Sudbury’s newest nickel and copper mine operator has successfully completed extraction of its first bulk surface sample from its Crean Hill mine project, southwest of the city.
Magna Mining reports it’s carved out, crushed and hauled away 20,715 tonnes of rock from the former Inco mine and trucked it north to Glencore’s Strathcona mill, near Onaping, for processing.
Extracting the sample began on July 2 with the final blast on Aug. 15. The last haul truck arrived Aug. 29. Milling the ore started Sept. 2 and is scheduled to be finished today, Sept. 6.
In a statement, Magna CEO Jason Jessup said Glencore is processing their bulk sample this week and they expect to have assay results to announce in the next four to six weeks.
The homegrown company intends to put Crean Hill back into operation and become a significant nickel and copper player in the Sudbury Basin. Inco ran Crean Hill as an underground operation from 1900 to 2002. Magna picked up the property from Vale in November 2022 and wasted little time in putting the drill bit into it to tap into previously underexplored mineralized zones.
The company sees an opportunity for both surface and underground mining. The bulk sample was taken from an area on its property called the 109 Footwall Zone.
A bulk sample is an advanced exploration technique — test mining, of sorts — that helps a mining company better understand the metallurgy of an ore body and helps it plan how to efficiently mine and process the ore to maximize the metal recoveries.
Magna said the information gathered will be used to better understand the mineralization in the 109 Footwall Zone and help them design mining stopes to access the underground portion of where it wants to mine.
Magna said the sample taken was bigger than originally planned but it was done on time with no injuries or harmful impacts to the environment.
To do this, Magna struck deals to involve local Indigenous people. The company hired ADLP and Z’Gamok, two Indigenous-owned entities, as its mining contractor and crushing-haulage contractor, respectively.
Geologically speaking, Jessup said they liked what they saw in the bulk sample.
“We observed semi-massive and massive sulphides throughout the sample and initial grab samples are reconciling well to our internal grade estimates.
The company has also started pumping water from the old underground workings.
Crean Hill is one of two former mining properties that Magna holds in the Sudbury area, the other being the Shakespeare Mine further west, near McKerrow. Shakespeare is a much larger 180-square-kilometre land package that once hosted an open-pit mine. There, Magna has a permitted processing plant and a tailings storage area.
