Pretium Resources' Brucejack mine, BC.
Photo by: Pretium Resources
TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – British Columbia’s Environment Minister Mary Polak and Energy and Mines Minister Bill Bennett have issued an environmental assessment certificate to Pretium Resources for the Brucejack gold mine, about 65 km north-west of Stewart district municipality.
The ministers had issued the certificate with 15 legally enforceable conditions that would provide them the confidence to conclude that the project would be constructed, operated and decommissioned in a way that ensured no significant adverse effects were likely to occur.
The project would only move forward to construction when and if regulators were satisfied that discharges would comply with provincial requirements and, therefore, would not cause significant adverse effects downstream from the mine and to the Unuk river.
The certificate conditions were developed following consultation and input from Aboriginal groups, government agencies, including the state of Alaska, communities and the public.
Key conditions for the project involved Pretium hiring an independent environmental monitor to ensure that construction activities complied with the conditions of the environmental assessment certificate, providing additional information to confirm the effectiveness of the water treatment plants and completing additional modelling of local groundwater conditions to increase confidence in the understanding of how water would interact with the mine. The company was also required to mitigate potential impacts on regional health services, ensure communication with Aboriginal groups and regional communities about regional economic and training opportunities and measures to mitigate adverse social impacts, and enter into an agreement with the province to provide financial support for and participate in activities to support the recovery, conservation and management of the Nass moose population.
During the environmental assessment, Pretium had proposed various design changes, based on feedback received during the evaluation process. These included building the required transmission line by helicopter to reduce impacts from the construction of new roads, including impacts from increased access and disturbance, to increasing the thickness of the tailings paste being deposited in Brucejack Lake to reduce the negative impacts on water quality from tailings in the lake.
The project still required several federal, provincial and local government permits to proceed. The BC Environmental Assessment Office would coordinate compliance management efforts with other government agencies to ensure that the office was satisfied that certificate conditions were met.
Pretium on Friday said it undertook to address these conditions before starting mine construction, which it expected to begin this summer.
The federal review of the Brucejack project by the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency was also nearing completion, with an expected referral to the Environment Minister later this spring, the company advised.
The Brucejack project is an underground gold/silver mine, with an estimated capital cost of $450-million, that would create 500 jobs during the two-year construction period and 300 jobs during a minimum 16-year operating life. It would produce up to 2 700 t/d of ore.
The Brucejack mine would not have a tailings management facility with a dam. Tailings would be stored underground in spent mine workings and in Brucejack Lake. This reflected best-available technology as recommended by the independent panel that investigated the Mount Polley failure. In its report, the panel noted that the most direct way to eliminate tailings dam failures is to store the majority of tailings below ground.