Green light for tailings
Toronto-based Anaconda Mining is getting a present from the province of Newfoundland worth up to $70 million: the green light to use the company’s dying Pine Cove pit to store its tailings.
Toronto-based Anaconda Mining is getting a present from the province of Newfoundland worth up to $70 million: the green light to use the company’s dying Pine Cove pit to store its tailings.
“It’s great because it’s not something that’s often seen,” Lynn Hammond, Anaconda Mining’s vice-president of pubic relations, said in an interview Thursday. “It’s an asset at a very low cost.”
After generating more than $140 million in revenues, the company’s Pine Cove deposit is now almost spent. Mining operations there are expected to come to an end in about six months. Anaconda Mining will then move to its nearby Stog’er Tight deposit while continuing to use its current mill to process the ore.
That will leave the company with a giant hole to fill. The Pine Cove pit is roughly thousands of times bigger than an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
It’s also what Anaconda Mining considers to be a great place to dump mine tailings because the walls of the pit are non-permeable rock, meaning it can quickly and easily be converted into a tailings storage facility.
Thursday, the company announced the Newfoundland Department of Natural Resources agreed.
The provincial government department has given the nod to an amendment to the company’s plans for the site, allowing it to dump seven million tonnes of tailings into that hole.
“The addition of the in-pit tailings facility strengthens our infrastructure at the Point Rousse project and fortifies our platform to support our growth initiatives in Atlantic Canada,” Dustin Angelo, Anaconda Mining’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.
“At our current rate of mineral processing, the pit provides tailings storage capacity of approximately 15 years. A long life, in-pit tailings storage facility is the perfect complement to our 1,300-tonne-perday mill and deep-water port,” he said.
Based on the company’s estimates of the cost of tailing storage facilities, it looks like the company can expect to save between $35 million and $70 million by using the Pine Cove pit for tailings.
“We will mine that out and stockpile any ore we don’t process and start using it for tailings in January 2018,” said Hammond.