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Canada
Mining for gold in the Canadian arctic is a challenge not to be taken lightly, but one such company which is defying the odds is Agnico Eagle Mines Limited (Agnico), a Canadian-based gold producer with operations in Canada, Finland, and Mexico, and exploration and development activities extending to the United States and Sweden.
When it came to deliver reliable, resilient, and dependable communications in one of the harshest, most unforgiving environments, Agnico selected TETRA radio communications technology from PowerTrunk for their exploration and production operations.
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The Meliadine project, located in the low Arctic of northern Canada, is Agnico Eagle’s largest development project based on mineral reserves and mineral resources. The project has 3.4 million ounces of gold in proven and probable reserves and a large mineral resource. Agnico Eagle has said the mine could produce 400,000 ounces of gold per year over a 14-year lifespan and hopes to run the mine until 2033 and possibly longer. The Meadowbank open-pit gold mine in the Kivalliq region of Nunavut was Agnico Eagle’s first low Arctic mine.
The Meadowbank mine is expected to produce 220,000 ounces of gold in 2018, and 60,000 ounces gold in 2019, which is anticipated to be the last year of the mine production. In February 2017, Agnico Eagle approved the Amaruq satellite deposit at Meadowbank for development pending the receipt of the required permits. The Amaruq ore will be hauled by truck to the plant at the Meadowbank site for processing and is expected to extend the life of the Meadowbank Complex another 7 years.
Open pit and underground mining operations all have built-in hazards that exist wherever they are located, but the gold mines in Nunavut have some additional unique challenges to manage. One of the first obstacles to tackle is that the high-grade gold project is located near the western shore of Hudson Bay in the Kivalliq region of Nunavut, and 400 km south of the Arctic Circle.
These remote locations mean that all of their equipment, fuel, and dry goods depend on a single annual delivery which arrives via a warm-weather sealift barge to Rankin Inlet or Baker Lake. Personnel, perishables, and lighter goods arrive at the local airport and newly constructed all-weather access roads are needed to reduce the transportation and logistical costs for exploration and development work.
Ensuring the safety of its employees is the mine’s number one priority and the greatest threat that workers have to contend with is the harsh arctic weather conditions. During winter, outside air temperatures can drop to -50C (-58F), which means that strict safety procedures have been implemented. Workers must always be pairs and are not allowed outside for more than 10 minutes at a time to perform tasks. After this time they must return indoors for a minimum of 30 minutes in order to maintain proper body temperature before venturing outside again. Workers must check each other to make sure that they are completely covered and have no exposed skin which will suffer 3rd degree frost bite within minutes.
Besides the risks to people, communications equipment such as the radios in trucks and portable radios used by workers outside must withstand these extreme temperatures and cannot fail. Proper radio and battery maintenance procedures must strictly be maintained in order to guarantee ongoing operations.
TETRA has also proved to be reliable when used over Agnico’s satellite link. The company installed a TETRA base station at their offices in Val-d’Or, Quebec and connected it to the TETRA core infrastructure located at the mine site using a satellite teleport based in New Orleans, LA. Although the signal was travelling over 6,000 km (3,500 miles) they were able to expand their TETRA network to their corporate office and communicate with other users on their portable radios at the mine. Usually this type of radio communication is hindered due to the inherent latency delays in a satellite link. But the mine’s robust PowerTrunk-T architecture means that even these extreme connection conditions are not prohibitive to establishing workable situations.
– Quessy explained.
TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio) is the accepted digital radio standard for critical communications. TETRA is an open standard where the focus is on meeting the critical communications needs of public safety and security agencies and an increasingly wide range of other market sectors. The technology has been standardized by ETSI (The European Telecommunications Standards Institute).