Silver Tiger Metals Kicks Off 2026 With Open Pit Build Underway, Underground PEA Imminent
Silver Tiger Metals' CEO Glenn Jessom used The KE Report to walk investors through active construction at El Tigre's Stockwork Zone — engineering nearly complete, man camp and bridge work underway — and reiterated that the underground PEA will land this month.
Investor angle
Silver Tiger is transitioning from explorer to builder in a strong precious-metals price environment. The near-term catalyst stack is dense — underground PEA this month, engineering handover by end of January, man camp by February, permanent bridge engineering by Q1 end — and management is deliberately deferring the debt package until the project is more de-risked, which trades dilution optionality for valuation timing. The 1× NPV framing from the CEO puts the onus on investors to model the upcoming PEA and existing PFS themselves; the Stockwork Zone being open along strike is the longer-dated torque.
Silver Tiger Metals (TSX-V: SLVR, OTCQX: SLVTF) is hitting 2026 at full speed. CEO Glenn Jessom joined The KE Report this week to walk through the construction milestones now running in parallel at the company's El Tigre project in Sonora, Mexico, and to confirm that the long-awaited underground Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) will land before the month is out.
The November permit for the bulk tonnage open pit at the Stockwork Zone triggered a chain of work that started, in Jessom's telling, well before the regulator stamped the application. "We just didn't go to the mailbox one day," he said — engineering was already underway at KCA (process plant and crusher) and at WSP (leach pad, ponds, water and mass balance) by summer 2025. Both packages are now about 90% complete, with final deliverables expected by the end of January. The remaining pieces — Merrill Crowe (a zinc precipitation process used to recover silver and gold from solution) and pumping station engineering — kicked off this month on a four-month runway.
On the ground, the visible signs of a mine being built are multiplying. Earthworks for a 300-person man camp started in early January and should finish in a month; the camp itself is a three-month build that Silver Tiger is constructing in-house with a hired crew, on track for first-of-February handover. Land clearing on the construction area is finishing up, and the water-well contractor is mobilizing this week to begin drilling for the production water supply.
The access story is also getting hardened. Silver Tiger built a 47-kilometer haul road from the town of Colonial Morales north of the project — the same road used last year to flatbed the underground mill up to the mountain. Final engineering on the road completed in the fall, and turn-area widening is in progress now. To make the route a true 365-days-a-year arterial, Jessom said the company has decided to build a permanent bridge at the Colonial Morales river crossing. Bridge engineering started December 1 and will wrap late in Q1; construction is a six-month build immediately after.
The underground PEA is the next catalyst, and Jessom was unusually direct about its contours. Silver Tiger already holds an 800-ton-per-day permit for the underground operation, and the study is sized to that envelope, even though "we have so much more" mineralization in the resource. He expects it to be a roughly 400-page document covering the full mine plan — stoping, underground access, sequencing — and he previews a high-grade, mainly silver-rich Mexican underground deposit, with the usual PEA outputs: net present value (NPV — the present-day value of all the future cash a mine is expected to generate, discounted back to today), internal rate of return (IRR — the discount rate that makes the project's NPV equal zero; higher is better), payback period, and total mine-life cash flow. The CEO pushed back on running the numbers at conservative study prices: with the PEA's sensitivity table in hand, "people can wander their way to the right" and see what the project looks like at current precious-metals pricing.
Capital is, for the moment, not the constraint. A late-2025 raise left the treasury at roughly C$50 million, and Jessom said he could put a debt package in place "last fall … today … or any time," but is choosing to wait until the project is de-risked further. "Sometimes in business, you've got the clock … sometimes you've got the time," he said. "I'm not looking at the clock. I got the time." Debt remains the "foremost" funding tool, with no rush to finalize.
Beyond the immediate build, Jessom framed Silver Tiger's three-doors strategy plainly. Door one: build the bulk tonnage open pit. Door two: publish the underground PEA and move it toward a Pre-Feasibility Study (PFS) with additional drilling. Door three: add more ounces — drilling to the north on brownfield (ground adjacent to an existing deposit or mine) ground later this year, and getting underground access, mapping, and sampling ready on the southern greenfield (untested ground with no prior mine workings) side for drilling in 2026 or 2027. The CEO also flagged that the Stockwork Zone itself "is open at both ends" and that infill drilling along strike will continue as the mine is built, with the company viewing El Tigre as a 20-plus-year operation.
On valuation, Jessom pointed to a roughly C$500 million market cap and noted that producers typically trade north of 1× NPV once in production — a benchmark he clearly wants investors to run themselves against the upcoming PEA and the existing PFS for the open pit.
What to watch next: the underground PEA release this month, completion of KCA and WSP engineering packages, and the first concrete build milestones at the man camp and bridge.
Generated by Pixys from the source video below. Not investment advice.
