Gold sector strives to reinvent itself with green measures

TORONTO Last month, Newmont Goldcorp summoned a host of local and provincial dignitaries to Chapleau, Ont., north of Sudbury, where it christened its Borden gold project, “the mine of the future.”

In an industry in which a 40-tonne diesel truck is considered modest-sized, the company wanted to build Borden into Canada’s first all-electric underground gold mine, a plan that has taken years — since the company was still called Goldcorp — and cost hundreds of millions of dollars as executives criss-crossed the world in search of such things as an electric haul truck.

“We call it our $300-million pilot project,” Brent Bergeron told the Financial Post in 2018, who at the time headed up Goldcorp’s Corporate Affairs and Sustainability. The mine is expected to finally begin commercial production in the fourth quarter of this year.

Now, in a report released Wednesday, the World Gold Council is laying out a plan for the rest of the sector to follow in the company’s footsteps, to collectively cut its emissions to “net zero” by 2050. The report suggests that doing so could help transform gold into a “climate risk mitigation asset,” in other words something that investors seek out in part because it lowers the overall emissions profile of their portfolio.

It ties into the Paris Agreement of 2015, in which nearly every major country — except the United States — has committed to reducing emissions to limit the global temperature rise to less than two degrees, and to try to keep it from rising more than 1.5 degrees.

While many sectors are likely to commit to decarbonizing, the report suggests that there is an investment case for the gold sector.

It notes that gold, long considered a hedging asset that maintains value during risky times, could see its value rise in the face of climate changecaused market volatility. Going green could help the sector capitalize on this value, the report suggests.

The report offers a new, detailed breakdown of the gold sector’s carbon footprint, calculating it emits at least 126 million tonnes of CO2 per year.

About 90 per cent of those are linked to production, such as mining, milling, concentrating and smelting, refining and recycling, the report found.