After a flurry of headlines a few years back, HD Mining has mostly fallen from the public’s consciousness.
The company rose to provincial and then national prominence as controversy swirled around their plan to at least partially staff the mine with skilled Temporary Foreign Workers.
The company was taken to court over the plan by a pair of unions, but the court ruled in favour of the company.
HD Mining applied for—and received— approval from Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC) to hire up to 201 workers under the temporary foreign worker program to complete a bulk sample at the mine.
Before obtaining the temporary foreign worker authorizations, the company says they did an extensive search for qualified Canadian workers. “Advertisements were placed with the federal government national jobs bank and numerous newspapers and other publications. Contrary to some allegations that the advertisements required Mandarin speakers, none of the advertisements said Mandarin was required. Most made no mention of Mandarin at all.”
As part of the application process, HD Mining developed and submitted a training and transition plan to ensure safe employment of workers and to eventually transition fully to Canadian workers.
But after sending home the 51 temporary foreign workers who came to Tumbler Ridge to complete the bulk samples in 2016, the mine has been in care and maintenance mode for the last two years.
Jody Shimkus, Vice President, Environment & Regulatory Affairs for HD Mining, says their plans haven’t changed since last we talked. “The intent is to find skilled Canadians where ever possible,” she says. “All the surface workers will be Canadian. But where we can’t find skilled workers we will bring in skilled miners internationally.”
Finding skilled underground workers, especially ones skilled in longwall mining is expected to be a challenge for the company, as there have been few underground coal mines in Canada over the last few decades, and even fewer longwall mines.
While there are a number of longwall mines operating in the Eastern USA, the jury is out whether longwall mining is even feasible in western Canada, where the geology is more complex. An earlier attempt in Grande Cache proved unsuccessful, but some observers blame poor planning, where the gear would sit unused for 12 hours, and sometimes longer, causing the equipment to get stuck as the rock settled.
In 2018, the mine received it’s last regulatory approval, getting its Mines Act Permit, which is valid for the next 25 years.
So far, says Shimkus, there is no specific date for when the mine will go into production. “It has such a significant front-end capital cost,” she says. “It’s a big piece of work, and we haven’t made the final decision. It’s not as if you can start with a smaller mine and move to a bigger mine. We are keeping the site ready to go, and all the permits are ready.”
The issue is financing. Just to get to the point they’re at now, the company has had to invest about $200-million dollars. The total cost to complete phase 1 of the mine is another $300 million.
Over the last few years, the company has been talking to investors, even bringing them to the site to inspect the property. Shimkus is optimistic that the mine will be funded soon. “ If we do not substantially start construction by October of next year, we will need to seek an EA amendment. If we don’t start by next fall, we will seek to extend the life of the certificate.”
While the company was hoping to have the mine up and running by 2016, “The process takes longer,” says Shimkus. We took two years to get the federal environmental decision.”
HD Mining was the proverbial straw that broke the caribou stalemate that had developed since the government acknowledged something needed to be done in 2003. While the company’s impact on caribou habitat was negligible (the provincial government found the mine would have no impact on caribou, points out Shimkus), it was the cumulative effects of their proposed mine, plus all the work done in the past around the Quintette mine, plus all the oil and gas development, plus all the forestry that finally forced the federal government to step in.
The federal government issued their environmental assessment certificate at the end of 2017, with 104 conditions, including provisions to consult with First Nations, building rock weirs on M20 and Mast Creek to protect fish habitat, and a unique cap on greenhouse gas emissions, limiting methane emissions to 500,000 tonnes of equivalent carbon dioxide per year, or about 15,000 tonnes of methane. This is the first time a coal mine has had a carbon cap.
And, of course, the company is required, in consultation with First Nations, mitigate the effects of the project on critical habitat for the Quintette Herd.
“HD has voluntarily identified an offset, and discussed it with the province,” says Shimkus. “It’s in the northern part of our coal license. There’s some habitat there that’s better for connectivity. We went back and forth on this with the government: financial offsets vs environmental. All the mining companies really stepped up to identify areas for caribou habitat.”
