| Popis: |
Current conditions in the global mining community have dramatically accelerated the quest for bringing projects on line with commensurate pressures being placed on every aspect of the permitting and planning processes. At the same time, the new realities of global communication, coupled with heightened environmental and social awareness, have placed local populations and special interest groups in much stronger positions to participate in those processes. In addition, governments and lending institutions are steadily becoming more sophisticated with respect to environmental and social liabilities while simultaneously wanting to encourage economic development. These competitive and frequently antagonistic interests create a need for efficiency, transparency and clarity in the permitting process and proactive approaches by mining companies. This paper focuses on a Peruvian porphyry Cu-Au deposit with early social issues that prevented access to the property and existing samples needed for waste rock characterization. The EIA application process threatened to stall for lack of related environmental data. The principals of geo-environmental models were used to assimilate published data from analogous deposits in British Columbia and to create a defensible surrogate database to supplement the yet- inadequate site-specific data. Presentation of such estimates provided a mechanism to proceed with the permitting processes until local social and political issues could be resolved and appropriate environmental data collected. Water quality data from several mines, as presented in the Red Chris, British Columbia project application for Environmental Assessment Certificate, is included, along with interpretations derived from equilibrium-based modeling. The information is used to substantiate and justify the choice of surrogate water quality parameters for acidic drainage from the Peruvian property in question. The surrogate composition was taken to temporarily represent dump seepage and sulfidic wall rock runoff and to estimate facility effluent and pit lake quality. Geo-environmental modeling principals are shown to be useful for advance planning and proactive environmental planning, including situations where the permitting process has outpaced the availability of critical environmental data. Resulting data can be shown to be pragmatic and robust, less subject to interpretation than some other assumptions, as well as independent of the specific operator making the application. |
