As it puts the finishing touches on its new Florence copper project in Arizona – which is actually more copper well than copper mine –Taseko Mines (TSX:TKO) is turning its attention back to B.C.
This comes as copper prices hit record highs Wednesday – US$5.374 per pound – as an ongoing trade war between the U.S., Canada and other trading partners creates uncertainty over access.
Vancouver-based Taseko owns the Gibraltar mine near Quesnel, B.C., as well as the New Prosperity property, which the company still hopes could be developed into a mine, despite being rejected a decade ago by the federal government and Tsilhqot’in First Nation.
Taseko’s next big focus is a new copper mine project, the Yellowhead, about 150 kilometres north of Kamloops near Vavenby. Gibraltar is the second largest copper mine in Canada. The Yellowhead would be even bigger.
“We’re building the mine in Florence, but we want to come back to B.C. after that, and we’re optimistic we’ll be able to develop Yellowhead in a few years,” Taseko CEO Stuart McDonald told BIV.
“For Taseko, moving from the one operation at Gibraltar to becoming a multi-mine operator is a big deal. We’ll produce first copper at Florence late this year, and we’ll be able to ramp that up next year and start building cash, and hopefully be ready to build another mine.”
The Florence project in Arizona is unique in both its geology and extraction method: in-situ mining. Rather than dig ore out of the ground through open-pit or underground mining, dissolved copper is essentially sucked out of the ground.
The in-situ mining operation involves drilling more than 100 wells over the ore body, and injecting diluted sulphuric acid into a fractured ore body to dissolve the rock and produce copper concentrate.
The geology around Florence, Ariz., is such that the ore body is fractured, McDonald said, and therefore porous, which allows for extraction through an in-situ process.
“It’s commonly used in uranium mining, but it’s rare in copper,” McDonald said. “It’s been used in the past at other mines, but we’ll be the first to use it as a primary mining method.”
In-situ mining eliminates a lot of the brute manpower typically needed in mining, requires no milling and produces no tailings.
“It’s very low-cost mining,” McDonald said. “It’s very productive in that respect. You’re not digging it out of the ground. There’s no tailings, there’s no waste rock, there’s no milling. So it’s very low-impact, low cost. We’ll produce a pound of copper here for about $1.11 per pound.”
As for the Yellowhead project, it is now moving from the exploration to development stage.
A feasibility study done in 2020 envisions an open-pit mine with a 25-year mine life and annual copper concentrate production of 200 million pounds in the first five years of operation, and 180 million pounds per year thereafter. By contrast, Gibraltar currently produces 130 million pounds per year.
Total metal production is estimated at 4.4 billion pounds of copper, 440,000 ounces of gold and 19 million ounces of silver. McDonald said the mine’s capital cost would be more than $1.5 billion.
“All the engineering and design work is done,” McDonald said. “It’s well past the exploration stage. We’re just entering the permitting process. We’re entering an EA process here imminently.”
Taseko recently published an economic impact study of its Gibraltar mine that estimated its economic contributions to B.C. to be $8 billion over the last 20 years – including $4 billion in employment income and $2 billion in revenues to government. Gibraltar still has 20 years of mine life, which means those numbers can be expected to double over the next two decades, McDonald said.
“Yellowhead is a bigger mine,” he said. “Once in operation, it would be a major copper producer.”
The mine is in the traditional territory of the Simpcw First Nation. Taseko is hoping to avoid the kind of problems with the Simpcw that it had with the Tsilhqot’in over the New Prosperity mine.
As part of an environmental review, Taseko has agreed to an Indigenous environmental review to be conducted by the Simpcw.
“They’re doing their own environmental assessment in parallel with the province,” McDonald said.
Just getting through the B.C. Environmental Assessment process typically takes a project like the Yellowhead at least four to five years. Both federal and provincial governments have acknowledged the need to streamline the permitting process in Canada, and pledges have been made to speed up the process.
In January, at the Association of Mineral Exploration (AME) Roundup conference, Premier David Eby committed to speeding up permitting for mines.
“We need to grow our economy, we need to expedite permits, we need to get metals and minerals out of the ground,” he said.
In his mandate letter to B.C. Mines and Critical Minerals Minister Jagrup Brar, Eby directed the new minister to establish fixed timelines for mining approval permits.
If Eby can make good on his pledge, McDonald said the Yellowhead mine could potentially be built and in production within five years.
“This project is right at the start line, so if there’s going to be a streamlined permitting process, or new expeditated process that the premier has been talking about, then we believe Yellowhead is a great model to use to establish that because we’re right at the start line,” he said.
“If we get some effective and efficient permitting process, we could be through this in two or three years. Then you’ve got a two-year construction period, and we’d be producing copper potentially in five years, on an expedited timeline.”
