traded in the market. 

Thomas, a well-known Canadian geologist and a graduate of the University of Toronto (B.Sc. Geology, 1990), has been active in the Canadian mineral exploration and mining industries for more than 25 years. In addition to leading Kaminak Gold, Thomas is the director of a number of other public companies and organizations, including Suncor Energy Inc., Lucara Diamond Corp., the Yukon Mineral Advisory Board, the University of Toronto Alumni Association and the University of Toronto President’s Internal Advisory Council. In the 1990s, Thomas led the Aber Resources Ltd. field exploration team that discovered Diavik, Canada’s second diamond mine. She spent more than 16 years at Aber, becoming vice-president exploration in 1997. Thomas joined the board of directors in 1998 and served until 2006, when she resigned to focus on her role as CEO of Stornoway Diamond Corporation. Stornoway is developing the Renard Mine, which is Quebec’s first diamond mine.

Thomas has received several industry awards, including Canada's Top 40 under 40, the William Harvey Gross Award, the Canadian Institute of Mining’s Past Pesidents’ Memorial Medal and Minerva for B.C. Women Natural Resources Award. She has also been named one of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women and selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

Kaminak Gold is advancing its100 per cent-owned flagship Coffee Gold Project, a multi-million ounce, high-grade oxide gold district that is amenable to heap leaching. The project is located in west-central Yukon, approximately 130 kilometres south of Dawson City and approximately 160 kilometres northwest of Carmacks. The property can be accessed by the Yukon River, helicopter or airplane. A 23-kilometre all-season road connects the barge landing site, airstrip, camp and gold deposits.  Because of the barge landing site on the river and the all-weather road, the project can operate all year. “Coffee was discovered from drilling in 2010,” said Thomas. “Since then we have completed more than 200,000 metres of drilling and defined a sizable gold resource.”

The resource in question measures 719,000 ounces indicated (14 million tonnes grading at 1.56 grams/tonne gold) and an inferred resource of 3,434,000 ounces (79 million tonnes grading at 1.36 g/t gold). “It is important to note that more than one-half of the gold resource at Coffee reports as oxide mineralization and has demonstrated amenability to heap leaching,” Thomas said. In 2014 Kaminak completed a preliminary economic analysis (PEA) of the Coffee project. The PEA confirmed that Coffee represents a robust, high margin, 11-year, open-pit gold mining opportunity using a gold price of US$1,250 and a Canadian/U.S. exchange rate of $0.95, generating a pre-tax net present value of C$522 million and an internal rate of return of 33 per cent.

“A feasibility study is now underway at Coffee that is expected to be completed next year,” Thomas said. “After that, we expect to move into the permitting process, which, in Yukon, is expected to take approximately 24 months.” Thomas said considerable resource upside remains at Coffee, with all of the deposits remaining open along strike and to depth. “Although 2015 has been devoted largely to the completion of our feasibility study, Kaminak will continue to progress exploration efforts later in the summer to help define this upside,” she said. “Planned exploration work includes soil sampling, mapping, prospecting and drilling.”