Wyoming’s prospective new gold mine has just cleared state regulatory hurdles and is moving ahead with a feasibility study, one stop closer to actually pulling gold out of the ground.
Turns out there really is gold “in them thar hills” — the hills past Curt Gowdy State Park.
“We received a mine operating permit in April/May of this year, but it was conditional,” US Gold CEO George Bee told Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday. “It was conditional on getting awarded a discharge permit, and that we put up a bond for reclamation for our initial disturbances, which we did in May.
“We were then just waiting on the air quality permit, and we were just granted that, so that frees us up now to finalize all our studies and move forward to development.”
The feasibility study will be the last step before actual development and will be used to secure financing for the CK Gold Project that US Gold is developing about 20 miles west of Cheyenne. And it could be a lucrative venture. The company has said there could be 1 million ounces of gold there.
“The lenders want to see the final economic numbers,” Bee said. “So we’re optimizing. We’re incorporating all the things we agreed to in the permit application and updating all the numbers that we had before.”
That includes inflationary pressure that has raised the initial estimated capital from $222 million a couple of years ago, to now somewhere between $290 and $300 million.
The company won’t start hiring in earnest until it has financing in place, Bee said, although it does now have a link on its site for interested vendors and prospective employees.
“We may well be in a position to consider populating our workforce and signing contracts with vendors and so on in the latter part of next year for the initial construction,” Bee said. “But it will take about 18 months to build and it’s all dependent on finalizing the financing.”
Bee said the company expects to hire an initial 231 people during the construction phase of the project, after which they would employ 255 people during the 10-year lifespan of the mine.
They would also work with several service providers during the operational phase, who would employ an additional estimated 183 people. Indirect jobs serving both the mine’semployees and the service provider employees would total around 69, making for just over 500 jobs supported by the mining operation during its lifespan.
“The good thing is these will all be good-paying jobs,” Bee said.
New Life To Old Ghost Town
Out past Curt Gowdy State Park on County Road 210, the remains of the old Copper King mine are still visible near the ghost town of Hecla, Wyoming.
“There were about 800 people out there at one point,” Bee said. “And they had a number of miners working little deposits in and around the area. So there’s quite a few, historically, there were quite a few workings.”
At the CK Gold Mine site, there is still a shaft and a bit of lateral development at the mining site, which was abandoned in the 1920s.
“The old timers were looking for very high-grade materials in those days,” Bee said. “Gold was then pegged at $35 an ounce and copper wasn’t terribly attractive. So the grades had to be really high.”
Unfortunately, the higher grades in the CK gold mine are not continuous.
“There are some really good grades around there, but with them not being terribly continuous it sort of eventually played out,” Bee said. “And for the miners, it was a tough life out there.”
Bee said he’s been told the miners eventually blew up the boiler because they weren’t getting paid in a timely fashion. That was the end of the mine, until U.S. Gold came along and gave it a second look.
“We’re really not mining the high grades that the old timers were interested in,” Bee said. “And copper prices are up, gold prices are up, so we can use big equipment to mine a much lower grade. Whereas the old timers needed to get really high grade material to take it to a stamp mill and then try to recover the metal on site.”
In fact, U.S. Gold was originally going to sell its Wyoming property, to fund exploration in Nevada instead.
But before selling, they asked Bee to take a look at the property, and he told them they would be crazy to sell the mine.
“It is a nice mine in a great jurisdiction, and it’s technically very simple,” Bee said.
Selling it would be like chasing the proverbial bird in the bush while having a perfectly good bird already in hand.
Money for exploration is much harder to come by these days than money for development, Bee added.
“Taking a known deposit, Copper King, and making it the CK Gold Project and putting it through development has been a better pathway at a time when funding for exploration has been very difficult to come by,” he said.
Smelting Won’t Happen In Wyoming
The CK Gold Project will be mining both copper and gold from a sulfide mineral called chalcopyrite, but it won’t be doing any smelting on site.
They will use a process called froth flotation, which involves grinding the rocks up finely enough that they make a slurry when mixed with water, then introducing foamy bubbles to the system.
“The bubbles rise to the surface and there’s a collector agent,” Bee said. “The minerals don’t like the water, they prefer the bubbles, so they’ll stick to them.”
The mineral-laden bubbles then overflow out of the tank into a collection trough.
“We then collect that and sell the concentrate to a smelter,” Bee said. “So it could be in Quebec or Salt Lake City or it could even be in Asia. We’ll sell the concentrate to wherever we get the better price.”
This approach means there will be no emissions on site, since there’s no smelting, and minimal chemical use as well.
The company also plans to recycle the water it uses in the process, to conserve on that resource as well.
“Normally what mines do is they make an impoundment and once they’ve taken the concentrate out, they’d let the rest of the slurry go into a big paddock, where the water evaporates off and the tailings solidify,” Bee said. “But in our case, we will spend extra money on a filtration press to squeeze all the water out of the tailings, so we can recycle it and conserve water.”
That will leave behind a filter cake — something like the coffee grounds left after a pot of coffee is brewed. That moist sand will be eventually covered up in rock and a layer of topsoil so it can be revegetated with native plants and grasses.
“It’s more expensive, but it’s a more responsible way of dealing with those tailings,” Bee said. “And we will leave a few boulder piles and rocks around strategically, because that’s where some critters like to live. We want to return it as close as possible to the sort of habitat that was there in the first place.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
