Goldcorp--Musselwhite Mine.

• Position: Mining Companies to Watch

Goldcorp is seeking to expand its presence on many fronts in northwestern Ontario.

The Vancouver-based gold miner is on course to boost production to greater heights at its remote Musselwhite Mine, 480 kilometres north of Thunder Bay.

Gold production at Musselwhite in 2017 is pegged at 265,000 ounces annually, but with new mine manager Peter Gula at the helm, the company is making improvements toward potentially reaching 300,000 ounces.

Originally built by Placer Dome, Musselwhite is a fly-in/fly-out operation for its 530 employees who work on a rotational basis from communities across Canada. About 220 contractors are at the site to work on the new Materials Handing Project.

In a perfect world, mine engineers and geologists want a deposit that's vertically dipping in order to place a shaft beside it and access it on various drifts and levels to mine it.

The deposit at Musselwhite has about a 30-degree plunge, down to 1,200 metres under Lake Opapimiskan.

"Musselwhite is not very deep but the ore body plunges away from the portal," said Gula. "We're not a shaft mine."

Getting ore to surface takes a long time. Goldcrop is out to quicken it by installing an inner shaft between levels, called a winze, to dramatically cut truck haul times to the mine's underground crusher.

"Every day that we advance, we're further than we were yesterday," said Gula.

The current underground truck haul distance to the crusher at the 400-metre level is approximately 7.5 kilometres, about an hour to an hour-and-half round trip for the company's 17,40-tonne haul trucks.

The new Material Handling Project, now under construction, is expected to reduce their reliance on trucking those distances while increasing production by 20 per cent.

"We're going to go from an hour-and-half to about 15 minutes. We can park probably eight to 10 trucks," said Gula.

Down the road, Goldcorp is looking at adopting autonomous trucks running remotely on their own, which should reduce ventilation costs.

North Bay mine contractors Redpath are handling the $90-million project, which got underway last October and is nearing the 25 per cent mark of completion. Work is scheduled to be done by the fourth quarter of 2018.

Daily production should increase from 3,400 tonnes to 4,300 tonnes when finished.

"We've got to look for ways to increase productivity and lower our costs," Gula said.

Only a few years ago, Musselwhite was running between $1,000 and $1,200 an ounce for its all-in sustaining...