The Northern Miner July 9 2018 Issue

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CANADIAN MINING SYMPOSIUM: PHOTO HIGHLIGHTS FROM LONDON / 14–15 Geotech_Earlug_2016_Alt2.pdf 1 2016-06-24 4:27:20 PM

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TECHNOLOGY METALS High-demand lithium and cobalt remain explorer favourites / 9–13

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JULY 9–22, 2018 / VOL. 104 ISSUE 14 / GLOBAL MINING NEWS · SINCE 1915 / $3.99 / WWW.NORTHERNMINER.COM

Mexican Gold’s Las Minas has big-time backers ZACATECAS  | Gold-silver deposit debunks ‘myth that skarns are difficult, poddy deposits’ BY TRISH SAYWELL tsaywell@northernminer.com

I Standing on Black Iron’s Shymanivske iron ore deposit near Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine, from left: Alexander Sobko, environment specialist at Black Iron subsidiary Shymanivske Steel; Matt Simpson, CEO of Black Iron; Lyudila Reminskaya, consultant on land issues, Shymanivske Steel; Mykola Bayrak, general director, Shymanivske Steel; Pavlo Komarytsky, first deputy general director, Shymanivske Steel; Yana Novikova, general director’s assistant, Shymanivske Steel; and Yevgeny Nikolenko, chief geologist, Shymanivske Steel.   PHOTO BY JOHN CUMMING

Black Iron advances Shymanivske in Ukraine SITE VISIT

| Junior seeks offtake agreement to fund scaled-down, two-phase premium iron ore mine region, 400 km east of Kryvyi Rih “WHY WOULD — into the neighbouring Russian BY JOHN CUMMING ARCELORMITTAL jcumming@northernminer.com Federation. KRYVYI RIH, UKRAINE Only a few weeks before, in late CHOOSE TO January 2014, Black Iron had comolitical turmoil in mining pleted a bankable feasibility study PUT SO MUCH countries may come and go, at Shymanivske showing attractive MONEY INTO but great deposits endure, economics for a 10-million-tonne- UKRAINE? ONE, waiting for better days to be devel- per-year iron ore mine, producing oped. That’s an old mining maxim a premium product with 68% iron THEY HAVE TO BE Black Iron (TSX: BKI; US-OTC: content, and low impurities. COMFORTABLE BKIRF) cofounder and CEO Matt Simpson says Black Iron had Simpson has lived every day since circled up just shy of US$800 mil- POLITICALLY, AND Ukraine’s political crisis erupted in lion of the US$1.1 billion needed TWO, BECAUSE 2014, and put on ice the Toronto- to build the mine, with the rest to based junior’s shovel-ready, Shy- have come from an export-credit THEY’RE MAKING A manivske iron ore project, which agency, and an equipment supplier. TON OF MONEY.”

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is now coming back to life beside the city of Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine, 330 km southeast of the capital Kyiv. In events that shook Eastern Europe and reverberate around the world to this day, Ukraine’s bloody Revolution of Dignity began in February 2014, with protests in Kyiv’s Independence Square that culminated in the ouster of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. In the ensuing weeks, Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea and Russianbacked separatist forces launched a still ongoing civil war to bring Ukraine’s two easternmost oblasts, or provinces — called the Donbass

“What started to get scary was when the government started to turn against its own people, and started shooting people,” Simpson recalls. “That was when it was, ‘Holy, what is going on here?’ and there was quite a bit of concern for the employees and making sure they’re okay. “We would have been off building a mine, but then Russia invaded Ukraine, iron ore prices subsequently fell from US$95 all the way to US$37 per tonne, and we just put the brakes on the project,” Simpson says. “There was shock. Everything was looking great, but that carpet just got pulled out from under us, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

MATT SIMPSON CEO, BLACK IRON

Black Iron clamped down on costs for the next three years, and cut its local workforce to only seven full-time employees by the end of 2017. “It was the right thing to do to protect the cash we had and wait for better days,” Simpson says. “And those better days are here.” He cites several reasons behind his sunnier outlook. “The first is, the front line hasn’t really moved since the original See BLACK IRON / 6

t all started with a cup of coffee in Zacatecas. Brian Robertson was swapping stories with a fellow engineer when he learned about 30 historical mines in the cliffs and ravines near the small village of Las Minas, 177 km from the port city of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico. Robertson was president and CEO of Source Exploration at the time, a Canadian junior that was investigating a silver property in the state of Zacatecas in north-central Mexico, roughly 1,100 km away. (Source Exploration was renamed Mexican Gold (TSXV: MEX) in April 2017, and Robertson continues as president and CEO.) But Robertson was on the hunt for new assets, and the account of artisanal miners extracting ore in Las Minas with grades of between 20 grams and 40 grams gold per tonne and up to 15% copper, which was then shipped to smelters in the U.S. and Europe, piqued his interest. What puzzled him was why no one had drilled the area, so he made arrangements to look for himself. What he saw when he arrived were old workings in the hillsides dating from 1870 to 1910, and extensive skarn under dense vegetation. He also discerned that Las Minas, 370 km east of Mexico City, hosted one of the largest, under-explored skarn systems known in Mexico, and that while the region’s production history began as far back as the Aztec era, his predecessor had barely explored the area to any depth. “They were mining what was exposed in the wall rocks in the sides of the valley and didn’t mine anything below surface — simply what was outcropping,” he recalls. “I could see there was potential for a large, open-pit resource, and potential for undiscovered high-grade zones they weren’t aware of.” After optioning the concessions in late 2009, Source Exploration raised enough money to start drilling them in 2011. Matt Liard, now the company’s senior consulting geologist, remembers being asked to take a look at Las Minas in early 2013 before he

started working for the company. One of his clients, worried about Source Exploration’s languishing share price, had asked him to evaluate the project and determine whether he was throwing his money away. Liard concluded it was far from a poor investment. Not only were Source’s assay results impressive, but with no previous drilling to guide it the company had hit ore-grade, substantial-length intersections at each of six or seven old showings. “When I put the drilling into a 3-D modelling software, the first thing I noticed was that I felt we could probably go in there and start drilling for resource right away,” he recalls. “I thought, of anything I had looked at in the previous five or six years, Las Minas was one that you could go in with a small amount of money and drill off a resource.” Liard was so keen on the project that he presented it to several of his contacts in the industry, some See MEXICAN GOLD / 2 PM40069240

ROSS BEATY: MOGUL CALLS FOR SUSTAINABILITY OVER GROWTH / 4

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