Excellent post "Been There", thank you.

"Joltin – How long to build a mine at FDN?

2 years from the ‘starting gun’ going off.

The time line starts once they have permits, money in the bank, bulk metallurgical work done, and a contractor lined up. Mine design would already have been developed pending tweaking of the actual mining plan based on underground drilling results.

With the permit in hand, the three big factors that would determine how long it would take to get into production are:
1) Securing a mining contractor;
2) Sourcing long lead time equipment, and;
3) Ground conditions.

As Fearless mentioned before, miners are in short supply due to the crash of the industry from the late 80’s through to the early 2000’s. Now combined with the number of mines being developed there are very few miners and mining contractors that are not committed. If they go with a North American, Australian or African contractor the project would probably have to be scheduled to fit with the completion of another project. Possibly a year + delay. Alternatively they could look at one of the Chinese firms (as the oil sand projects have been) to do the project.

Once they sign the contract it will take about 3 months to mobilize. As we saw with the FDN drills, things can get hung up in customs for a while. Surface prep for the decline takes about a month depending on how much they have to excavate and prep the area around the decline entrance. Assuming they drive the decline through stable ground conditions they should be able to advance at 10+/- meters/day. If they have to bolt the roof or grout because of water flow it will be slower in those areas (that is the reason they have been drilling the ‘geotechnical’ holes along the proposed path of the decline to see what they may encounter). So from the ‘go’ they could do about 2 km of decline work in the first year. As they get to the various levels they could start concurrent work on drifts, drilling stations and stope (actual mining faces) development on those levels.

As to the shaft, if they plan on putting in a concrete collar (which I suspect that they will because of the surface weathering and potential surface water issues) it takes about 3 months. Once the collar is in place a good rate of advance would be around 4 meters per day. So a 600m shaft would take about a year.

Work on the decline and the shaft could be done concurrently depending on availability of personnel and equipment resources. At the same time surface work on surface mine development (surface water diversion, river diversion, tailing pond development, mill site development, mining roads, etc) would be going on. Other surface work such as camp construction, putting in a power lines to the grid, upgrading road access, etc would be fit in there somewhere.

The long lead time equipment is a big unknown. Historically most mines would buy used equipment, including mills, from closed mines and refurbish it for use plus add whatever new equipment they needed. With the level of activity in oil, potash, construction etc there is a tremendous shortage of equipment and everything from the actual equipment (trucks, scoops, drills, hoists, conveyers, crushers, transformers, etc) to the spares (try to find tires for heavy equipment) are all back ordered by months. In many cases the lead time to delivery is well over a year. Actual construction (assembly) of the mill and associated works would take around a year once the pieces are on site.

So all totalled assume they could get the mine running in about two years from the signing of a contract. This could be sped up if they have taken out options on the delivery of long lead capital equipment (I think they would have had to announce this or shown it in their financial updates). However there are also lots of things that could slow them down. One of the ones they can anticipate is bad ground conditions.

Whenever drill results start reporting rates of drill core recovery and lost drill holes you know you are going to have problems. Both are indicative of poor ground conditions (water movement through faults, shears and fractures that have eroded away rock) through which water is almost always moving. This means that they will have to stop and grout (very fine cement injected under high pressure to seal the openings) every time they encounter one of these areas so it can really slow things down. Hopefully they have been filling/cementing each of the drill holes as they have drilled them so they don’t have the additional problem of encountering them as they mine.

So most probable case --- 2 years from the staring gun with lots of bumps along the way (everyone has them).