The Eastmain gold project is located in the Upper Eastmain Greenstone belt, 320 km northwest of Chibougamau and 800km North of Montreal. The property covers 8,000 ha, consists of 152 mineral claims and one industrial lease permit, and is under option agreement by Benz Mining Corp. The Eastmain deposit was discovered in 1969 by Placer Development Limited who intersected the discovery hole of 1.5m @ 13.4 g/t in the gold, copper, and silver-bearing “A Zone” while drill testing an airborne geophysical conductor. Zones B and C were subsequently discovered when Placer drill tested additional geophysical targets. Mining of the A zone in 1995 produced 118,000T of ore at 10.5g/t Au, with 95% recoveries for total recovered gold of 40,000 oz. However, mining operations stopped in November 1995 due to a low gold price environment and logistical issues associated with using an ice road for the transportation of ore, which was the only avenue of ground transportation at the time.
The property is now accessible via Route 167, which provides all-weather access to the property and was completed in 2016 to facilitate access to the Renard diamond mine. This new road access will also allow Benz Mining to fully explore and evaluate an extended property package surrounding the historic Eastmain mine. Historical operations have proven that gold mineralization on the property is associated with semi-massive and massive sulfides, where the gold is predominantly co-incident with pyrrhotite in quartz veins. This geological feature of the deposit theoretically explains the prior success when drilling geophysical exploration targets on the property. Despite this, however, very little geophysical exploration work has been carried out since the 1980s. Based on the well known geological and metallurgical features of the Eastmain deposit and the successful exploration track record of the Benz management team, Benz Mining’s objective is to apply modern geophysical exploration techniques and expertise and establish a significant, new high-grade resource within 2 years.
On the 24th May 2023 Benz Mining released an Updated Independent Mineral Resource Estimate (MRE) in accordance with NI 43-101 guidelines defined on Eastmain Project at a 2.5 g/t Au cut-off:
| Classification | Tonnes (M) | Au (g/t) | Au (koz) |
| Indicated | 1.3 | 9.0 | 384 |
| Inferred | 3.8 | 5.1 | 621 |
Note: rounding errors apply
