Name: Kittilä mine.

Location: The Kittilä mine is located in the Lapland region of northern Finland, about 900 km north of Helsinki and 150 km north of the Arctic Circle.

Controlling Company: Agnico Eagle Mines (100%).

Brief History: Swedish exploration company Riddarhyttan Resources acquired the Suurikuusikko gold deposits from the Finnish government in 1998 and focused its exploration efforts On this area. Agnico-Eagle acquired a 14% ownership interest in Riddarhyttan in 2004, and made a successful bid for all remaining shares of the company in May 2005. The following year, Agnico completed a final feasibility study on the project and began construction of the mine. First gold was poured in January 2009, with the processing plant achieving commercial production in May of that year.

Brief Description: The Kittilä mine is named after the nearby community of the same name. Kittilä mines one of the largest known gold deposits in Europe. The property consists of 11 130 ha in tenements and a mining licence covering 847 ha. The 3 000 t/d operation is expected to produce about 150 000 oz of gold in 2011 and an average 173 000 oz/y of gold from 2012 to 2015. Underground mining to extract deeper ore began in 2010. A feasibility study is currently under way to evaluate the potential expansion of the mine.

Products: Gold.

Mining Method: Openpit and underground. Underground mining involves open stoping followed by delayed backfill.

Major Infrastructure and Equipment: The Kittilä orebodies were initially mined from two openpits – Suuri and Roura – and underground operations were added in October 2010. The pits were mined out in November 2012. Mining is now entirely underground. Additional, small openpits will mine any remaining near-surface reserves in the future.

The underground method is open stoping, followed by delayed backfill. About 6 km of tunnels are developed each year to ensure enough ore production is available to keep the mill supplied. After extraction, stopes are filled with cemented backfill or paste backfill to allow the safe mining of adjacent stopes. Ore is trucked to the surface crusher using underground haul trucks through the 3 000-m-long ramp access system.

An estimated 3 000 t/d of ore are fed to the processing plant. The ore at Kittilä is treated through grinding, flotation, presure oxidation and carbon-in-leach circuits. The mine has the company’s only pressure oxidation circuit (autoclave), which is required because of the ore’s refractory nature. Gold from the leach circuit is stripped from the carbon and recovered from solution using electrowinning and then smelted in a furnace and poured into doré bars. Gold recovery of more than 83% is expected over the life of the mine.

Geology/Mineralisation: The region around the Kittilä mine is underlain by mafic volcanic and sedimentary rocks of the Kittilä greenstone belt, oriented nearly vertical. This greenstone belt is comparable to those hosting Agnico-Eagle's Canadian deposits in Quebec’s Abitibi region and Nunavut.

At the contact point between iron-rich and magnesium-rich rocks lies a 100-m- to 200-m-thick structural zone, known as the Suurikuusikko trend. This trend hosts the Kittilä deposit, where multiple mineralised zones have been traced over a strike length of more than 25 km.

Most of Agnico Eagle’s work has focused on a 4.5 km segment of the Suurikuusikko trend that hosts the five main zones of the known gold reserves and resources – Ketola, Etela, Suuri, Roura and Rimpi.

The ore at the Kittilä mine is refractory, making gold extraction relatively difficult, as the gold is generally ltrapped inside the two main sulphide minerals – arsenopyrite and arsenic-rich pyrite. Only about 2% is very fine-grained ‘free gold’ (not trapped in sulphide grains) and easier to extract. Most of this free gold is found in the outer, oxidised or eroded sections of the ore.

Reserves: Total proven and probable reserves as at December 31, 2012, were 33.122-million tonnes, with a grading of 4.49 g/t gold.

Resources: Total indicated resources from underground operations as at December 31, 2012, were 7.85-million tonnes, with a grading of 2.65 g/t. Total inferred resources from openpit and underground resources were 18.97-million tonnes, with a grading of 3.88 g/t.

Prospects: An expansion project is under way to increase the throughput capacity at the mine by 25% to 3 750 t/d, starting in the second half of 2015.

Contact Person: Corporate communications.

Contact Details:
Agnico Eagle Mines
Tel +1 416 847 8669
Fax: +1 416 367 4681
Email media@agnicoeagle.com
Website http://www.agnicoeagle.com