Fireside chat with Kirkland Lake Gold’s Tony Makuch

The Northern Miner hosted its third annual Progressive Mine Forum in October. During the event, Tony Makuch, president and CEO of Kirkland Lake Gold (TSX: KL; NYSE: KL), sat down with Northern Miner publisher Anthony Vaccaro for an in-depth fireside chat in front of an audience at the MaRS Discovery District in downtown Toronto. The following is an edited transcript of the discussion. The following is an edited transcript of the discussion, to watch it on video, click here. Anthony Vaccaro: Kirkland Lake Gold’s Macassa mine has a fully electric fleet and was first to use electric 40-tonne underground haul trucks. Can you take us back to when you decided to take the company down this road?  Tony Makuch: Macassa was operated with battery-powered equipment, battery-powered locomotives and air-operated machines for the first 65 years of mining. Now, I had worked at Macassa before, but coming back to the mine in 2016, it already had electric battery-powered trucks before I got there. We had some smaller, 20-tonne, 12-tonne capacity trucks and some smaller load-haul-dump (LHD) machines running in the mine. They were the first generation of the battery-powered equipment. Continue reading at The Northern Miner.