INNOVATION May-June 2016

J ust a decade ago, the Brucejack Gold Project in northern British Columbia was bare rock and a sealed underground portal. The site had been reclaimed by the previous owners who had discovered the smaller West Zone deposit but were unable to develop it due to low metal prices. Silver Standard Resources took over the property in 1999 and drilled into the adjacent Valley of the Kings zone in 2009, encountering visible gold and unearthing what is now considered one of the largest undeveloped high-grade gold deposits in the world. Based on a handful of promising drill holes, Pretium Resources Inc. bought the project in 2010 and forged ahead, undeterred by the industry downturn. Today, the site hosts over 400 people, and construction of the mill has begun, driven by a team with a single, collective focus: production in the summer of 2017. The mine area is 65 kilometres north of Stewart, BC, above the tree line in open, alpine tundra at an elevation of 1,400 metres, with little in the way of soil, plants or animals. Visitors to the site, however, are met with a hum of human activity, as Pretium constructs BC’s newest underground gold mine. “It’s been impressive when you think how, five years ago, this was merely a concept,” says Robert Quartermain, P.Geo., chief executive officer of Pretium Resources Inc., the company he created in late 2010 to buy the Brucejack project. “We had a piece of drill core and thought there was high-grade mineralisation there, and now here we are. This spring, we start construction of the mill building and, at the same time, we’re excavating underground. In the summer of 2017, we’ll start producing gold.”

One of the many benefits of developing a project in northern BC is that the Vancouver-based senior management group can visit the site easily and regularly. Quartermain and Pretium’s president, Joseph Ovsenek, P.Eng., visit at least once a month to check on progress and ensure the entire team stays focused on the schedule and budget required to meet the 2017 production goal. But the reasons Pretium rocketed from three employees in January 2011 to more than 700 employees and contractors and a fully permitted-and-financed project advancing underground in January 2016 go beyond location and people. The single biggest reason Pretium is able to survive and thrive during a brutal industry downturn is gold grade. Bonanza-Grade Gold “First and foremost is grade,” says Ovsenek, one of the original three people to form Pretium in the winter of 2010/2011. “We have half an ounce [14.18 grams] of gold per tonne of rock. That’s a very high- grade mine in current conditions. With these grades, we can sustain lower gold prices, and this has allowed us to raise the money to build a mine.” Brucejack has estimated reserves of 207 tonnes of gold. In March this year, the company announced the latest drill results from the underground infill drill program at Valley of the Kings. The reported assays included multiple intersections of high-grade and visible gold—four of which graded higher than 1,000 grams per tonne gold. These add to the 24 similarly rich intersections reported from the 2015/2016 infill drill program.

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