Golden Minerals Receives Final Environmental Permits for Rodeo Gold Project; Company on Track for January 2021 Gold Production

GOLDEN, Colo., Nov. 17, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Golden Minerals Company (“Golden Minerals”, “Golden” or the “Company”) (NYSE American and TSX: AUMN) is pleased to announce it has received final environmental permits for its Rodeo gold-silver project located in Durango State, Mexico. The Company is presently on track to begin gold production in January 2021, which will mark the transition of Golden Minerals to gold producer from precious metals exploration company.

President and Chief Executive Officer of Golden Minerals, Warren Rehn, notes, "The receipt of the environmental permits for our Rodeo mine puts us on schedule to begin mining in January 2021. We expect to begin delivering gold-bearing material to our Velardeña mill early in January and begin processing immediately.”

Mining Plans and April 2020 Preliminary Economic Assessment (“PEA”)

Rodeo is located approximately 115 kilometers (“km”) by road from the Company’s Velardeña Properties in Durango State, Mexico. The Company intends to truck mined material from Rodeo to Velardeña using a commercial trucking contractor, upon which the material will be mined through Golden’s existing and newly vacated oxide plant. The plant is a typical agitated leach plant rated to handle up to 450 tonnes per day (“tpd”) of throughput from Rodeo. It is equipped with a Merrill Crowe circuit and a modern doré refinery, and the attached tailings facility was recently expanded and is expected to be sufficient for the tailings produced from Rodeo’s operations.

The Company published a PEA in April 2020 (Mineral Resources Engineering - April 1, 2020, see https://www.goldenminerals.com/projects/technical-reports/ for the complete report) which called for an open pit mining operation at Rodeo. In August 2020, the Company completed a 35-hole 1,400-meter drilling program in order to further verify continuity of the high-grade core of the Rodeo deposit. Results from this drilling program were slightly better than assumptions used in the PEA. The results of this program enabled Golden to finalize the initial start-up mine plan. Further metallurgical testing on newly obtained material confirmed recovery assumptions and enabled the Company to plan appropriately to modify the oxide plant by adding a regrind mill for higher throughput. Results of the 2020 metallurgical testing revealed that the harder characteristics of Rodeo’s mined material would necessitate an additional regrind circuit in the oxide plant in order to achieve a finer grind size at desired throughput rates to attain recoveries projected in the PEA. The need for an additional regrind circuit and its estimated $0.6 million cost were already included in the PEA’s estimated $1.5 million of start-up costs and capital expenditures.