Spend a day with Wes Carson, general manger of Thompson Creek Metal's Mount Milligan project, and you'll get the sense the fledgling mine is a culmination of happy circumstances - and being home to sizeable deposits of gold and copper is only one.
For starters, at 92 kilometres in one direction and 91 in another, it's located almost equally between Fort St. James and Mackenzie, amounting to an hour-long commute from either community.
For the time being, a work camp assembled out of modular buildings and large enough to house 600 workers is on site for the construction phase. The three-by-four-kilometre mine footprint has been cleared and foundations are being poured for an assortment of buildings.
But once up and running in late 2013, the camp will be taken away and the vast majority of the 350 employees who will work at the mine will be living in either of the two communities.
"A lot of operations that are opened up nowadays, by necessity they are what are called 'fly-in, fly-out' operations, where you have a camp on that site, they fly in for a couple weeks and they go out for their days off," Carson said Friday as he hosted a media tour of the site.
"With the location of this operation, we're able to run a community-based operation where people will be able to go home to their families every night.
"That has benefits to the employees themselves and also to the communities because, obviously, if you've got 360 people based in those communities that is going to have a positive impact."
Salaries at the mine will average $75,000 a year.
Four crews of about 60 people each - most of them heavy equipment operators - will each work two 12 hour shifts during the day and another 12 overnight, with a day off in between, followed by four days off.
To help with housing, Mount Milligan's owner, Thompson Creek Metals Company, is building 12 units in Fort St. James and is in discussions with the municipality in Mackenzie over bringing in some modular units.
Gold, copper, gravel and sand
Before the gold and copper, you need gravel and sand to make the concrete for such facilities as the milling plant and an "esker field" located within the mine's main footprint will provide enough material for the life of the operation.
"All of the construction material that you need to build this is actually here available already," said Carson.
"For a lot of places, to get proper aggregate to make concrete, you've got to ship it in from offsite somewhere that could be tens or hundreds of kilometres away," said Carson, who added 50,000 cubic metres of concrete will be required to get the mine going.
Carson could not say how much money that will save, but the project's total cost has been put at $1.3 billion.
Mother Nature builds
a tailings pond
Topping the list of Carson's highlights is the "zero discharge" tailings pond. He was quick to point out that the the goal of capturing at least 10 million cubic metres of water in the pond has been met and exceeded thanks to an exceptionally wet spring and summer.
"You need to have that base of 10 million cubic metres in order to get yourself started," Carson said.
Once again, the site's geography works in the mine's favour.
"All the runoff from the pits, from the process plant, so any contact water that runs through those facilities, flow directly into the tailings pond, so you won't have any water going offsite at all," Carson said.
"And that is really [important]. We don't have to pump any water, we don't have to create any extra ponds or ditching in order to move that water back around. It all ends up in there on its own... we've taken advantage of what Mother Nature has given us."
The operation is centred on two traditional open pits. By the time all the mining has been done in about 22 years, the main pit will be about 550 metres deep and just over two kilometres across while a second pit will be about 400 metres deep and about a kilometre wide but 2.5 kilometres long.
"This is what you'd probably call a mid-sized open pit mine," Carson said. "It would be comparable to Gibraltor or Endako."
The aim, upon closure, is to return the site back to it's previous state, or as close as possible - the site will be revegetated and the open pits will fill back up with water to become lakes.
"Hopefully, you'll be able to walk away from this and never tell that a mine was here," Carson said.
Complementary metals
Gold has all the glamour and copper is the all-purpose metal but more important from Carson's perspective, they complement each other on the economic front with one holding value during good times and the other during tough ones.
"One of the main reasons that the price of gold is so high up right now is because of the recession, because of the instability in the world," Carson said. "Copper generally will go up as there is more stability so we're actually pretty well positioned to take advantage of whatever the economic climate is."
The mine's viability is based on copper going for at least $1.60 per pound and gold attracting at least $690 per ounce.
"I'm not sure how familiar you are with prices right now, but they're a lot higher than that," Carson said but cautioned that with the rise in prices also comes a rise in costs.
"We use a lot of materials that as commodity prices go up, the prices also go up," Carson said. "We do make, obviously, a lot more money when the prices are high but the mining industry is cyclical so it's something you have to really make sure you're aware of, when those cycles are going to happen and prepare yourself for when they're going to drop off."
Once up and operating as many as a dozen giant haul trucks will carry 110,000 tonnes of material out of the pits each day.
About 60,000 tonnes of that will be ore, containing the copper and gold, and will go through a crusher and a process plant where it's refined into about 500 tonnes of concentrate for shipment to smelters, likely in Japan and Korea. The mine is expected to generate 81 million pounds of copper and 194,500 ounces of gold annually. Put another way, the average grade at Mount Milligan is 0.2 per cent for copper and 0.4 grams of gold per tonne or ore which makes it a low-grade operation.
