The playbook — gold · October 14, 2026
Santa Fe restart study pegs post-tax NPV at US$820 million
Lahontan's updated Nevada heap-leach study shows an 11-year mine life — built almost entirely on a US$3,600 gold price.
Lahontan Gold published an updated economic study for its Santa Fe Mine, a past-producing gold-silver operation in Nevada’s Walker Lane belt. The headline numbers: an eleven-year mine life and a post-tax NPV5 of US$820 million, with a 40.1% internal rate of return (the annual percentage return the project earns on money invested). This is a Preliminary Economic Assessment — a first-pass study of whether a mine makes money, not a construction blueprint. The company states plainly there is no certainty the PEA will be realized. Santa Fe already produced 359,202 ounces of gold and 702,067 ounces of silver when it ran as an open-pit heap-leach mine from 1988 to 1995.
The rock here is low grade: 0.76 grams of gold per tonne over 62.8 million tonnes — meaning each tonne of ore carries less than a thousandth of an ounce. That works as a bulk-tonnage heap leach (crushed ore stacked on pads and soaked with solution to pull the gold out), the same method that worked here before. But the economics lean almost entirely on the price assumption. The base case uses US$3,600 per ounce of gold, well above long-run consensus, and all-in sustaining cost of US$2,250 per ounce leaves a thin margin. The NPV jumped roughly fourteenfold from the 2024 study’s US$56.5 million — and that leap came mostly from the higher gold price and an expanded resource, not from new technical de-risking. CEO Kimberly Ann’s background is in investor relations and corporate development; she helped steer corporate communications at Prodigy Gold before its C$340 million sale to Argonaut in 2012. The stock shed 4.2% over the past three months while gold edged up 1.2% and junior gold miners rose 8.5% — a roughly 12.7-point gap that says the market isn’t paying for this story yet.
Several honest caveats sit under the headline. No Mineral Reserves have been defined — the study incorporates Inferred resources considered too speculative to categorize economically, which the release discloses. Gold recoveries vary by material type: oxide material runs 52%–71%, transition material 45%–49% (with a 28% floor per the resource cut-off assumptions), and Santa Fe sulfide non-oxide at 68% — but York non-oxide recoveries are 0%, capping value from that portion of the resource. Permitting is still ahead: the Mine Plan of Operations has not yet gone to the BLM, and construction is targeted for 2027. Watch for the full NI 43-101 technical report within 45 days, assays from a 20-hole, roughly 3,500-metre drill program at West Santa Fe later in 2026, and a maiden resource estimate there by year-end.