St Barbara has restarted ore processing at its Touquoy gold mine in Nova Scotia, about 70 kilometres northeast of Halifax, after the provincial Department of Environment and Climate Change confirmed on October 30 that all prerequisite steps under the Touquoy restart industrial approval amendments had been met. First ore processing took place at the official reopening on November 3, with commissioning and operations expected to ramp up through November and December. The site had been inactive since mining stopped in 2023, after the company failed to secure approvals to extend operations beyond its original mine plan. Provincial approval granted in April allows subsidiary Atlantic Mining Nova Scotia to reprocess about three million tonnes of stockpiled ore.
The restart is modest in scale and deliberate in design. Subsequent company guidance put Touquoy restart production at 17,000 to 21,000 ounces of gold at all in sustaining costs of A$2,070 to A$2,560 an ounce, processing low and medium grade stockpile material, with about 200 jobs secured. Growth capital across the Touquoy restart and the 15-Mile project was guided at A$40 million to A$50 million in total, subject to the permitting timetable. The company also lifted total Nova Scotia mineral resources to 3.02 million ounces, including a maiden underground resource at Old Austen, and approved an on market buyback of up to 100 million shares.
The complication arrived the same day as the restart approval. The Impact Assessment Agency of Canada determined that the nearby 15-Mile Processing Hub Project requires a federal impact assessment. St Barbara called the requirement duplicative, noting it does not reflect the cooperation agreement between Canada and Nova Scotia or the federal government’s one project, one review goal. The agency has said the assessment can be concluded in time for the company’s targeted start of construction in mid 2028, and the proposed Bill C-39, which St Barbara supports, would legislate a 12 month approval period for federal permits.
St Barbara will engage with both governments over the following three weeks to establish whether the decision adds only cost, workload and confusion, or whether it risks the 15-Mile timetable. As a contingency, the company has begun planning to seek provincial permission to resume open pit mining at Touquoy, which would extend gold production beyond the currently scheduled 2027 end of stockpile processing. The episode captures the permitting split now running through Canadian mining: provinces can restart an existing mine on schedule, while the federal layer decides, project by project, whether a neighbouring expansion gets a second full review.