Canada's Three Newest Gold Mines Made 187,000 Ounces in One Quarter

A mill near Gogama, Ontario, processed more ore in September than its designers drew it for. IAMGOLD said this week that its Côté Gold plant set a record for the month, a little above its design rate.

Côté is one of three large gold mines that began processing ore in Canada in 2024 and 2025. The other two belong to Equinox Gold: Greenstone, near Geraldton in northwestern Ontario, and Valentine, in central Newfoundland and Labrador. All three reported third-quarter numbers in the past fortnight. Read together, they show a generation of new Canadian mines close to the speed they were built for, and they show why reaching that speed is the start of the work rather than the end of it.

What nameplate means, and why it takes years to reach

Nameplate capacity is the rate a processing plant was designed to handle, usually stated in tonnes of ore a day or a year. It is an engineering figure, set in the feasibility study before construction. Almost no new mine reaches it on the first day.

A ramp-up is the period in which the operator works the plant up to that rate. Crushers, grinding mills, pumps and leach tanks each have to run together at full load, the pit has to deliver enough ore of the right size and hardness, and the crews have to learn the equipment. The industry treats a mine as ramped up when it sustains nameplate for months, not when it touches it for a day.

Throughput is only one of the three numbers that decide how much gold comes out. The ounces a mill produces are the tonnes it processes, multiplied by the grade of the ore (grams of gold per tonne), multiplied by the recovery rate (the share of that gold the plant actually captures). A mine can be at full speed and still short of its plan if the ore is leaner than modelled or the plant recovers less of it.

Côté: a record month inside a flat quarter

Côté is operated by IAMGOLD, which owns 70 per cent; Sumitomo Metal Mining Co. Ltd. holds the rest. Its plant is designed for 36,000 tonnes a day, and in its October 21 update IAMGOLD reported a September average of 37,100.

The climb took longer than first planned. In an October 2024 update, early in the ramp-up, IAMGOLD reported about 1.6 million tonnes milled in that quarter and said it was aiming for nameplate in 2025.

Two years later, the plant milled 2,879,000 tonnes in the third quarter of 2026. Over the quarter's 92 days that averages about 31,300 tonnes a day, or 87 per cent of nameplate, by the desk's division. The September record shows the plant can run above design.

IAMGOLD gave two reasons the quarter stayed roughly level with the second. The plant took an extended annual shutdown in August, and crushing moved entirely to the company's own equipment after a contractor's crushing ended in June.

Grade was 1.10 grams a tonne, against 1.12 in the second quarter. Recovery fell to 90 per cent from 93 per cent in the first two quarters, which the company attributed to downtime early in the quarter on one of the plant's two Vertimills, the large vertical grinding mills that reduce ore to a fine powder before leaching. Work on a third Vertimill has started, with installation expected in early 2027.

Côté produced 92,000 ounces in the quarter, of which 64,400 belong to IAMGOLD.

The company kept its 2026 guidance for the mine at 270,000 to 310,000 attributable ounces and said it expects to finish at the lower end.

Maple's October 22 piece, Côté Gold Made 64,400 Ounces for IAMGOLD in the Third Quarter, worked that through: reaching 270,000 takes about 86,000 attributable ounces in the fourth quarter, against 64,400 in the third.

IAMGOLD's next step is an updated mine plan and reserve estimate in the fourth quarter of 2026, followed by a technical report. The company said the plan targets sustained processing of about 40,000 tonnes a day, about 11 per cent above the original design.

Greenstone: near nameplate in tonnes, behind plan in recovery

Greenstone is the largest of the three by design, at 27,000 tonnes a day. In an August 2025 release, Equinox said Greenstone "approaches nameplate capacity." In its March 30 technical-report release this year, it described its immediate focus as "achieving sustained nameplate milling capacity of 27,000 tonnes per day."

Equinox reported on October 13 that Greenstone processed 2,178,706 tonnes in the third quarter and produced 60,596 ounces.

Divided over the quarter's 92 days, that is about 23,700 tonnes a day, roughly 88 per cent of nameplate. The ore graded 1.03 grams a tonne.

Grade and ounces together allow one more calculation. The ore Greenstone processed contained about 72,000 ounces of gold, so the 60,596 ounces produced imply a recovery of about 84 per cent. The March technical report plans for about 87.5 per cent over the mine's life. The difference is the desk's estimate from reported figures, not a recovery rate Equinox has published for the quarter, and quarterly production can also differ from the gold contained in the ore processed because of gold held in the circuit.

Equinox wrote in its October 13 release that "both Valentine and Greenstone are positioned for stronger production through the remainder of 2026 and into 2027."

The March technical report averages about 320,000 ounces a year at Greenstone over the next decade, and names potential to raise the mill rate toward 30,000 tonnes a day.

Valentine: at its design rate within the year

Valentine is the youngest of the three. Equinox announced on August 28, 2025 that it had begun processing ore through a 2.5-million-tonne-a-year plant and said it expected the mine to reach nameplate during the second quarter of 2026.

In the third quarter the plant processed 640,448 tonnes and produced 34,719 ounces. Scaled to a full year, that tonnage is about 2.54 million tonnes, slightly above the design rate.

For the quarter, Valentine ran at about its design rate. The October 13 release does not say whether the plant first reached nameplate in the second quarter, as Equinox had said it expected; the third-quarter tonnage shows it there now.

"At Valentine, our mining initiatives are working: Q3 mill feed grade averaged over 1.8 g/t, another incremental step-up," the company said in its October 13 release. The same figures imply a recovery of about 93 per cent, again a desk calculation.

Valentine's plan is to double. The March 30 release set out a second phase taking the plant to 5.0 million tonnes a year, with construction subject to board approval and completion targeted for the second half of 2028. Combined with the first phase, the technical report averages about 223,000 ounces a year over the next decade.

What the three add to Canada

Sources: IAMGOLD release, October 21, 2026; Equinox Gold release, October 13, 2026; design rates from IAMGOLD (October 15, 2024) and Equinox (March 30, 2026 and August 28, 2025). Daily and annual averages are the desk's calculations from quarterly tonnes over 92 days.

The three produced about 187,300 ounces between them in the quarter, or about 5.8 tonnes of gold.

Natural Resources Canada reported national mine output of 200 tonnes in 2024, the latest full year it has published. At the third quarter's pace, the three mines would make about 23 tonnes a year, about 12 per cent of that national total. The comparison spans different years and is a sense of scale, not a forecast.

The weight falls mostly on Ontario, which produced 40 per cent of Canadian output in 2024, according to NRCan. Côté and Greenstone are both in the province. Valentine sits outside the two big producing provinces, in Newfoundland and Labrador.

NRCan ranked Canada the world's fourth-largest gold producer in 2024, with 6.1 per cent of mine output, and put the value of Canadian gold production that year at C$16.9 billion.

For the two companies, the ramp-ups carry their guidance. Maple's October 23 piece, Equinox Gold's Canadian Mines Made 59% of Its Third-Quarter Gold, set out how much of Equinox's quarter came from Greenstone, Valentine and Musselwhite, the Ontario mine it acquired with Orla Mining.

Equinox said on October 13 that it remains on track to achieve its updated 2026 guidance of 870,000 to 920,000 ounces.

What a full-speed mine still has to prove

Reaching nameplate settles the first engineering question and opens the next ones. Each of the three is at a different point. For Côté the question is recovery and the step to 40,000 tonnes a day, which the updated plan due this quarter will set out. At Greenstone it is the last 12 per cent of throughput and the gap between implied and planned recovery. At Valentine it is whether the grade gains continue and whether the second phase is approved and built on its schedule.

None of that changes what the third quarter showed. These three are running close to the speed they were built for, between one and two and a half years after their first ore went through the mill.

The next figures arrive soon: IAMGOLD reports its third-quarter financial results on November 5, Equinox on November 9, and IAMGOLD's updated Côté mine plan is due before the end of the year.