- ESGold CEO and Director Paul Mastantuono recently appeared on the Exploring Mining Podcast to discuss the company’s reuse and discovery plans for the historic Montauban gold and silver mine site in Canada, west of Quebec City
- ESGold is sidestepping the traditional junior miner model of obtaining investor financing for mine development, focusing instead on building revenues through tailings cleanup and repurposing that can then be reinvested in mining operations
- The gold and silver resource developer is focused on an environmental and social governance mission that would minimize pollutants while repurposing waste minerals for useful construction products
- The company’s operation in Quebec is fully permitted and expects to begin production this year
Production is expected to begin by year end on a tailings cleanup operation by precious metal resource developer ESGold (CSE: ESAU) (OTCQB: ESAUF). The process will provide for the economically and environmentally friendly reuse of mineral resources at the Montauban mine in Quebec where new gold and silver discovery is expected, company CEO and Director Paul Mastantuono told the Exploring Mining Podcast recently.
“Even right now with values, gold (at its) current prices, that low-hanging fruit — (recovering) surface material, tailings, … 400,000 metric tons — we have the capacity to generate on our first four, five years, close to $350 million on this low-hanging fruit, with almost zero cost,” Mastantuono said of the company’s reuse-first strategy (https://ibn.fm/WMXKM).
“(And then we would) be able to take that money and invest it and build real value going into the ground,” he added in regard to the plans for later mining of precious metals. “That was our whole focus, just keep things very simple.”
ESGold holds 265 mining claims on the historic Montauban mine site in Quebec, covering 13,116 hectares (about 32,410 acres) of abandoned gold and silver exploration 80 kilometers (49.7 miles) west of the province’s capital city.
Mastantuono’s comments in the podcast addressed the company’s strategic shift toward focusing on high-value, low-cost resources like tailings and surface ore bodies as a means of delivering shareholder value by moving away from the traditional drilling-heavy model of junior mining (https://ibn.fm/FxSin).
“(It’s) focusing on simplified solutions and keeping on track with what is the simplest way to generate cash flow,” he said. “We’re able to create a concentrate, and if we’ll be able to get that concentrate high enough, then we’re able to literally pour the concentrate directly into a wabi furnace that we have on site and literally pour doré bars very, very quickly.”
ESGold’s heavy emphasis on building a profitable metals market model from ESG (environmental, social, and governance) values will rely on gravity separation in a Humphrey spiral concentrator to recover mica, gold and silver from the tailings without having to use the cyanide polluting extraction methods employed by other recovery operations.
The recovered mica concentrate will be used to create a stronger-than-concrete material for products such as bricks, cinder blocks, paving stones, patio tiles, parking columns and highway Jersey barriers, based on a clean technology developed by partner DMCMS Inc.
The company plans to begin processing the tailings within the next six months, Mastantuono said, potentially by the end of October. Testing of the Humphrey spiral concentrator this month has been under way to establish whether production will be able to speed up with the pouring of doré bars directly onsite.
For more information, visit the company’s website at https://esgold.com.
NOTE TO INVESTORS: The latest news and updates relating to ESAUF are available in the company’s newsroom at https://ibn.fm/ESAUF
