(Kitco News) Dakota Gold says it has the money to take its Richmond Hill gold project in South Dakota to the point of construction, and it intends to build the mine itself rather than sell it.
“So we’re targeting Richmond Hill as that next mine in the Homestake district,” Co-Chair Robert Quartermain told Kitco Mining on Sept. 29 at the 2026 Mining Forum Americas in Colorado Springs. The district’s Homestake mine produced more than 40 million ounces, and Coeur Mining’s neighboring Wharf mine has produced more than 4 million.
Quartermain said Dakota raised $75 million earlier this year as gold prices climbed. “So as of June, we had a very strong balance sheet, about $99 million. So that sees us what we consider all the way through to being shovel-ready,” he said.
A pre-feasibility study is due in the fourth quarter, drawing on more than 350 Dakota drill holes and about 900 historic ones, with a feasibility study to follow in the first half of 2027. The project’s July 2025 initial assessment with cash flow outlined about 153,000 ounces of annual production from a 30,000-ton-per-day heap leach operation. Quartermain said the later studies could show more.
Metallurgical testing found a breccia in the southern part of the property “which actually had recoveries upwards of 90%,” he said. “Now we haven’t spent much time drilling that, so we’ve moved two drills there.”
Much of the gold sits at surface, so Dakota is weighing a larger gyratory crusher. “So that means you’re going to have an increase in capital cost, but it does mean that you can increase your run rate where you can go from instead of 30,000 tons a day perhaps up to 45,000 and maybe even up to 60,000 tons a day,” Quartermain said.
The 2025 study carried a contingency of about $50 million on roughly $400 million in capital, and Quartermain acknowledged inflation is a factor. He argued Richmond Hill is better placed than most projects. Road and power are already in place, much of the equipment is likely to be made in the U.S., and the site is close to the office. “We’re about a 15-minute drive from our head office out to our site,” he said.
Dakota has already placed deposits on long-lead equipment, including an electrical substation, a component now in demand from AI data centers. “That’s a three-year advance item,” Quartermain said.
Running the build falls to Jack Henris, who joined as president and chief operating officer last year and took over as CEO from Quartermain on Aug. 18. Henris previously managed Newmont operations on the Carlin Trend. “So it was a fairly easy pass of the baton,” Quartermain said.
Permitting has not yet begun. Because Richmond Hill is on private land, the process runs through the state of South Dakota and Lawrence County, and Dakota has already met with both. Quartermain expects “probably maybe an 18-month permitting process timeline.” “We’ll be doing that through 2028, expect to get our permits by the end of that, then start construction in 2029, and hopefully be up and running by the end of that year.”
Construction financing is now the job of Shawn Campbell, appointed chief development officer in July. Quartermain sees a mix of a stream on the project’s small silver component, gold forward sales, and conventional debt. “So I think we can look at two or three components using the silver, perhaps using forward sales, and then using conventional debt financing that can make an attractive package that’s going to be the least dilutive for our shareholders,” he said.
The high-grade Maitland project, two miles away, is next in line. Shifting drills to Richmond Hill has pushed its maiden resource into 2027. Quartermain said Maitland’s deeper JB Zone shares the geology of the Homestake mine’s West Ledges, with intercepts averaging about 11 grams per tonne over four meters. “It’s just never been explored, right?” Where other single-asset developers go looking for a second project, he said, Dakota’s “is on the way back to the drive to the office.”
Quartermain, who describes himself as Dakota’s largest shareholder, said the old model of selling at feasibility has given way. Producers now trade at far higher valuations than developers, he said, and companies such as Artemis Gold and Skeena Resources have developed their own projects.
“We’ve got the team to build it, we have the access to the capital to build it, and we’ll move forward doing that,” he said.
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Learn more about Dakota Gold here.
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