The chief operating officer of Atlantic Gold picked cigarette butts out of the gravel in front of the administrative offices of Nova Scotia’s newest mine on Tuesday morning.
“I want people to take pride in what we have created here,” said Maryse Belanger.
She also had 90 visitors, ranging from investors to journalists, community members and her own board of directors, coming for a tour of the mine on Wednesday.
After spending $130 million on an immense earth-moving and infrastructure-building project at Moose River Gold Mines in the Halifax Regional Municipality, Atlantic Gold will be pouring its first gold bars next week.
At least, that’s the plan.
“Everything is commissioned,” said Craig Hudson, Atlantic Gold’s 28-year-old chief metallurgist.
“We’re just about there.”
Originally from Waverley, Hudson has been working in mines around the world since he was 20.
The Dalhousie University graduate in mineral resource engineering spent the last year before coming to Moose River at a mine in the Amazon rainforest.
“It’s good to be home,” said Hudson.
The open-pit mine employs 205 people in a community with no more than five houses and a little clapboard museum dedicated to Moose River Gold Mines’ heritage.
Atlantic Gold’s Moose River Consolidated Project is actually four mining sites — Touquoy, Cochrane Hill, 15 Mile Stream and Beaver Dam.
The four projects were brought together by Vancouver-based Spurr Ventures when it purchased their owners, Atlantic Gold and Acadian Mining.
Spurr Ventures then changed its name to Atlantic Gold.
The company has published projected reserves at Touquoy of 16.4 tonnes of ore at 1.44 grams of gold per tonne.
“So let’s say you have one million grains of sand in a box and you dump it out on the table — you’d have 1.4 grains of gold in that,” said Belanger.
“For an open pit in North America, that’s very good.”
There’s a long history of boom-and-bust cycles in underground gold mining in Nova Scotia. Atlantic Gold is doing it differently. Rather than following a seam underground, Atlantic Gold is digging up all the rock in an area where 85 per cent of the gold is disseminated in microscopic amounts, grinding it all up into a fine dust, then leaching the valuable yellow stuff out with cyanide.
While the average cost of getting ore from an underground mine is $70 a tonne, it’s $2.50 a tonne in an open-pit mine.
Belanger estimates her production costs at about $690 per ounce. Gold was trading at C$1,605 per ounce on Wednesday.
“We then have a cyanide destruction circuit in our processing plant,” said Hudson.
“The discharge is less than one part per million cyanide in the tailings.”
Those tailings flow into a massive pond built for the project by Antigonish-based Alva Construction. Some 50 employees have built the 3.5-kilometre wall of rock and clay that will contain the tailings.
The tailings water will be repeatedly recycled through the processing facility where the gold-bearing ore rocks, up to a metre in diameter, are crushed to a powder through a series of conveyor-belt-connected crushers, grinders, centrifuges and sifters.
The Touquoy Project is expected to last five years and then it’s on to Beaver Dam, 37 kilometres away.
As part of its environmental approval, Atlantic Gold has put funds in place to rehabilitate the land after all the ore has been taken from each of the sites. If Atlantic Gold gets environmental approval for Cochane Hill and 15 Mile Stream, the entire project’s lifespan is from 15 to 20 years.