Carmacks Project Details
Location
The Carmacks Copper Project is located 192 km north of Whitehorse, Yukon. The Project site is 8 km west of the Yukon River and approximately 38 km northwest of the town of Carmacks.
The project is on Crown land administered by the Yukon Government and it lies in Little Salmon Carmacks First Nation and Selkirk First Nation traditional territory.
The average annual precipitation is approximately 339 mm with one third falling as snow.
Infrastructure
The Project site is currently accessible by an existing 12 km exploration road that leads north from km 33 of the secondary, government maintained, unpaved roadway (Freegold Road) from Carmacks. Carmacks lies on the Klondike Highway, a paved highway, 175 km north of Whitehorse which provides the main transportation link in the Yukon. Situated 180 km south of Whitehorse by paved road is the year-round port of Skagway, Alaska.
History
In 1898, the first claims were staked to cover copper showings that were associated with copper bearing quartz veins located in Williams Creek and Merrice Creek Canyons, east of the present Carmacks Copper deposit.
In the late 1960’s the discovery of the Casino porphyry copper deposit, 104 km to the northwest, precipitated a staking rush that led to the staking of the Williams Creek property in 1970 by G. Wing and A. Arsenault. During the site examination by the Dawson Range Joint Venture the present No. 1 and No. 2 Zones were located.
The property was purchased by Western Copper Holdings and Thermal Exploration in 1989. Western and Thermal merged in 1995 to become Western Copper Holdings Ltd.
Kilborn Pacific Engineering completed the first full feasibility study (1993), the feasibility study update (1995), a basic engineering study and a definitive capital cost estimate (1997). Western Copper Holdings then began the process of obtaining proposals for the construction of the project. In 1998, after completing some early construction work, the company suspended the project indefinitely due to low copper prices.
In February 2003, Western Copper Holdings Ltd. changed their name to Western Silver Corporation. In late 2004 Western Silver re-entered the permitting process and has been engaged since then in the environmental review process under the YEA process and more recently the newly enacted YESAA process.
In early 2006 Glamis Gold purchased Western Silver Corporation and spun off a separate firm named Western Copper Corporation. Western Copper retained the rights to the Carmacks Copper Project.
In September 2006 Western Copper retained M3 Engineering & Technology Corporation to revise the earlier studies and to create a Feasibility Study fully compliant with NI 43-101.
Geology
The Carmacks copper-gold deposit lies within the Yukon Cataclastic Terrane. The Yukon Cataclastic Terrane includes hornblende-biotite-chlorite gneisses with inter-foliated granite gneisses, and is underlain by intrusive and meta-intrusive rocks of the Early Jurassic Granite Mountain Batholith. The intrusive rock composition ranges from granodiorite to diorite.
The focus of drilling and resource definition on the property to date has been at the No. 1, No. 7 and No. 4 Zones. The No. 1 Zone consists of a sub-vertically oriented gneiss structure, striking NNW and dipping at between 60 and 75 degrees to the east. It is up to 50 m wide and extends over a 700 m strike length. The structure is oriented in a NNW-SSE direction and is recognized to at least 450 m down dip. The No.1 Zone remains open at depth and is oxidized to approximately 230 m in depth. The No. 7 Zone is a shorter narrower mineralized zone, offset from and parallel to the south-western portion of the No. 1 Zone, and the No. 4 Zone is an irregular and faulted mineralized structure to the southeast of the No. 1 Zone.
Development Plan
The Carmacks Copper Project will be developed as an open-pit mine with an acid heap leach and a solvent extraction/electrowinning (SX/EW) process facility producing, on average, approximately 14,500 tonnes of LME Grade A cathode copper annually.
The mining operation is designed to produce an average 1.73 million tonnes of ore per year or approximately 28,400 tonnes (ore and waste) per day on a seven day per week, 24 hours per day operation.
Ore will be hauled by truck and dumped directly into the primary, secondary and tertiary crusher circuit. The crushed product will first be agglomerated with sulphuric acid and water and then conveyed to a lined valley fill leach pad. The crushed ore on the leach pad will be irrigated with dilute sulphuric acid to leach copper from the ore. Pregnant leach solution will be collected and pumped to the solvent extraction plant where the dissolved copper in the solution will be concentrated. This concentrated solution passes to the electrowinning plant where the dissolved copper is plated onto cathodes. Copper is stripped from the cathode and is transported to market.
Power
Discussions have taken place with Yukon Energy, the regional electrical utility company, to serve the mine from their new 138 kV transmission line being built between Carmacks and Stewart Crossing along the existing Klondike Highway. The line extension to the Carmacks mine would consist of an 11-kilometer 138 kV transmission line to the mine’s main substation.
Total project electrical load is estimated to be about 10 MW.
Water
Total fresh water required is about 600 m³/day, which will be supplied from a combination of storage precipitation and fresh water supply wells located in the bedrock-confined aquifer underlying the Williams Creek drainage.
