In mid-November 2020, Marie-Claude Dumont, senior operations manager at Trevali Mining’s Caribou zinc-lead-silver mine in northern New Brunswick, “dusted off the life-of-mine plan” for the operation the company had shuttered nine months earlier.
With zinc prices on the rise and a faint light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, Dumont and her team ran the numbers to assess the feasibility of restarting the mine. The models looked good, and with a healthy hedging deal in place, Trevali moved swiftly to announce the restart of the mine on Jan. 15, 2021.
By March 6, the first ore was at the surface and delivered to the stockpile, 20 days shy of a year since Trevali announced the temporary suspension of mine operations.
Just plodding along
Trevali bought the Caribou underground mine and mill complex in late 2012. (The mine originally began as an open pit in 1970.) It is one of about 46 mineral deposits with defined tonnage in the northern New Brunswick’s Bathurst mining camp that, together with another hundred mineral occurrences, make up one of Canada’s great mining camps.
After completing some underground work, Trevali declared commercial production at the mine in July 2016 and resumed production of zinc and lead concentrates with silver as a by-product.
For the rest of this article: https://magazine.cim.org/en/projects/hitting-the-reset-button-en/