After two years of discussions, Conuma has agreed to buy Peace River Coal (PRC) from Anglo American.
Brian Sullivan, CAO for Conuma says discussions started early in 2023. “The closing happened this morning [February 11] slightly before lunchtime,” says Sullivan.
Sullivan was hoping the process would have wrapped up before the end of 2025, but these things can take longer than expected. “In the world of acquisitions, you have a list of things that has to happen before the actual closing can occur, and they can be mundane things like making sure that your licenses are transferred for software or leases, or registrations being done with agencies. So there’s a typically a closing list that’s pages long to be done before you can actually exchange signatures.”
He says things had been moving forward for the last two weeks, and it was only at the end of the last week that a date was set. “And for reasons of consideration of, you know, everybody involved, including employees, we wanted them to find out first, which they have,” says Sullivan.
The district has also been advised, and a press release has gone out from Anglo American telling the world the sale has happened. Sullivan says he’s pleased how the two companies have been working together over the last two years.
And that partnership is not over, according to Anglo’s press release. “ Anglo American will continue to work with Conuma, the provincial Government of British Columbia and Treaty 8 partners on this innovative environmental management program, in line with Anglo American’s commitment to helping ensure a lasting and positive legacy.”
Unlike with the purchase of Quintette, says Sullivan, which was a purchase of the Quintette assets, In this case they bought the actual company, which is—was—a subsidiary of Anglo American. “It’s a little bit of a different style of transaction than we did with Teck and Quintette,” he says. “So there’s a laundry list of things that you have to take care of. Some are regulatory imposed by requirements, but we’ve been working on these for quite a number of months. The regulators were aware we intended to close somewhere this week. They’ve been notified this morning as well.
While the process of buying the mine is different than with Quintette, Sullivan says it won’t look much different than Quintette. “This morning, we had eight employees I think that were PRC employees begin their orientation with Conuma. We will begin the process of integrating those people into the company and all of the processes that were ongoing at Anglo will be folded into the Conuma processes so there won’t be any noticeable difference in terms of the way the Quintette transaction transpired and the PRC transaction transpired.”
Of course, the question on everyone’s mind: when will the mine re-open? Sullivan says they first need to make sure everything is in place at Quintette. “Our 2025 goals are to achieve the full permit for the Quintette restart, which we’re targeting for June of 2025. That’s still out there, and all our effort right now is on making sure that the full permit is received in a timely manner. There’s a huge effort ongoing both in Conuma and in Victoria with the regulators. Our First Nations partners are working alongside us to make sure that that goes smoothly. We have told the regulators that we did not intend to submit any permit materials for PRC until we are complete with the Quintette restart. We don’t want to divert attention from Quintette onto PRC. It will take us about that long to get our ducks in a row to get the restart permit filed with the Ministry of Environment.”
Once that’s done by the middle of this year, He says then the focus will be on PRC. “Like Quintette, PRC has in place two Mines Act permits—one for the Trend operations and then the second one for the Roman Pit that they received in… I believe it was 2015… shortly before they went into care and maintenance. Those two permits are still in place.”
But a decade has passed since the mine was last in operation, so there are certain requirements for Conuma to meet before they can restart the mine. “Those are the same types of plans that we had to update with respect to Quintette—namely water management and wildlife management. But we don’t expect major changes from the mine plan that PRC had tabled with the regulators back in 2015 as part of the permit package.”
He expects that will take 12 to 18 months, putting a tentative restart of the mine sometime late next year.
Sullivan says he hopes that the process to re-open PRC will be shorter than Quintette. Not necessarily because it has been closed for less time, but because there’s less to be done. “We will not be operating a preparation plant at PRC as an example,” he says. “The intent is to take the coal from PRC and use the existing infrastructure at Quintette to process. That should shorten the the permitting timeline.”
He says their experience with the water management and wildlife management permitting process at Quintette should speed up the process for getting PRC back on-line. “Our long term plan as Conuma is to operate projects on our properties for the next 30 years, plan to minimize our disturbance on the land and help the long term restoration efforts for the first nations and their ability to practice treaty rights on Treaty 8 lands that we’re operating on.”
While the town isn’t tapped out, the workforce at PRC would add another 275 to 300 people. Sullivan says that will probably require some new housing in town.
“There might be Quintette employees that go over to work at PRC, or Willow employees that go over, but one of the significant issues that we have to work on in the interim is as we get closer to a date, we’re going to have to ramp up the discussions with the district on where will those people reside? One of the one of the questions we always get is: what’s the effect going to be on rent or housing costs in the district?”
He says he doesn’t want to see the same thing that happened in Chetwynd during the pipeline construction where people couldn’t find any room, and families were priced out of the market. “Fundamentally, we want to make sure that families can still afford to live in Tumbler Ridge, whether or not they’re working at the mine. We have to get that balance just right. And so it probably will involve the addition of some housing stock.
The mine did inherit some houses with the purchase of Quintette, as well as with the purchase of PRC, but not enough to house 200 new families.
The company is also looking at things like contributing housing to attract medical professionals or teachers to the community, in partnership with the district. “So there’s a lot on the go, but it’s really going to depend on the start date. We will not have a very long, 18 month construction window like we had for Quintette, because we’re not going to be doing construction at PRC. We don’t anticipate a huge influx of contractors like we had for Quintette. When we start, we’ll probably start with one spread of equipment and two crews, something like 75 people, total. And then we’d add up to eventually three shovel spreads, with four crews a piece. Yhat’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 to 325 people.
But as more people come into the community, the company is looking at short term lodging. He says right now, about a quarter of the workforce travels into town for their seven days on. “We get a lot of inquiries about that. We’ve resisted that in the past. We’ve tried to make sure that we’re building the community. Rather than just going the quick route of a camp. And that’s been purposeful. But there may come a point where we have to explore something more suited to that percentage of the workforce that can’t be accommodated in in local rented rooms or apartments or even hotel stays.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
