The future of the Ekati diamond mine may be underwater
CBC
With the years ticking down on the future of two of the Northwest Territories's biggest mines, one owner says the life expectancy may be increased through the use of a new technology to the North — underwater remote mining.
Rory Moore, the newly appointed president and CEO of the Arctic Diamond Company, which owns Ekati Diamond mine, is hoping to test trial a piece of equipment he called "the crawler" by 2023.
Moore gave an update on Ekati during an annual geoscience forum in Yellowknife Wednesday organised by the NWT & Nunavut Chamber of Mines, the government of the Northwest Territories and the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency.
"If we get this technique right, which I'm very confident we will, we've got decades of successful mining ahead for Ekati," Moore said during a virtual appearance.
Arctic Diamond partnered with Dutch company Royal IHC, a supplier of maritime technology, to build the machine.
It operates on four suspended tracks, with a rotating drum in the middle equipped with a blade to cut through the kimberlite, with an auxiliary cutter on the side.
Behind the drum, a big hydrophilic pump sends the cuttings up the line to the surface and then onto a dewatering plant.
Moore said the company is planning to test the system over two years beginning in 2023 on the Lynx pit at Ekati.
He said the company envisions taking 150,000 tonnes of kimberlite in the trial, producing $25 million in revenue.
The idea is to then fine tune the technology and use it on the Sable pit by 2026.
Right now, the plan is to continue to carry out conventional mining at Sable until 2024, then over the course of two years, flood the pit and in 2026, send in the crawler to scoop out the remaining kimberlite.
Moore said the crawler could operate for about six months of the year during the warmer months.
As the company digs deeper into ore bodies, Moore said the value does not support traditional mining techniques.
"The future beyond 2028, we have no conventional mining planned," he said.
More than 1,000 Maritime Electric customers are without power after high winds blew across the Island Friday night into Saturday.
The Supreme Court of Canada is deliberating a case that could shape the way sentences are handed down in cases where both the offender and victim are Indigenous, which some Nunavut lawyers say could have ramifications for the Inuit-majority territory.
A man barricaded in a former church in Welland, Ont., was taken into custody early Saturday, nearly 24 hours into a standoff that began over a fence dispute.
Peel police are investigating after a Friday night shooting in Mississauga left one person dead, police said.
Another busy construction season has come to an end in London, and the city is already looking ahead to next spring when a slew of new projects are expected to begin.
Prime Minister Mark Carney has begun to lay out publicly what he sees as boundaries when dealing with China, as his government wades into a new relationship with the economic giant.
Ferry crossings are cancelled and over a thousand households are left without power Saturday morning, due to high winds and severe weather conditions.
Tens of thousands of Nova Scotia Power customers are waking up without power on Saturday morning after high winds and rain hit the province on Friday night.
Statistics Canada is reporting a population decrease last quarter for New Brunswick — its largest quarterly decline since the 1970s, according to an economic development consultant.
Residents clapped, danced, sang and cried in the Anishinaabe community of Kitcisakik this week when the lights were finally turned on for the first time.
A man is suing three members of a Winnipeg family and a real estate broker he alleges used his intellectual disability to financially exploit him through property deals in Canada and India, leaving him out hundreds of thousands of dollars.
When Stephanie Gamble watched her mother model the first dress she made, smiling wide and walking an imaginary runway, she knew that was what she wanted to keep doing in her life.
'Tis the season for cuddling on the couch with a cup of hot chocolate and watching holiday movies. And for people in B.C.'s Interior, that can increasingly mean seeing their home communities on display.