Nine Mile Metals eyes second life for Wedge Mine in storied Bathurst camp

Junior miners spend most of their existence chasing grade. Nine Mile Metals Ltd. has the opposite problem at parts of its Bathurst Mining Camp land package: ore so rich that the region's processing infrastructure isn't built to handle it. It's a strange complaint for a resource company to have. At Nine Mile Brook, drilling has returned intervals grading as high as 15% copper alongside significant lead, zinc, silver and gold. That grade is high enough that the company has entered an agreement with commodities giant Glencore to test whether some of the material could bypass conventional milling altogether and go straight to a smelter. As Nine Mile CEO Patrick Cruickshank explains, a mill is optimized around a specific type of ore, so it would need to make adjustments for different material. "The biggest concern is impurities, because the milling process typically helps separate and remove those elements," Cruickshank told Proactive. Whole drill core has already been shipped to Glencore for direct-to-smelter testing, while two additional bulk samples are undergoing metallurgical and gravity separation testing, a roughly three-month process. Depending on the outcome, the lead-zinc component could ultimately be routed to a Glencore facility in Quebec, with copper-gold material potentially destined for the Horne Smelter. Even logistics become a variable at this scale. A 3,000-tonne bulk sample carries an estimated contained metal value of roughly $4,000 per tonne,