Canadian Zinc fine-tunes its plan at Prairie Creek

VANCOUVER — It’s a tough market for juniors with development stage assets, and that’s especially true for Canadian Zinc (TSX: CZN; US-OTC: CZICF) and its Prairie Creek polymetallic project, 500 km west of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. Prairie Creek boasts a large zinc-lead-copper-silver resource and offers a quick path to production, but its isolated locale creates unique challenges.

A rise in zinc prices would certainly help, though the industrial metal hasn’t really come to life over the past year despite positive buzz amongst industry analysts. So Canadian Zinc is approaching Prairie Creek from an optimization angle, which it hopes will boost the economics set out in a prefeasibility study filed in June 2012.

Vice-president of exploration and chief operating officer Alan Taylor says there’s plenty of room for improvement at Prairie Creek, which already features strong projected economic returns. The current mine plan envisions a 1,000-t/d mill that would produce zinc and lead concentrates without using cyanide. An average 92% of the silver values in the plant feed would also be recovered.

Read the complete article at NorthernMiner.com/news/canadian-zinc