Canadian Mining Journal April 2018

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MOUNT POLLEY REMEDIATION REPORT ON MINERAL PROCESSING

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WATER WASTE

New tailings tech New water treatment rules

APRIL 2018 | www.canadianminingjournal.com | PM # 40069240

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CANADIANMINING

APRIL 2018 VOL. 139, NO. 03

JOURNAL

Hazeltine Creek in 2017. CREDIT: IMPERIAL METALS

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TAILINGS AND WATER MANAGEMENT

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13 A breakdown of new water treatment rules coming to Canadian mine sites this year.

18 The Mount Polley tailings dam failure has spurred a look at tailings alternatives.

22 Imperial Metals’ Vice-President Environment Affairs ‘Lyn Anglin speaks about the remediation process at Mount Polley.

MINERAL PROCESSING 26 SART plants are perceived as expensive, but they can be valuable

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in treating complex gold ores.

28 How Eriez’s two-stage flotation process can save miners both time and money.

DEPARTMENTS 4 FIRST NATIONS | AFN Ontario Chief Isadore Day reacts to the recent federal budget and its commitments to First Nations communities.

5 EDITORIAL | When mines run dry.

6 UNEARTHING TRENDS | EY Canada’s Iain Thompson reports on positive spending trends in B.C.’s mining sector.

8 CSR & MINING | Michael Torrance and Carolyn Burns outline the latest changes to the federal government’s CSR strategy for the extractives sector.

10 LAW | Michelle Jones of Bennett Jones explains how reconciliation is central to the overhaul of the environmental assessement process proposed in Bill C-69.

12 FAST NEWS | Updates from across the mining ecosystem.

www.canadianminingjournal.com APRIL 2018

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28 ABOUT THE COVER

This month’s cover supplied by Metso..

Coming in May Canadian Mining Journal looks at mining in the digital age. Plus, a feature report on mine and mill safety.

For More Information

Please visit www.canadianminingjournal.com for regular updates on what’s happening with Canadian mining companies and their personnel both here and abroad. A digital version of the magazine is also available at www.digital.canadianminingjournal.com

CANADIAN MINING JOURNAL |

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FIRST NATIONS

Reconciliation means federal government must follow through on spending promises

By Isadore Day

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n Feb. 27, the federal government released its latest budget. It is the third budget by this Liberal government that promises significant new spending for Indigenous peoples – $8.4 billion in 2016; $3.4 billion in 2017; and now $4.75 billion for a total of $16.55 billion. Now we need “deliverology” in action. Hopefully, the third time is the charm in getting these significant sums flowing into First Nation communities in Ontario – from the north to the south – to create sustainable and healthy First Nation communities and People.

We commend Minister Philpott of Indigenous Services for advancing and advocating to secure the much needed funds for child welfare. The budget includes a total of $1.4 billion for First Nation child welfare over six years – this works out to $230 million annually across Canada or $360,000 per community. While this is a first step towards change, much more needs to be done. Our chiefs will be looking for more details when we meet the minister in March, especially on how this new funding will enable our communities to bring their children back home.

At first glance, it’s unfortunate the support for much needed infrastructure to support all program areas seems to be omitted. We need investments in structural capacity and safe environment spaces for our growing capacity to deliver programs.

The $172.6 million for providing access to clean drinking water across Canada, gives us pause, falling short on the needed investment in Ontario, let alone across Canada. We look forward to seeing further details on this and how the federal government intends to keep in line with commitments made thus far.

Unfortunately, this year’s budget still does nothing to address the growing housing crisis across Canada. An additional $600 million over three years nationally is a drop in the bucket. Ontario needs $2 billion alone. Manitoba needs $3 billion to end their housing crisis. But we do see the skills and employment portion as a much needed support that can go hand in hand with housing, to ensure that citizens are able to live and work within their communities.

There is $189 million in new funding for First Nation communities to engage the federal government on the new Indigenous Reconciliation framework and legislation, announced on Feb. 14. This framework is part of a freight

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced in February the creation of a Recognition and Implementation of Rights Framework, which will form the basis of all relations between the federal government and Canada’s Indigenous Peoples. CREDIT: OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER

The budget includes a total of $1.4 billion for First Nation child welfare over six years – this works out to $230 million annually across Canada or $360,000 per community.

While this is a first step towards change, much more needs to be done. train of legislation that First Nations must deal with in the coming months. The big question remains, will we get run over by the train, or will we be able to actually engage and engineer the laws that will forever influence the future landscape of this country? We see this as placating to the modern treaty agreements and we don’t see our treaty nations reflected in the funding or new Indigenous Reconciliation Framework.

It will take time to fully analyze the budget and the potential impacts any new funding may have. As we set about this analysis, some of the continued work for First Nation leadership will include taking full control of the funding and services provided by the governments, so they can distribute it according their priorities and to create and sustain healthy First Nation communities.

CMJ ISADORE DAY Wiindawtegowinini, is Assembly of First Nations Ontario Regional Chief.

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FROM THE EDITOR

CANADIANMINING April 2018 Vol. 139 – No. 3

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Editor-in-Chief Alisha Hiyate 416-510-6742 ahiyate@canadianminingjournal.com CTwitter: A N A D I A N@Cdn_Mining_Jrnl MINING JOURNAL

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Radical change coming to tailings management Alisha Hiyate

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aybe it’s overstating the case to say the 2014 Mount Polley tailings dam failure changed everything.

It hasn’t yet. But it will.

Today, the mine’s owner, Imperial Metals – which has already spent about $70 million on remediation efforts at Mount Polley – is still cleaning up the site.

Still, the company has been very lucky. That’s because the tailings spill could have been much worse.

If the tailings had been reactive (they are not acid generating, but rather relatively chemically inert) – the damage to the Quesnel water shed, local aquatic life, and the mining industry itself could have been devastating.

Thankfully, they are not, and the effects of the spill have been mostly physical (see page 22).

(While there are some people who don’t completely trust either Imperial or the B.C. government’s work assessing the spill’s effects, a recent independent study by U.K. researchers published in the journal Applied Geochemistry, concluded that “… transport of Cu from Hazeltine Creek to Quesnel Lake may be slightly higher than before the tailings dam spill. However, given the size of Quesnel Lake, and the relatively low Cu flux from Hazeltine Creek, this additional Cu load should have a negligible impact on lake water quality and ecosystem processes.”)

Regardless, the failure has prompted a search for alternatives to the conventional method of handling tailings via sub-aqueous deposition, or tailings ponds.

A 2015 report by an independent panel investigating the causes of the Mount Polley disaster recommended drier methods of disposal, such as thickening or filtering (dry-stacking) tailings. But these methods are more expensive, especially at a larger scale, and come with their own trade-offs, such as the necessity of added infrastructure (a thickening plant) and difficulties in achieving a consistent and stable end product.

For the moment, companies advancing new mines in Canada are still proposing conventional tailings ponds. But as they make their way through permitting, it would not be surprising if pressure from both the public and regulators causes some of them to change course and adopt different methods.

In the meantime, there is ongoing research on making dewatered tailings solutions viable at a larger scale. For example, Goldcorp’s EcoTails co-mingling tailings technology (see Page 18).

And it is interesting to note that Imperial Metals had investigated other disposal methods at Mount Polley in the past.

“We considered thickened discharge in the 1990s and we were about to trial mixing tailings into the rock storage areas (co-mingling) in 2014,” says Vice-President Environmental Affairs ‘Lyn Anglin. “In fact, Mount Polley had a permit to undertake co-mingling research prior to the breach.” Imperial is likely to go ahead with that research in the future.

The Mount Polley tailings dam failure should never have happened.

But because it did – followed a year later by the much more destructive Samarco failure in Brazil that killed 19 – the days when sub-aqueous deposition is considered the default option for tailings disposal are coming to an end.

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UNEARTHING TRENDS

BC’s mining sector is back – in a big way

By Iain Thompson

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fter several consecutive years of decline in the global mining and metals sector, it looks like happy days just might be here again. And for British Columbia, the prospects are looking especially rosy, with growth in mineral and coal exploration spending up for the first time since 2012.

Optimism prevails A variety of factors converged in 2017 to create this positive result. These include rising, or at least stable, commodity prices which have bought about an overall improvement in market sentiment towards exploration and, more importantly, a growing sense of investor confidence in the sector after years of being starved of capital.

The survey found that, while exploration investment was considerably lower than the peak years of 2011-12, it marked the first year of growth since that time. Compared to 2016, expenditure levels increased by 21% to $246 million.

Gold still glitters Gold accounted for 75% of global exploration expenditure in 2017. In B.C. gold was in even more demand, up 32% from 2016 to $151 million, and accounting for 87% of the total exploration expenditures in the province. It was also the number-one primary target out of 38 for nearly 40% of survey respondents, and a commodity of interest for 65% of those who indicated a commodity focus. This was an increase of more than 10% – a not insignificant figure.

B.C.’s Northwest and South Central regions saw the greatest increase in gold exploration, accounting for 80%. These areas encompass the historic Cariboo gold belt and the so-called Golden Triangle, which has benefited from three very important infrastructure upgrades recently – the paving of the Stewart-Cassiar Highway, the opening of ocean port facilities for export at Stewart and the completion of a $700-million high-voltage transmission line.

It’s interesting to note that nearly all the increase in spending in gold exploration has been on existing projects rather than new ones.

Other metals still have their lustre While gold took top spot in B.C. extraction investment in 2017, base metals held their own, with about 20% of exploration expenditures.

Copper accounted for the vast majority (80%) of base metals 6 | CANADIAN MINING JOURNAL

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Companies need to make the investments in research and ever-evolving technologies to adapt to changing circumstances.

If they do this, and at the same time serve as responsible custodians of the province’s rich natural resources, the future will be very bright.

exploration expenditure in 2017. This was higher than its global share of base metals exploration expenditure (69%).

Zinc exploration in B.C. came back as well, up 46% to $8.2 million, as prices continue their upward trajectory since mid-2015. Its share of base metals budgets grew from 13% the year before to 18% in 2017.

What’s next?

Increased appetite for exploration is reassuring during a time in the industry when resource depletion is beginning to become a very real concern.

According to the EY report Business Risks Facing Mining and Metals 2017-2018, miners’ concerns about resource replacement entered the top 10 risks they face for the first time.

The bottom of the supercycle, compounded by increasing exploration costs due to harder-to-reach reserves, had exploration spend sitting at the bottom of the corporate agenda until recently. Future growth depends on exploration investment, however. A lack of spend is equivalent to technology companies not spending on innovation. It’s encouraging to see miners picking up their investment in exploration in B.C. Whatever is on the far horizon for the province’s mining sector, B.C.’s diverse resource-based economy will continue to thrive. Companies need to make the investments in research and ever-evolving technologies to adapt to changing circumstances. If they do this, and at the same time serve as responsible custodians of the province’s rich natural resources, the future will be very bright.

CMJ IAIN THOMPSON is the EY Canadian Mining & Metals Advisory Services Leader. He is based in Vancouver. To read more about the British Columbia mineral and coal exploration survey, visit ey.com/ca/bcminingsurvey.

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CSR & MINING

Canadian CSR ombudsman to replace CSR counsellor

By Michael Torrance and Carolyn Burns

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fter much discussion and speculation the Canadian government announced in January 2018 the formation of a new Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise and a multi-stakeholder Advisory Body on Responsible Business Conduct. This body will replace the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Counsellor for the Extractive Sector which has been in place since 2009.

The federal government’s original Corporate Social Responsibility strategy for the Extractive Sector was released in 2009. That strategy included the creation of the Office of the Extractive Sector CSR Counsellor, a non-judicial grievance mechanism with a primary mandate to intermediate international disputes between local communities and Canadian extractives companies. The CSR Counsellor’s Office received much criticism for not being effective.

An enhanced Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy for the Canadian mining sector was announced by the federal government on Nov. 14, 2014, that would create consequences for companies who refuse to adhere to endorsed CSR best practices and dispute resolution processes. As part of the renewed CSR strategy, Canadian mining companies would face withdrawal of Trade Commissioner Services and other government of Canada advocacy support abroad if they do not meet the endorsed CSR standards and participate in dialogue facilitation processes of Canada’s CSR counsellor and OECD National Contact Point. This included withdrawal of government of Canada services, including the issuance of letters of support, advocacy efforts in foreign markets, and participation in government of Canada trade missions. Such matters would also be taken into account in the CSR-related evaluation and due diligence conducted by the government of Canada’s export financing body, Export Development Canada (EDC), in its considering financing or other support.

International standards such as the 2012 International Finance Corporation Performance Standards on Environmental & Social Sustainability (IFC Performance Standards), the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (the UNGP) and OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises were endorsed in that strategy.

The new ombudsperson’s mandate goes a step further than even the “enhanced” CSR counsellor. The ombudsperson’s mandate will be to investigate allegations of human rights or other business conduct abses arising from Canadian corporate 8 | CANADIAN

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For the Canadian mining sector, this is a step change rather than a paradigm shift. It remains to be seen whether the ombudsperson operates fundamentally differently than the CSR counsellor did. activity abroad. The ombudsperson will operate with a budget that allows them to conduct independent investigations (presumably globally). The details of the office remain to be determined and will be established through an Order-in-Council that has not yet been introduced and no specific date has been announced.

The government of Canada has announced that the ombudsperson will have the ability to undertake collaborative fact-finding, initiate independent fact finding (even without submission of a complaint, report publicly on findings and make recommendations to parties involved in the complaint and to the federal government. Like with the enhanced strategy, if a company refuses to participate or cooperate in the process, the ombudsperson can recommend denial or withdrawal of certain federal government services as an interim measure or final recommendation. In that respect, the ombudsperson’s “stick” is similar to that of the CSR counsellor under the enhanced CSR Strategy of 2014.

One important new development is the scope of the ombudsperson mandate. Whereas the CSR counsellor was focused on the mining and oil & gas sectors, the ombudsperson will cover those sectors plus the garment industry sector.

It is also expected that the mandate will be expanded to add new business sectors in its second year.

Another new development is the establishment of the advisory body that will comprise experts in civil society, industry and government and will report to the minister of International Trade. Its role will be to advise the government on the effective implementation of the strategy and further development of law and policy around human rights and CSR for Canadian companies operating abroad. The advisory body will help the government determine the ombudsperson’s mandate and investigative procedures. Notably, Dr. John Ruggie, lead www.canadianminingjournal.com

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author of the UNGP and now chair of the board of trustees of the human rights consultancy SHIFT and Harvard Professor will be on the advisory board. This shows the federal government’s increasing focus on human rights as the core focus of “responsible” business conduct.

For the Canadian mining sector, this is a step change rather than a paradigm shift. It remains to be seen whether the ombudsperson operates fundamentally differently than the CSR counsellor did. This development may (and likely will) mean more complaints are brought for review, even if only to test the new powers of the ombudsperson. Consequences of findings of non-compliance or non-cooperation will be essentially the same as under the enhanced CSR Strategy of 2014.

The fact that other sectors, like retail, will also be in the scope of the ombudsperson’s mandate should also be seen as positive for the mining sector, which had previously been the exclusive focus of scrutiny. Whether the new mechanism means that Canada’s reputation abroad will be improved is an open question. It is also uncertain whether the new mechanism will reduce at all the number of lawsuits that have emerged in recent years alleging damages for human rights related harms against Canadian companies operating outside of Canada. It likely will not. What it will do is raise the

The fact that other sectors, like retail, will also be in the scope of the ombudsperson’s mandate should be seen as positive for the mining sector, which had previously been the exclusive focus of scrutiny. importance of the UNGP and other human rights focused standards as a baseline for acceptable CSR or responsible business conduct for the mining sector. Companies should consider the extent to which they are grappling with that standard or other human rights standards in particular as part of their CSR programs and consider beefing up their understanding in that area.

CMJ MICHAEL TORRANCE is the director of environmental, social and governance at BMO Financial Group. CAROLYN BURNS is director of operations at NetPositive, a non-profit that works with diverse stakeholders to help local communities see sustained positive outcomes from mining

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LAW

Reconciliation central to overhaul of federal environmental assessment process

By Michelle Jones

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n Feb. 8, 2018, the federal government introduced Bill C-69, An Act to enact the Impact Assessment Act and the Canadian Energy Regulator Act, to amend the Navigation Protection Act and to make consequential amendments to other Acts. Bill C-69 overhauls the federal environmental assessment process for major projects.

Amongst the objectives underlying the overhaul to the current project assessment process is reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. Reconciliation finds a central role in the proposed changes of Bill C-69. In fact, the preamble of Bill C-69 recognizes the Government of Canada’s commitment “to achieving reconciliation with First Nations, the Métis and the Inuit through renewed nation-to-nation, government-to-government and Inuit-Crown relationships based on recognition of rights, co-operation and partnership.” A similar reference to the Government of Canada’s commitment to fostering reconciliation and partnerships with Indigenous peoples is found in the Preamble to Part I of Bill C-69, the Impact Assessment Act (“IAA”).

The federal government has stated that the proposed changes will recognize Indigenous rights and knowledge in project reviews and create new partnerships with Indigenous peoples built on mutual respect and dialogue.

The specific changes are numerous. They permeate various aspects of the proposed assessment and decision-making process for major projects, including the information to be considered as part of assessments and decision-making, the role Indigenous peoples will play as part of the process, and representation of Indigenous peoples within the proposed decision-making bodies.

Below we have outlined several notable proposed changes.

This list is by no means exhaustive; it highlights key proposed changes.

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Legislative recognition of Indigenous rights One of the key changes to the assessment process is the creation of a legislative requirement around the consideration of potential project impacts to Indigenous rights and culture. The purpose section of the IAA provides that these legislative requirements are designed “to ensure respect for the rights of Indigenous peoples of Canada” in the course of impact assessments (“IAs”) and decision-making on major projects.

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As to the specific requirements, section 22 of the IAA directs the Agency to consider impacts that the designated project may have on any Indigenous groups as part of the impact assessment process. As to decision-making, section 16(2)(c) of the IAA provides that in making a decision on the project, the Agency must consider “any adverse impact that the designated project may have on the rights of the Indigenous peoples of Canada recognized and affirmed by section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982.” Section 63 of the IAA imposes the same requirement on the Minister when considering whether the project is in the public interest under section 60.

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Strive to secure free, prior and informed consent Another significant change is the express inclusion of the concept of Indigenous consent into the impact review process. The federal government has advised that the goal with all projects will be to secure free, prior and informed consent from Indigenous groups through a process based on mutual respect and dialogue.

While obtaining Indigenous support for a project has long been the goal for project proponents and governments, the inclusion of “free, prior and informed consent” into the assessment process has a special connotation. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (“UNDRIP”) includes such a requirement. Canada has endorsed UNDRIP and has agreed to implement it in accordance with the Canadian Constitution.

During the Feb. 8 news conference announcing the proposed changes, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna noted that striving for Indigenous consent was consistent with Canada’s commitment to UNDRIP. While the goal is to obtain consent, she clarified that it may not always be possible: “That is what you strive for. It is not always going to be possible. You will not always be able to get every Indigenous community coming together, but you have to try really hard.

That is the expectation under Canadian law. We are going to try really hard.”

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Mandatory consideration of traditional knowledge Under the proposed IA process, consideration of Indigenous traditional knowledge (ITK) will be mandatory. While traditional knowledge is considered as part of the

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current process, the proposed changes will require the Agency to treat ITK with equal weight as science and other information in assessing the potential impacts of a project. The proposed changes also provide protection for ITK through confidentiality and non-disclosure provisions.

4

Consideration of Indigenous assessments One of the purposes of the IAA is to promote co-operation and coordinated action between federal and Indigenous governing bodies with respect to IAs. In support of this purpose, section 22(1)(l) of the IAA requires that the IA of a designated project take into account any assessment of the effects of the designated project that is conducted by or on behalf of an Indigenous governing body.

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Consultation co-ordinated by a single agency The proposed changes streamline consultation with Indigenous Peoples by assigning the responsibility for coordinating Crown consultation to a single body: the Agency.

It is the intent of the federal government that coordination through a single body will assist in supporting long-term relationships with Indigenous Peoples.

6

Indigenous representation on decision-making bodies The proposed changes contemplate Indigenous representation on decision-making bodies including: Section 157 of the IAA contemplates the creation of an expert committee to advise the Impact Assessment Agency on issues related to IAs, including scientific, environmental, health, social or economic issues. At least one member of this committee must be an Indigenous person.

Section 158 of the IAA contemplates the creation of an Indigenous Advisory Committee tasked with working with the new IAA to develop policy and technical guidance on issues of concern to Indigenous peoples. Membership must include Indigenous persons.

Section 14 of Part 2 of Bill C-69 (Canadian Energy Regulator Act) provides that at least one member of the board of directors and one commissioner of the proposed Canadian Energy Regulator must be Indigenous.

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Increased funding for Indigenous engagement The federal government has committed to providing expanded and streamlined participant funding to Indigenous peoples to support their increased engagement in the assessment process.

CMJ MICHELLE JONES is a lawyer at Lawson Lundell LLP whose practice is focused on Indigenous law and environmental law. She also advises clients on occupational health and safety matters. She can be reached at mjones@lawsonlundell.com.

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FAST NEWS • EQUIPMENT |

Updates from across the mining ecosytem

Artisan delivers first 40-tonne battery-powered hauler

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n March 5, 2018, at its new facility in Kirkland Lake, Artisan’s top executives joined together with top executives from Kirkland Lake Gold and community leaders from Kirkland Lake to celebrate the launch of the first ever all battery powered 40-tonne underground haul truck.

The Z40 40-tonne underground haul truck is not only zero emission, but also has the smallest footprint of any 40-tonne truck on the market. Enabled by Artisan’s extremely high powered electric powertrain system, the Z40 can operate in spaces designed for much smaller trucks.

“The Z40 is a game changer for our Macassa mine site” said Tony Makuch, CEO of Kirkland Lake Gold. “Being able to haul significantly more ore in each truckload means more production with a smaller truck fleet. This truck is a critical part of our expansion plans here in Kirkland Lake.”

The Z40 haul truck ushers in a new era in underground hard rock mining.

With its Artisan all-electric battery powered drive system, the Z40 has almost twice the peak horsepower of a comparable diesel machine. It is the smallest

• TRAINING |

Artisan’s Z40 40-tonne underground haul truck will be used at Kirkland Lake Gold’s Macassa gold mine in Ontario.

PHOTO CREDIT: Artisan

40-tonne truck on the market. It produces zero diesel emissions and it generates only one-eighth of the heat of its diesel equivalent.

Artisan has optimized the recharging process to ensure that the Z40 will outperform its rivals on tonnes hauled per day. The Z40 reduces demand on the mine’s ventilation and cooling systems, enables deep mining and improves working conditions underground.

Artisan’s underground mining loaders

and haul trucks are designed from the ground up to include the best thinking in vehicle engineering and to maximize the performance of its high powered, highly reliable, field proven battery electric powertrains.

Artisan is headquartered in California.

The new location in Kirkland Lake will soon grow into an expansive centre of excellence, including a vehicle assembly plant, parts and service distribution centre, and a technology education program.

NORCAT launches two new experiential training programs

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ORCAT, a global leader in the development and provision of skilled labour training and development services, has launched two new, hands-on and experiential training and development programs to prepare the global mining workforce for the “new world of work.”

These new programs, which will provide opportunities for both new and existing workers, were developed based on feedback from NORCAT’s global mining partners that identified the need to provide workers with the skills and confidence to implement, operate, and manage emerging technologies that are being adopted by and transforming the global mining industry.

The two new programs are delivered through a combination of hands-on, experiential training at the NORCAT Underground Centre and instructor led classroom-based learning. The first new program provides fundamental skills training on the operation of tele-remote and autonomous vehicle technology while the second program focuses on understanding underground commu-

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nication systems and IoT (internet of things) technologies.

“Our investments in new technology enabled methods of training and development, combined with the development of new training and development programs, demonstrates our understanding that the new world of work in mining requires a new world of training and development,” said Jason Bubba, Norcat’s director of training and development. “In launching our new training programs and supporting technologies, NORCAT continues to engage, educate and strengthen the future mining work force in order to meet the human capital needs of the global mining industry.”

NORCAT debuted the new training and development programs and new learning technologies at the PDAC convention in Toronto. Live demonstrations included the latest in mine skills training technology including AR, VR, interactive multiplayer avatar-based training, incident re-creation, and digital safety systems.

CMJ www.canadianminingjournal.com

2018-03-22 3:17 PM

WATER & WASTE MANAGEMENT

PREPARING FOR TIGHTER MINE

regulations What miners need to know about the amended MDMER

By Marc LalibertĂŠ

O

n May 13, 2017, the federal government published new regulations amending the Metal Mining Effluent Regulations (MMER) in the Canada Gazette. These amendments, the product of long consultations, will come into force between June 1, 2018, and June 1, 2021. This article will review what impact the amended regulation will have on water treatment.

Diamond mines The most obvious change is that the regulation now applies to diamond mines: the regulation is now the Metal and Diamond Mining Effluent Regulation (MDMER). Previously, diamond APRIL 2018

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MBBR (moving bed biofilm reactor) tanks and the water treatment plant at a gold mine in Canada.

CREDIT: VEOLIA

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WATER & WASTE MANAGEMENT

mine effluents had not been regulated countrywide. While the diamond mining industry was small when the original regulations were published in 2002, there are now six or seven diamond mines in Canada in various stages of operation. Diamond mine effluents are usually fairly easy to make compliant with the MDMER, as the main contaminant is usually total suspended solids (TSS) with minor releases of dissolved salts and nutrients. The impact of the new regulations for that part of the mining industry is thus expected to be minimal.

New limits One of the changes in the new version of the MDMER is that the allowed limits of many contaminants (called “deleterious substances” in the regulation) have been made more stringent.

One important change is for arsenic, where the maximum monthly mean went down from 0.5 to 0.1 mg/L. Arsenic is not especially difficult to remove in the presence of a ferric or aluminum coagulant, but at 0.1 mg/L a good control of pH, coagulant dosage and efficient TSS removal is required if the water contains a lot of arsenic. For mines where a fraction of the arsenic in the influent is present as an organic species, an unusual but not unheard-of occurrence, then it is possible that coagulation will not be sufficient to meet the new criteria. A second treatment stage might then become required, using advanced oxidation, adsorption on activated carbon, reverse osmosis or some other mean.

The maximum monthly mean concentration for copper is reduced from 0.3 to 0.1 mg/L. Copper is fairly easy to remove at high pH with a coagulant provided it is not complexed with ammonia or some other substance, and with the new ammonia requirements it is unlikely that enough ammonia will be present to cause issues. The old limit was high enough that barely meeting it would have caused issues with trout lethality. Even at 0.1 mg/L trout lethality might be an issue, and it is safer for 14 | CANADIAN

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Top: MBBR (moving bed biofilm reactor) tanks and the water treatment plant at a gold mine in Canada. CREDIT: VEOLIA Above: Biological treatment, such as Veolia’s AnoxKaldnes MBBR technology, can be very effective in dealing with cyanates and ammonia. CREDIT: VEOLIA

toxicity conformity to target 0.02 mg/L. It is thus likely that mines where there is no issue with trout lethality will easily meet the new limit.

Cyanide, lead, nickel and zinc all see their maximum allowed concentration reduced. In all cases the reduction should not be an issue with a modern water treatment plant with good pH control and removal of TSS. It should be noted that with the tighter nickel and zinc limits, it might become difficult to meet the new arsenic requirement if these contaminants are present at the same time in the water to treat. Arsenic will usually be better removed at a lower pH than nickel or zinc, and with the new requirements it might not be possible to remove them all in one go. A two-stage treatment might be required. www.canadianminingjournal.com

2018-03-22 3:18 PM

Unionized ammonia The addition of a criteria of 0.5 mg N/L for unionized ammonia is to be considered with the requirement that the effluent be non acutely lethal for the rainbow trout. Trouts, and salmonids in general, are exquisitely sensitive to ammonia. The Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment has established that the low toxicity threshold for unionized ammonia for the rainbow trout is 0.4 mg N/L, and it has been our experience that acute toxicity may occur in water containing 0.1 to 1.0 mg N/L of unionized ammonia, depending on the water composition. The fraction of ammonia being unionized diminishing rapidly with pH, the main impact this requirement will have, in my opinion, is to force mines that are borderline with respect to ammonia to operate at the lower end of the allowed pH range: instead of being able to operate between 6.0 and 9.5 they may find themselves forced to operate at 6.0 to 7.5. Old water treatment plants may require updates to operate in such a narrow range, or might have to add some treatment capability to reduce ammonia.

On a side note related to ammonia, environmental managers should be aware of the fact that if their effluent contains cyanate (it will if the mill use a cyanide process followed by detoxification), and if they analyze ammonia using bottles stabilized with sulfuric acid (most ammonia analysis kits do), cyanates will hydrolyze to ammonia in the presence of the acid. The ammonia results reported by the lab will then actually be the sum of the true ammonia plus any cyanates present in water.

If the manager finds the treated effluent close to the unionized ammonia criteria this might be worth investigating, as cyanates do not actually count in the calculation of unionized ammonia.

D. magna toxicity We finally come to the last change, and perhaps the one which is going to affect miners the most: the obligation to be non toxic for Daphnia magna. Toxicity is a tricky issue. It varies between species. A substance might be toxic in a given water, not so in a different water. Some substances increase the toxicity of other substances, some substances decrease it. All of this to say that even if the mine effluent was not toxic for the trout; it might very well be for D. magna. By now all mines should have been testing for D. magna toxicity (even if they did not have to make the water non toxic), so it should be known which water treatment plants will require improvement. The tricky question will be, what kind of improvement? There is no easy answer to that, and toxicity identification evaluations (known as TIE studies) might be required in many instances.

As an example, consider the above mentioned cyanates.

Cyanates are the end product of the detoxification of cyanides.

The detoxification process was named as such as it produces water much less toxic to fishes, birds and mammals. Unfortunately, D. magna is very sensitive to cyanates. So, ironically, the water produced by the detoxification process might need further treatment to reduce its toxicity.

Treatment to reduce toxicity to D. magna will depend on what the actual cause of the toxicity is (hence the necessity of TIE studies). Biological treatment in an aerobic environment, as an example, is very effective in dealing with cyanates and APRIL 2018

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ammonia (Veolia has installed biological systems at gold mines throughout Canada), but it is useless if the toxicity is caused by beryllium.

The future The new MDMER regulations will take into effect gradually.

For most mine sites the impact on the water treatment should be minimal. Older sites may require some upgrade to lower TSS or control pH to a narrower range. Sites where D. magna toxicity is an issue will have to identify the source of the toxicity. Depending on the investigation results, more significant results might be required.

Water treatment plants at new mines will have to be designed according to the new regulation and this design will have to take into account the new criteria for ammonia and the toxicity requirements. It has been my personal experience that geochemical models used for water quality prediction do a poor job of predicting nitrogen species concentration, including ammonia, cyanate, thiocyanate and cyanide. New mine owners should make sure that these parameters are included in their water quality models. This, in turn, will ensure that the water treatment plant will be properly designed to meet the CMJ new regulations.

MARC LALIBERTÉ is a senior process engineer with Veolia Water Technologies. He can be reached at marc.laliberte@veolia.com

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2018-03-22 3:18 PM

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WATER & WASTE MANAGEMENT

THE CLEANER, DRIER FUTURE OF MINE WASTE

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www.canadianminingjournal.com

2018-03-22 3:20 PM

Left: An FLSmidth 4-metre by 2-metre pressure filter. The company is working with Goldcorp on developing EcoTails technology and will offer the system commercially once testing is complete. Right: GeoWaste test piles.

CREDIT: GOLDCORP

Mount Polley failure spurs look at tailings alternatives

By David Godkin

T

he numbers are a mine owner and manager’s worst nightmare. Ten million cubic metres of water and 4.5 million cubic metres of slurry pouring from a 4-sq.-km sized tailings pond into Polley Lake, raising it 1.5 metres. Hazeltine Creek transformed from a 2-metre-wide stream to a 50-metre “wasteland,” according to local press. Along the way, trees ripped from their roots amid a torrent of mud and debris flowing as far as Quesnel Lake and Cariboo Creek.

That in a nutshell is what drove the work and findings of a panel examining Imperial Metals’ tailings dam collapse at Mount Polley in August 2014. The causes, they concluded: A history of operating the pond beyond capacity and failure to correct an interim design measure which steepened the angle of the dam’s slope, and a “trigger for the collapse” said panel chairman Norbert Morgenstern.

But the real culprit, said the report, was the mine’s original design. “The design did not take into account the complexity of the sub-glacial and pre-glacial geological environment associated with the Perimeter Embankment foundation.” That layer of continuous GLU glacial till, unaccounted for by the original engineering contractor, was also undetectable by government inspectors who could not have recognized, said the report, “that it was susceptible to undrained failure when subject to the stresses associated with the embankment.”

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It’s all in the design… or should be Today, Cam Scott, principal geotechnical engineer for SRK North America, says the viability of a mine’s tailings facility can’t be separated from recognition of the mine’s design at one very crucial stage.

“You need to go into design thinking about closure and having a closure plan in place. It’ll probably be refined over time, but that’s the number one significant thing in my view,” Scott says.

The Mining Association of Canada (MAC) also made it clear in a revised Tailings Guide released in November that it wants more attention paid to “minimizing harm,” i.e. “zero catastrophic failures of tailings facilities, and no significant adverse effects on the environment and human health.”

“It’s a tall order, isn’t it?” replies Scott. “I absolutely am certain that the bar is being raised yet again and that the likelihood of getting there is higher and higher as time goes on.

Will we get to zero? That’s certainly the hope.”

MAC’s Tailings Review Taskforce has made numerous updates to the tailings guide to help industry get closer to zero, stressing the importance of assessing and selecting Best Available Technology and Best Applicable Practice. That includes new technical components critical to the physical and chemical stability of tailings facilities, something Scott helps unpack.

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WATER & WASTE MANAGEMENT GeoWaste test piles at the Peñasquito mine in Mexico, where a proof-of-concept study on EcoTails is under way. CREDIT: GOLDCORP

“I think it comes down to two fundamental issues: geochemistry and physical stability. On the physical side it’s very much about managing the solids and the water. And if you can’t control the geochemistry then you have to be able to manage the water.”

Trafficable and stackable Water has been the underlying source of virtually all failures of tailings storage facilities, making water recovery the key to tailings design and mine operations. Decades ago, slurries were simply discharged from a mine site into the surrounding environment with little thought given to their impacts. Enter new ideas like cyclone sand placement which recovers roughly 25% of water, conventional thickening and paste systems at 60% and 70% of water respectively, all the way to the extremely costly physical filtration systems which can recover as much as 80-85% before the remaining material is taken away by earth-moving equipment and dry stacked.

Use of these technologies naturally depends on how they’re applied and the surrounding environment, but can we do even better? Simon Hille thinks we can. The vice-president of Technical Services, Metallurgy and Process at Goldcorp is on a mission with Mike Jacobs, director of Water and Tailings to not only drastically reduce fresh water consumption and reduce the footprint of mining operations but also to eventually eliminate conventional slurry tailings, currently the largest store of unavailable water in the mining process.

The centrepiece of Goldcorp’s Towards Zero Water (H2Zero) initiative is Eco Tailings, award winning technology designed to improve tailings and waste rock disposal while processing mine waste and increasing water recovery. Part of this involves building a “trafficable” process system, says Hille.

“We dewater to a conveyable moisture point. What we then do is blend that dewatered tailings product with waste rock on a conveyor in flight to create a product we call GeoWaste.”

This sounds like traditional co-mingling but the difference maker, says Hille, is science. Where traditional co-mingling places two products side by side and blends them together using heavy moving equipment, “we’re trying to reach a certain core filling of the particles so that we create a product that will both be pliable and reduce the potential for oxygen to enter these pilings in the future.”

The remainder can then be terraformed and progressive closure techniques applied “so that what we leave behind is being closed while we’re still in operation and is not something simply left for the future.”

Hille is currently overseeing a proof-of-concept study of the system at Mexico’s Peñasquito polymetallic mine which he hopes to complete this summer. Goldcorp expects this to be followed by a full-scale prototype and, fingers crossed, actual mine deployment.

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The goal of Goldcorp’s EcoTailings technology: No tailings dam, lower fresh water use, reduced acid rock drainage, smaller mine footprint and less overall risk.

Considering cost and risk Air drying large tonnages requires significant amounts of time, multiple units and high energy use “to blow that water down,” Hille added. This can account for up to a third of the cost of filtration. A simple “fast filtering” process to deliver a conveyable moisture product like GeoWaste eliminates the need for that blow down stage, he says.

Can Goldcorp scale up Eco Tailings to high volumes to make it cost-competitive against the industry standard? It says it can, but to do so will require processing equipment up to 375% larger than what is currently on the market to lower operating costs and streamline maintenance. The goal at the end of the day: No tailings dam, lower fresh water use, reduced acid rock drainage, smaller mine footprint and less overall risk.

That last item is like gold to Andrew Watson, sector leader for mining at Stantec in Denver, Colo. Watson has published and presented numerous times on managing tailings storage facilities at mines, seeking practical solutions to engineering challenges using risk-based decision-making. It’s driven by a number of risks.

“What’s the physical risk of having wet tailings stored behind an impoundment or dam and do we actually have the water to operate the facility? If we can recover the water and recirculate it, we’d be in much better shape.”

Those paying particular attention are financiers and investors who base their assessment of the properties they’re interested in on what you have to say about potential liabilities. “What do they need to see in order to evaluate a property? Because if you www.canadianminingjournal.com

2018-03-22 3:20 PM

can’t address that then they have to put their own safety factor on what they’re prepared to pay,” says Watson.

Remain silent on risks such as those posed by weak tailings design and operations and the prospective buyer or financier “is going to put their own spin on it and make an offer commensurate with their own risk evaluations,” he adds. Address those issues yourself and allay people’s concerns, and they might pay you a little more.

And then there’s the industry’s own bottom line. Risk based decision making is not aimed solely at squaring risk to people and property with short term profitability, Watson explains.

“People are realizing it’s great if you’re going to make a lot of cash in the first few years but it doesn’t help you if you start giving it all back again.”

Watson says we already have a model for avoiding zero catastrophic failures like the one at Mount Polley in the model for zero harm to workers. “If we adopted a similar approach and applied the same tools and training and monitoring that we do for work safety around our environmental performance we could lick this.”

The eventual goal, Watson adds: to convert all the potential energy contained within a tailings facility “so that you don’t have to carry this big contingency on your books. Millions of those dollars are on company balance sheets right now in order to account for future obligations.” And the added costs in new facilities like that proposed by Goldcorp?

“I think this goes back to Cam Scott’s point: you need to think about these things as you’re conceptualizing the whole deal,” Watson says.

Unless you can justify the tradeoffs at the beginning, it’s awfully difficult to proceed to a more advanced takings technology.

“If you’ve already spent a hundred million dollars on a storage facility and then say you don’t want to use it is a drastic change of course,” he adds.

Getting everyone in the room Something that may help, Scott said, is contained in MAC’s 29 recommendations for tailings management, including a framework for annual inspections, audits and the push towards an independent review panel. “It’s not perfect, but I think it’s good to have a completely independent set of eyes asking the questions, challenging the designers and the engineer of record.”

Watson agrees. Imagine two people in a room he says, one the mine owner, the other the mine’s chief engineer. They’re at cross purposes as to how much they should spend and the level of care that’s required on the tailings end of operations. Having a third voice in the room like an independent engineer could make all the difference by “slowing the conversation down a bit,” Watson says.

“That independent engineer could do two things: talk sense to the owner in terms of how to manage their risk better and talk sense to the engineer in terms of making sure they do the right thing. One of the biggest benefits is that you get a cross CMJ pollination of ideas and best practices.

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WATER & WASTE MANAGEMENT

MOUNT POLLEY, 3.5 YEARS LATER Imperial’s VP environment talks remediation

By Alisha Hiyate

W

hen the Mount Polley tailings storage facility failed in August 2014, it sent 7.3 million cubic metres of fine tailings, 600,000 cubic metres of construction materials and 17 million cubic metres of water into the local watershed, uprooting trees and vegetation in its path and depositing the slurry in Hazeltine Creek, Quesnel Lake, Polley Lake and Edney Creek.

Three and half years later, the mine’s owner Mount Polley Mining Corp., a subsidiary of Imperial Metals, has spent about $70 million on rehabilitation efforts.

It also has 3.5 years’ worth of data from testing of water, aquatic life, soil and plants to assess the effects of the tailings facility breach, contained in thousands of pages of studies including post event environmental impact assessment reports, a human health risk assessment, and an ecological risk assessment, all of which are posted on its website.

So what has it found out from all that testing?

“Out of all of those studies what we found was after the initial tailings release, the effect was primarily physical, not chemical,” says Dr. ‘Lyn Anglin, chief scientific officer and vice-president environmental affairs with Imperial Metals. “That’s the bottom

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line of all of the research that we’ve done.”

Anglin, former president and CEO of Geoscience BC, is a relative newcomer to Imperial, having joined the company in September 2014 as part of Imperial Metals’ support to Mount Polley, just one month after the breach occurred at the operation, about 56 km northeast of Williams Lake, B.C. “It has been a large, challenging, but very interesting multi-disciplinary research project to look at the impacts of the spill, to design monitoring programs, mitigation and remediation programs and determine what risk if any there is to human health or the environment from the spill,” Anglin says.

‘Toxic’ News coverage of the Mount Polley failure described the tailings as “toxic” – a characterization that, fortunately, has proven inaccurate.

“Unfortunately, the word toxic gets tossed around a lot and I think a lot of people don’t understand that just about any chemical can be toxic,” Anglin says, adding that toxicity is determined by the concentration and form of exposure.

“A big part of why I was motivated to join the company is because my background is in mineral deposits, and regional geochemistry, and I did know a fair amount about the geowww.canadianminingjournal.com

2018-03-22 3:21 PM

A community tour of Mount Polley in June 2015. Residents of Likely, B.C., view progress that’s been made on channel reconstruction and erosion control work.

CREDIT: IMPERIAL METALS

selenium and copper in effluent, as well as other metals.

chemistry of Mount Polley,” Anglin continues. “I knew that this deposit was non-acid generating. Essentially, the chemical impact of any tailings spill will be determined by the mineralogy and chemistry of the material that spilled and at Mount Polley, it’s relatively inert.”

As a low sulphide copper-gold alkalic porphyry with a lot of carbonate associated with the mineralization, Anglin explains the deposit is basically a self-neutralizing system. She adds that it’s also low in a lot of the metals about which people have expressed concern, like cadmium, arsenic, lead or zinc.

The tailings that escaped the tailings storage facility are essentially copper-rich sand.

“The copper is in a form that is not easily leached, the tailings are non-acid generating, so in fact they’re fairly chemically stable, relatively inert,” she says. “Therefore the question of toxicity is not really a concern.”

As for other chemicals of concern, the deposit is not high in arsenic: although there is an arsenic signature in Quesnel Lake, it’s there naturally and does not come from Mount Polley.

The deposit is not high in selenium either, but it’s enough of a concern that it is addressed in the company’s water treatment plan. The company has also installed a water treatment plant to reduce the levels of particulates, which reduces the levels of APRIL 2018

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‘Worst case water’ As part of its impact assessment work, Mount Polley has done a lot of toxicity testing of the sediment, the water, and of their impact on aquatic organisms.

“We’re finding no toxicity effects related to copper or any of the other metals in the tailings,” Anglin says.

While she says the company doesn’t have a lot of detailed information on the lake water quality before the spill, thanks to an innovative study by the province and supported financially by Mount Polley, it does have one year of pre-spill data on resident fish populations in Quesnel Lake.

Data from the study, which used electronic tags on fish and sensors in the lake on floating buoys to track the fish, showed that there was no fish mortality in 2014 or 2015 associated with the spill, and no significant change in fish behaviour.

“That gives us a great amount of comfort, particularly because the Quesnel Lake watershed is a very important one for salmon spawning.”

After the tailings breach, a “turbidity plume” appeared in Quesnel Lake. The plume, which was formed from fine grained particulates that initially remained deep in the lake, and then, when the lake turned over in the fall, was present at surface for about five to six months, causing the water to

look cloudy.

Mount Polley did toxicity testing of this cloudy water on rainbow trout eggs and alevin – an early stage at which the fish are considered very sensitive.

“We took some of that water, which would have been the worst case water that a spawning trout or salmon would see in the river and we saw no impact on the development of those fish.

So we’re very confident again that we’re not seeing a chemical impact on the aquatic life.”

Anglin adds that the province recently increased the lake trout fishing quota, which had been quite stringent for years before the spill.

As predicted by water modelling completed by consultants, the plume cleared by spring 2015. As for the potential for turbidity to return and stir up the sediments, the company doesn’t believe it will be an issue, noting that regular monitoring of water quality indicates that it hasn’t recurred since Hazeltine Creek was reconstructed.

Remediation – what’s been done?

In contrast to the chemical effects, the physical effects of the spill were dramatic. These have been the central focus of remediation efforts at Mount Polley. The first thing Mount Polley CONTINUED ON PAGE 24

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WATER & WASTE MANAGEMENT Left: Construction at the breach area of the tailings dam in April 2015.

Right: Revegetation crew working in lower Hazeltine in May 2015.

CREDIT: IMPERIAL METALS

did was to clean up and reconstruct the 8-km-long Hazeltine Creek, which had been deeply scoured by the spill, and remove tailings from the creek valley. The company estimates that about 400,000 tonnes of tailings have been removed from the creek. About 1 million tonnes of rock was used to construct a new creek channel and the access roads for the creek construction. The bulk of that work was completed by May 2015.

“We dug out all the tailings along the creek and replaced them with an engineered, rock-lined channel so that we could stop the erosion, and control the flow between Polley Lake and Quesnel Lake,” Anglin says. “As soon as we had completed that channel, the particulate matter going into Quesnel Lake from the breach-impacted areas dropped right off.”

Since then, the company has been reconstructing fish habitat in the creek, which rainbow trout that live in Polley Lake use to spawn. Fish habitat has been completed along 2.5 km of the upper part of Hazeltine Creek and Mount Polley is hoping to re-introduce fish into the creek this spring.

Most of the remediation work has been completed with the assistance of contracting companies that are joint ventured with two local First Nation bands. Mount Polley lies on the traditional lands of the Williams Lake Indian Band and the Xatsull First Nation (Soda Creek Indian Band), both of which have partnership agreements with Mount Polley. The ongoing working relationship with the two bands is demonstrated by the fact that both bands have renewed their partnership agreements with Mount Polley since the tailings breach.

In addition to reconstruction work, rehabilitation efforts have included planting of over 300,000 native shrubs – a mixture of willow cuttings from the site, plants grown from seeds collected at the site, and seedlings of native plants.

Limits of remediation Remediation of the site isn’t complete yet, and it remains to be seen what level of remediation will be considered sufficient.

Mount Polley submitted a conceptual remediation plan to the B.C. Ministry of Environment in January.

The plan includes tailings being removed wherever they would prevent the site returning to a naturalized environment. This includes areas where the released tailings are very thick, such as near the tailings storage facility. Most of this work has already been completed by the mine with over 350,000 tonnes of tailings removed, Anglin says, and more work is planned for 2018.

“Because it’s very fine grained, homogenous and low in organics, it wouldn’t support a healthy ecosystem in terms of being able to revegetate it,” Anglin explains. “So where we can’t really introduce a viable ecosystem, we are removing the tailings.”

Tailings are also being removed from areas where they would be subject to remobilization in a heavy rain or spring freshet.

That material may be put back in the tailings facility, used for construction, or potentially stored to use in remediation.

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“Because they’re a nice sand-sized particulate material, that can help us remediate the site where we’re very low on soil,” Anglin says. “If you mix in organic materials with sand just like you do in your garden, you can actually augment the soil so it’s more productive, and again because we don’t have an issue with metal mobility on the site, this means we may be able to use some of the materials that way.”

However, in some areas, the company believes it might be less disruptive to let some of the tailings sediments remain where they are.

Dredging Quesnel Lake to remove tailings sediments, for example, would disturb the benthic community (organisms that live on and in the lake bottom), which has slowly started to return as natural sedimentation and organic material are added.

“Dredging would involve fairly significant disruption – we’d be probably looking at generating more turbidity and there would be a lot of infrastructure required, a lot of equipment required,” Anglin says.

“We think at this point probably the best approach is to leave the tailings in place, monitor the recovery and see whether we need to do anything to help accelerate the re-establishment of the benthic community.”

The company has presented the draft conceptual remediation plan in community meetings in late 2017, and will be consulting with First Nations and the public on the proposal.

Water management plan A long-term water management plan for Mount Polley was approved last April.

The site was always predicted to have a positive water balance because of its location in an interior rain forest, and needs to discharge water into the local watershed. Now that storing extra water in the tailings facility is no longer acceptable, the need to discharge water is even more pressing. All mine contact water is treated before being released.

To meet water quality guidelines, Mount Polley’s water management plan relies on meeting very stringent permit conditions for effluent. These conditions mean that the water being released into the lake meets all 30-day aquatic life protective water quality guidelines (more stringent than drinking water quality guidelines) within a 100-metre initial dilution zone (IDZ) perimeter around the discharge point. Anglin notes that the lake often naturally exceeds these water quality guidelines, so the conditions on the mine’s effluent are very strict.

The company has faced criticism from members of the public that would like the effluent itself to meet 30-day water quality www.canadianminingjournal.com

2018-03-22 3:21 PM

guidelines, but Anglin says the mine’s water management plan was developed based on a detailed best achievable technology (BAT) assessment, and a permit was issued by the B.C. government, after thorough review, as protective of the receiving environment.

Longer term, the company is looking at options for passive or semi-passive water treatment, for example through constructed wetlands, that could replace the water treatment plant after closure. The mine is permitted to 2022, but there is potential to extend the mine life.

Future of mine waste Since the tailings facility was put back in operation in June 2016 after being repaired and fortified with buttressing, there have been strict limits on how much water can be held in it.

But why put the tailings dam back in operation?

Mount Polley certainly needed revenue from the operation to help pay for the remediation. The company also had a strong desire to keep people employed in the Cariboo Region. Considering it wanted to continue mining and needed a place to put mine waste, after a detailed analysis of options, it concluded that using the existing facility was less impactful on the site than building a new one would be.

With the assurance of the Independent Engineering Review Panel (a group of four independent engineers, including one that represents the local First Nations), and several detailed studies on the facility and its failure, the company is certain the dam will not fail again.

But the spill has both the company and the wider industry questioning the status quo when it comes to waste and water management.

Sub-aqueous deposition was largely adopted in the mining industry to prevent acid mine drainage (by not exposing sulphidic minerals to the air). But since Mount Polley tailings are not acid generating, why have a tailings pond at all?

“It’s a really good question,” Anglin says – and one that she admits she doesn’t have an answer for. Neither does the industry at large.

Adopting less conventional mining waste technologies will require changes in the approach to water at sites and in site processes, and the industry’s mindset. But the Mount Polley failure has set the course of the industry firmly in that direction. CMJ

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MINERAL PROCESSING

SART

OBSERVATIONS ABOUT

PLANT COSTS

Treating complex gold ores with SART doesn’t have to be pricey

By Brent Baker

A

s the modern gold mining sector tries to avoid the depletion of metal reserves, the importance of complex gold deposits are increasing. These deposits are characterized by elevated content of cyanide soluble metals such as copper and zinc, which increases cyanide consumption and destruction costs. As a result, additional steps in the metallurgical flowsheet are required to maintain gold extraction efficiency.

One tool available to the industry to manage these interferences is the SART (Sulphidization-Acidification-RecycleThickening) process. Although SART was developed more than two decades ago, the common perception is that SART is uneconomical to make it broadly applicable. To provide insight into the true costs of SART, we would like to share our experiences from our involvement in the design, construction, commissioning and ongoing operation of several large-scale SART plants and multiple feasibility studies assessing SART integration into different metallurgical circuits.

SART plants are perceived as too expensive When plants are designed based on inaccurate criteria or by parties with no direct SART operating experience, the result can be a large plant that is expensive to operate. From our experience, the following are key to keeping SART costs down: • Involving professionals with direct SART design and operating experience from the early stages of the project, including the initial metallurgical test work; • Understanding the orebody by including base metals in geo-

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logical and mine planning models to establish the base metal loading over the mine life and making appropriate provisions in the metallurgical flowsheet; and • Planning carefully through all aspects of integrating SART into the existing metallurgical flowsheet.

Importance of project continuity Maintaining a direct line of continuity from design through to operations will ensure that the design intent is fully realized when the plant is operating. Process design, control philosophy and SCADA programming are crucial to the final plant size and performance. Multiple party involvement can lead to disconnects and an overdesigned and costly plant. In worse case scenarios, the plant may never reach the target metallurgical performance or even create negative impacts on the downstream metallurgical processes.

Settling characteristics of sulphide product SART removes the metallurgical interference of base metals by liberating them from cyanide and precipitating the metal as an insoluble sulphide product. The ability to design a system that produces a high-grade sulphide product with good settling and filtration characteristics in operations has been challenging.

Achieving success with this aspect of SART will allow for a small clarifier which reduces plant capital costs.

Gypsum slurry management The acceptance or use of the SART gypsum slurry elsewhere within the mine site will determine whether dewatering is www.canadianminingjournal.com

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required. Since the tonnage of gypsum production in SART can be significant and gypsum dewatering and subsequent filter cake handling can represent a major ongoing operating cost, the elimination of gypsum dewatering can create significant life cycle cost savings.

Location & pre-fabrication These factors contribute directly to SART installed costs.

Plant location, particularly the remoteness of the site and the country in which it operates, will impact on-site labour rates, shipping costs and the need for a building enclosure. Utilizing skidded equipment and/or modules built at the nearest major transportation hub can help reduce costs. The degree to which pre-fabrication of plant components are used will accordingly shorten fabrication and install schedules, while also reducing costs associated with shipping to site and on-site labour.

SART, when applied properly to the processing of complex gold ores, can yield many benefits. We have worked on SART projects from start to finish and we have also been asked to step in to help improve performance of SART plants designed by others. From these experiences, we hope we have shed some light on SART plant costs.

CMJ BRENT BAKER is the manager of process engineering at Vancouver-based BQE Water.

He can be reached at bbaker@bqewater.com.

From top to bottom: Gypsum clarifier showing the clean overflow of the neutralized leach solution ready for use in the gold extraction circuit; Enclosed clarifier where copper precipitated from the leach solution is settled and filtrated to produce a high-grade copper concentrate with commercial value; Commissioning of a SART plant in Mexico to remove the metallurgical interference of copper in the orebody to improve gold extraction efficiency. CREDIT: BQE WATER

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ERIEZ EVOLVES CONVENTIONAL FLOTATION New StackCell technology improves cost and performance

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Photo:istock80, iStockimages.com

MINERAL PROCESSING

FIG.

3

Eriez’s StackCell technology uses two-stage flotation.

By Eric Bain Wasmund, Lance Christodoulou and Mike Mankosa

Photo:istock80, iStockimages.com

Conventional flotation It is commonly appreciated that the flotation separation process depends on at least two sequential steps. In the first step, ore particles and bubbles collide efficiently to form aggregates.

The second step occurs as these bubble-particle aggregates gently float to the top of the unit and join the froth phase. The first step is improved by adding large amounts of mechanical energy to induce turbulence which enhances collision and attachment, especially for fine particles. In contrast, the second step is improved by low energy quiescent fluid conditions, especially for coarse particles.

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energy is selected to be a compromise between recovering fine particles and coarse particles. In practice, the tails are normally enriched in both of these size classes, as shown in Figure 1, which illustrates the metal contained by size in the final tailing stream for a world-class copper concentrator.

1

FIG.

F

roth flotation is the most industrially significant process for upgrading a wide range of mineral systems. Most operating concentrators have a flotation line. The majority of these operations use mechanical tank cells for the lion’s share of the flotation requirements.

Tank cells have some advantages. Firstly, they can float ore that is not fully liberated, which enables an initial separation with high recovery. However, this does not necessarily achieve a practical level of enrichment. Secondly, they are relatively robust and simple to operate, which is advantageous for handling ore variability and operator training. Thirdly, the stirred tank cell unit operation has been shown to be scalable, in other words, the feed to the unit can be increased or decreased by making the cells larger in a way that is well understood. Finally, the scale-up rules are simple and time-tested. This means that the flotation performance can be tested on a very small lab unit in a batch mode, and the results can be reliably extrapolated to large flowsheets. Despite these advantages, there are significant trade-offs in terms of lower efficiencies and higher costs.

Here it can be observed that about 85% of unrecovered ore is in the fine and coarse size range for conventional flotation.

As a result of this compromise, ore particles may combine with bubbles and then be knocked apart by fluid acceleration (called “drop-back” in flotation lingo) several times before being successfully removed in the froth phase. This internal cycle within the unit results in lower overall efficiency, and can only be compensated by increasing the retention time in the tank, which has a direct impact by increasing the volume of the flotation cells by making them over-sized, compared with cells that could be designed and operated using a more efficient application of process engineering.

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Side-by-side comparison In this comparison, continuous sampling was available on the feed and outlet (tails and concentrate) of the rougher tank cells and the scavenger tank cells. Receiving identical feed was a train of three 0.6-metre diameter StackCells, shown in Figure 3. Sampling on each of these cells allowed the investigators to close mass balances around the plant rougher and scavenger banks and each StackCell under identical feed conditions.

Finally, pulp from the plant was taken to a commercial lab and used to run a batch Denver test. This is a standard test that is used to evaluate the performance of industrial tank cells.

Normally, the industrial tank cells need two to three times the amount of retenMINING JOURNAL

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2

FIG.

30 | CANADIAN

4

FIG.

Two-stage flotation The solution to this problem has been previously identified.

The basic idea is to break the flotation cell into two separate and isolated tanks. In the first tank, the fluid environment is optimized for high bubble particle contacting (called “particle collection� in flotation lingo). In the second tank, the fluid environment is optimized for quiescent density separation, which minimizes the number of particles that get caught in the internal “drop-back� cycle. This class of flotation devices is sometimes referred to as “two-stage flotation cells.�

Eriez developed and patented its two-stage device, called the StackCell in 2008. Today, the company has more than 30 fullscale installations in coal flotation. A cut-away of the StackCell is shown as Figure 2. The design features a tank within a tank. Air and feed pulp enter the internal tank, where they are mixed with a high shear rotor and stator mechanism. The internal tank is bounded on all sides and the aerated pulp can only leave through a narrow gap between the top of the tank wall and the rotating lid. This special design means that when bubble-particle aggregates form and flow through the internal tank, they cannot return. In the outer tank, the low amount of energy is ideal for facilitating the density separation (flotation) of the bubble-particle aggregates and “drop-back� is minimized because there is no mechanically induced forced convection.

Several years ago, a 1.2-metre diameter unit was tested in gold sulphide flotation in South America. In the comparison, the StackCell was run side by side with a conventional mechanical tank cell and was able to achieve a comparable degree of metallurgical separation (as measured by grade and recovery) in about one-sixth of the residence time of the conventional cell. In another recent side-by-side comparison, a train of three StackCells was run alongside a set of five 8-metre diameter conventional rougher scavenger tank cells at the site of a copper porphyry concentrator. That comparison is summarized in this article. The full experimental method and results were published earlier this year at the National Canadian Mineral Processors Conference in Ottawa.

tion time to achieve the same degree of separation as the Denver batch test.

Typical results for the recoveries from this test are shown in Figure 4. All three flotation units generated concentrate with comparable grade. In this figure, the kinetic response is shown for the StackCell train (diamonds), the Denver batch test (squares) and commercial tank cells (triangles).

#

MINERAL PROCESSING

Unsurprisingly, the multiplier to transform the Denver curve onto the commercial tank cells was about two. This is a well-known “rule of thumb� used in the time-tested scale-up of mechanical tank cells discussed in the introduction of this article. The big news is that the StackCell results were on the left hand side of the Denver curve. In other words, flotation in the StackCells was almost three times faster than the Denver batch test or about six times faster than conventional tank cells.

What could account for this dramatic and improved result?

Recall that in a conventional tank cell high energy is a requirement to cause bubbles and ore particle to combine, but this same condition can cause detachment and drop-back. The only way to handle this compromise is to allow for multiple cycles of formation and drop-back by radically increasing the required retention time. Even then, significant amounts of fine and coarse particles are lost, as demonstrated in Figure 1. The internal “drop-back� cycle is expected to also occur in a Denver lab-cell, albeit with potentially less impact because of the substantially diminished length scales involved compared with industrial-scale tank cells. These results are a powerful demonstration of the potential of the two-stage device, contrasted against two variants of the conventional stirred tank design with the inherent built-in “drop-back� loop. Obviously, the perfection and commercialization of the two-stage device can be a game changer for the mining business. Based on these results, the potential has been shown for dramatically reducing the size of the units, installation costs, and operating energy costs.

To that end, Eriez is currently working closely with a number of mining companies, including several of the largest global mining companies to test the limits of this CMJ technology and scale it up to larger quantities.

ERIC BAIN WASMUND is global managing director and LANCE CHRISTODOULOU, global testing manager with Eriez Flotation Division; MIKE MANKOSA is executive vice-president of Eriez.

www.canadianminingjournal.com

2018-03-22 3:23 PM

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