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MMG wants partners, maybe government, to help pay for port, airport, road, microwave broadband system
You might call it a “challenge,” as an MMG manager put it, or you could see it as an ultimatum. After sinking $300 million into studies to see if the mineral-rich Izok Corridor in western Nunavut is economically viable, the mining giant says it won’t move ahead with the project unless a partner helps build a port, airport, road and microwave broadband towers.
MMG ‘s delivered its latest message to residents of Nunavut’s western communities of Cambridge Bay and Kugluktuk this week: the lack of regional infrastructure is a deal-breaker for its plans to build a $6.5-billion network of lead, zinc and copper mines along the Izok Corridor.
Unless a partner is found to invest a “quite substantial” amount of money to build a deep-water port and airport at Grays Bay on the Coronation Gulf, a 325-all-season road and a microwave broadband network, the majority Chinese-government-owned company won’t go ahead with the project.
Since telling the Nunavut Impact Review Board in April 2013 not to proceed with its recommended detailed review, MMG has crunched its numbers in a $60 million feasibility plan and revised its 2012 Izok Corridor Mine Proposal.
According to information distributed at public meetings in Cambridge Bay, the two Nunavut communities closest to the Izok Corridor, the new, streamlined mine plan includes a relocation of the three-million tonnes per year ore plant at Grays Bay, more modular components into the mine deign and a mining of the most distant deposit, Izok, to followed by High Lake.
The mine, with a lifespan of 11 years could be operational in eight years.
But “one more hurdle exists,” MMG says in its project update.
“Even with all the changes and finding hundreds of million dollars in savings, the enormous capital costs of building the needed regional transportation and communications infrastructure is still more than the project can support.”
The company plans to tell the NIRB by the end of the year whether or not to proceed, Scott Trussler, MMG’s manager of approvals, said Sept. 8 at a public meeting in Cambridge Bay.
Trussler said the Red Dog mine in northwestern Alaska received Alaska state assistance for similar regional infrastructure.
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