Vancouver-headquartered Endeavour Silver is continuing to advance its growth projects, with the Terronera silver/gold asset, in Mexico, remaining a top priority, CEO Dan Dickson said this week.

The company, which initiated predevelopment activities at Terronera last year, expects to make a formal construction decision “in the months to come”. That decision is subject to the completion of a financing package and receipt of additional amended permits.

“Terronera is a transformative asset that will make Endeavour the fastest-growing silver miner, with close to 100% production growth in two years,” Dickson said on a conference call.

The mine is strategic to the company for many reasons; firstly being that it has reserves that support more than a decade of operations and secondly, it is a low-cost mine that will drive significant profitability, he added.

Endeavour has approved a $41-million budget, of which $29-million has been spent to date. The company has started with the procurement of many long lead items and has several key contracts before the spike in costs and supply chain issued accelerated.  The majority of the mobile mining fleet has been delivered to site.

Nevertheless, Dickson said that there would be cost creep from the $175-million estimated in the 2021 feasibility study, although the capital expenditure would not be significantly higher.

“We have seen inflation since that $175-million, but we have locked in a lot of our costs with the mobile fleet already on site and a lot of the 12 critical parts for our mill already ordered.”

Terronera will produce an average of 3.3-million ounces a year of payable silver and 32 874 oz/y of gold over a 12-year mine life, at an all-in sustaining cost per silver ounce of $3.24.

Beyond Terronera, the Mexico-focused company’s pipeline includes the Parral and newly acquired Pitarrilla projects. Endeavour acquired Pitarrilla – said to be one of the biggest undeveloped silver deposits in the world – from SSR Mining for $70-million in cash and shares.

Pitarrilla has the potential to be a large-scale cornerstone asset for the company. Dickson reported that Endeavour had nearly completed verifying its historic resource and said it could add more than 500-million ounces of silver to its consolidated mineral resource inventory – effectively tripling the firm’s total precious metals resource estimate.

“Between Terronera, Parral and Pitarrilla, I think we have one of the best growth profiles in the space,” he said.

Advancing the Terronera project is advancing as follows: work continued on predevelopment activities initiated last year including detailed engineering, critical contracts, procurement of long-lead items and road and camp construction. The company intends to make a formal construction decision subject to completion of a financing package and receipt of additional amended permits in the coming months. Budgeted development expenditures for 2022 are estimated to be $41.0-million.