Prodigy reports Ontario Magino Gold PEA with $939M NPV, 36% IRR

Prodigy Gold Inc TSXV:PDG announced an updated preliminary economic assessment for its Magino Gold Project in northern Ontario. The report assumes a gold price of $1,200 an ounce and estimates resources to be 74.23 million tonnes grading 1.15 g/t gold with a strip ratio of 2.1:1. The pre-production capital cost is estimated at $405.6 million. The mine life is estimated at 11 years averaging 249,300 ounces gold annually, totalling over 2.61 million ounces at an average cash cost of $461 an ounce. At a 5% discount rate, the project is calculated to have a pre-tax net present value of $939 million. At an 8% discount rate, the NPV comes to $709 million. In the base case scenario the internal rate of return is 36% with a payback period of 1.9 years.

President/CEO Brian Maher tells ResourceClips.com, “We’re looking at having full feasibility done about the middle of the year, so it’ll be late 2Q, early 3Q. It’s absolutely our intention to take this into production ourselves.

“It’s absolutely our intention to take this into production ourselves—Brian Maher”

“Our new VP of Operations, Fred Mason, has been in the industry over 40 years building and operating gold mines and milling facilities globally. So we’ll have no problem with the next stages,” Maher adds.

“We’re always looking to add to our properties package in the district. We think very highly of that particular greenstone belt, so if an opportunity presents itself, we’ll certainly add to our ground.

“We have some land up in the Beardmore-Geraldton area, but by and large our focus now is on the Magino Project,” he says. “We’ve spun out some of our assets into a new company called Goldstream Exploration. It’s a private company right now, but it’ll be going public in Q1 of 2012. We’ve done that so we could focus our personnel as well as our financial resources on Magino.

“We have about $30 million in the bank right now, so our treasury is very well set. We can be patient with financing and do so if and when we feel market conditions are appropriate,” Maher emphasizes.

“I would encourage investors to look at the scope of this project,” he concludes. “As we go through the process of de-risking it by taking it to feasibility, I think it’s a clear pathway to share price appreciation and, given the fact that we’re located in the mining-friendly jurisdiction of Ontario, the fact that the project has very robust economics, there’s excellent infrastructure, an active mining district—when you add together all those incremental attributes you start to see why this is such a compelling project.”

This article was posted by Greg Klein - Resource Clips on Thursday, December 22nd, 2011 at 12:50 pm.

http://resourceclips.com/2011/12/22/prodigy-reports-ontario-magino-gold-pea-with-939m-npv-36-irr/