Published: February 15, 2021 |

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A proposed tailings reprocessing project is a step closer to taking flight at Barrick Gold’s Golden Sunlight Mine five miles northeast of Whitehall.

The Montana Department of Environmental Quality is seeking public comments on the development of a draft environmental impact statement for a proposed amendment to the mine’s current operating permit, and is holding a public scoping meeting to be held on March 4. The public comment period ends on March 12.

The amendment would allow the mine to excavate the tailings from a storage facility, reprocess the tailings on-site using a flotation separation method, and ship the sulfur/gold concentrate to northern Nevada. Moira Davin, public relations specialist for the DEQ, said the flotation process is similar to that used at the Montana Resources mine in Butte.

The contract between Barrick and Nevada Gold Mines was finalized in April 2020.

Chuck Buus, Golden Sunlight’s general manager, said the project would add around 20 Barrick employees to the 16 employees currently working at the site, for which the company has seen a lot of local interest.

An additional 15-20 contractors are also currently working at the site, about half of them from Montana, and the company put out a bid request to contractors for the proposed project a month ago. Five of the seven bids received came from Montana firms, Buus said.

The operation switched from open-pit to underground by early 2016, and active mining ended in April 2019, resulting in lay-offs of around 150 employees over the time period.

Buus said the proposed project would last for 12-15 years.

The current permit requires perpetual water treatment of tailings and pumping of contaminated water, as the mine had a major waste leak in the 1980s. Though additional reclamation would be necessary after the project, Buus said, the proposed amendment could change the long-term outlook.

“The opportunity is a much longer operational life and the high probability of eliminating perpetual water treatment,” Chuck Buus, Golden Sunlight’s general manager said.

“It just tells a good story — you’re removing tailings from a historic unlined tailings facility, with the opportunity to put some benign materials back in the open pit to perform final reclamation. I think it’s a good story. I think a lot of people understand that it has a positive net benefit environmentally,” Buus added.

The proposed project will not change the company’s current water pumping plan, Buus said.

Approximately 26 million tons of tailings would be processed. After excavation, the tailings facility footprint would be reclaimed for land uses such as grazing, recreation and wildlife habitat. All proposed activities would occur within the existing permitted disturbance boundary and would not include any new disturbance area, Davin said.

Submit comments or view the application documents HERE

The remote public hearing will be held via Zoom on Thursday, March 4, 2021 from 6 to 8 p.m.

Participants can sign up to attend the meeting held via Zoom and receive instructions about how to access the meeting by registering HERE

About Barrick Gold
On January 1, 2019, a new Barrick was born as a result of the merger between Barrick Gold Corporation and Randgold Resources Limited. The merger has created a sector-leading gold company which owns five of the industry’s Top 10 Tier One gold assets Cortez and Goldstrike in Nevada, in the United States (100 percent); Kibali in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (45 percent); Loulo-Gounkoto in Mali (80 percent); and Pueblo Viejo in the Dominican Republic (60 percent) and two with the potential to become the gold assets of the first level: Goldrush / Fourmile (100 percent) and Turquoise Ridge (75 percent), both in the United States. With mining operations and projects in 15 countries, including Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, the Ivory Coast, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Dominican Republic, Mali, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, the United States, and Zambia, Barrick has the lowest total cash cost position among its senior gold peers and a diversified asset portfolio positioned for growth in many of the world’s most prolific gold districts.

To stop by Barrick’s website, CLICK HERE

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