Casino Project Details
Location
The Casino property is located in west central Yukon, 300 km northwest of the territorial capital of Whitehorse.
The project is located on Crown land administered by the Yukon Government and is within the Selkirk First Nation traditional territory; the Tr’ondek Hwechin First Nation traditional territory lies to the north.
The characteristic terrain consists of rounded, rolling topography with moderate to deeply incised valleys. The Yukon River flows to the west about 16 km north of the project site. Annual precipitation ranges between 300-450 mm.
Infrastructure
The site is currently accessible year-round only by air. Various route options for a year-round access road were examined and the selected one was a new, 187 km, unpaved road from the Alaskan Highway at a point about 48 km northwest of Burwash Landing.
History
In 1992 Pacific Sentinel Gold Corp. acquired the property and commenced a major drilling program from 1992 to 1995. In addition, they performed a considerable amount of metallurgical, geotechnical and environmental work and completed a scoping study in 1995.
First Trimark Resources and CRS Copper Resources obtained the property and published a Qualifying Report on the property in 2003. The two firms combined to form Lumina Copper Corporation in 2004 and in the same year it updated the Qualifying Report.
Western Copper Corporation acquired Lumina Copper Corporation in November 2006.
Geology
The deposit is weathered to an average depth of 70 m, producing a well defined leached cap (“oxide gold”) zone that is relatively gold enriched and copper depleted due to supergene alteration processes. With depth, the supergene alteration erratically grades from a poorly defined supergene oxide zone (upper “copper oxide” zone) to a better-defined supergene sulphide zone (lower “copper sulphide” zone). The average thickness of the copper oxide zone and copper sulphide zone are 10 m and 60 m respectively.
Development Plan
The Casino porphyry copper-gold-molybdenum deposit will be developed as a conventional truck-shovel, open pit mine, initially processing the gold bearing oxide cap as a heap leach operation. Sulphide ore processing would commence approximately 2.5 years later at a nominal rate of 90,000 tpd in a concentrator, which would produce a copper concentrate and a molybdenum concentrate. Higher ore grades and greater concentrate production during the initial 6 years of operation provide an accelerated cash flow during this period resulting in a capital payback in 3.8 years.
Mining is by conventional open pit methods with drilled and blasted rock loaded onto rigid frame haul trucks by large electric shovels.
Oxide ore will be transported from the mine to a run of mine heap leaching facility by off-highway haulage trucks. Gold bullion produced from the oxide gold ore will be shipped by truck to metal refiners. Copper will be recovered, as a precipitate, by the SART process to control the quality of the leach solution. This precipitate will be shipped to smelters.
Sulphide ore will be transported from the mine to the primary crusher by off-highway haulage trucks. Mineral concentrates of copper and molybdenum will be produced by mineral flotation technology. Copper concentrate will be thickened and filtered and sent by on highway haul trucks to nearby ports. Molybdenum concentrate will be dried and placed in supersacks for transport.
Power
Various options for providing power to the project were examined and an onsite 100 MW coal-fired circulating fluidized bed (CFB) power plant was found to be the best option to meet the power needs of the project. The base case assumes coal will be imported through a new coal receiving facility at Haines, Alaska. Coal will be hauled on a backhaul with trucks hauling concentrate to the port.
Water
The Yukon River will supply fresh and process makeup water through an infiltration gallery that will collect water for pumping approximately 17 km to the site. At times, the accumulated water and decant return water may be sufficient for all process requirements, eliminating much of the pumping required from the river.
