Equinox Gold has the finish line in sight as construction of its US$1.23-billion Greenstone gold mine near Geraldton in northern Ontario wraps up after a challenging but ultimately smooth three-year build.
The project was blessed with key infrastructure such as a highway, airport and natural gas pipeline all in the immediate vicinity, but a full slate of mine infrastructure had to be built.
Projects included a water treatment plant, truck shop, warehouse, sewage treatment plant, pit, plant site fuel stations, reagent storage buildings, crushers, a processing plant/mill, explosives plant, ore storage dome, conveyor belts, transfer towers and an operating centre.
Over five kilometres of Highway 11 have been reconfigured, a service pipeline from the main Enbridge line has been built and connected to a new power plant, and a new MTO operations centre has been constructed.
Equinox CEO Greg Smith said recently infrastructure and facilities are over 90 per cent complete with an anticipated Q1/Q2 2024 mine commissioning on target.
“We’re in the final stretch here,” said Smith. “We’re moving very quickly through pre-commissioning.
“Ideally, we’re in a position to start putting material through the plant in Q1, so things are rapidly evolving from construction into that commissioning stage. And then next year, early next year, much more into the operating stage.”
The project incorporates the former Hardrock, MacLeod-Cockshutt and Mosher underground mines which operated from the late 1930s until about 1970. The ownership partners Equinox Gold and Orion Mine Finance came on board in 2020.
The life of the Greenstone mine is expected to be 15 years with throughput averaging 27,000 tonnes per day.
Project general manager Eric Lamontagne has been involved with the project for 11 years. Smith said the core team that has been shepherding the project all that time deserves tremendous credit for obtaining environmental and other approvals, undertaking site engineering and design and co-ordinating the support of local First Nations, who are reaping employment and economic benefits.
“Eric will say, ‘this is my baby.’ He is very invested in the success of this personally because this is a project he’s been with since day one,” said Smith.
“We had 85 per cent detailed engineering before we ever started this project. We had also completed a whole bunch of geotechnical drilling in the area of the tailings facility and process plant area, a bunch of pre-construction work on ground preparation.
“By the time we actually formally broke ground on construction, we had a very, very clear idea of what we were building.”
During the peak of construction, the build required 1,000 workers onsite. Even now there are waves of trades on the job. Crews recently completed structures in the gravity tower, acid wash, elution and carbon regeneration areas. Gold room concrete block walls were installed with most electrical and mechanical equipment in place.
“When I was onsite three or four weeks ago, there were 160 electricians onsite doing incredibly detailed, time-consuming work,” said Smith.
There are three gold mines in Ontario all striving to reach the commissioning stage — the others are the Magino and Cote mines — and Smith said that has heightened the challenge to secure the skilled construction labour required. Greenstone is an open site, using both union and non-union labour.
“That frankly was another benefit to us because it opened up the universe of contractors we can use. It allowed us to go out of province and allowed us to bring in groups that can be sometimes a little more flexible. I think that was a competitive advantage to our site in terms of maintaining our budget and our schedule over the last couple of years.”
The in-house project management model under Lamontagne brings efficiency as teams report on both construction and pre-commissioning efforts.
There have also been third-party quantitative risk consultants invited at the engineering phase and to assess construction and pre-commissioning. The process helped ensure the project stayed on time and on budget, Smith said.
Engineering and construction participants have included Fournier & Fils, Minodahmun Development LP, Gridlink, Aramark Remote Workplace Services, Cloutier Contracting, Teranorth Construction, MBUILDS and TBT Engineering.
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