SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - De Beers Canada reached an important stage in the regulatory process for its proposed Gahcho Kue diamond mine last month.

Paul Cobban, permitting manager for De Beers Canada, right, delivers the environmental impact statement for its proposed Gahcho Kue Diamond mine at the office of the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board and the panel manager of Gahcho Kue Environmental Impact Review Panel, Alan Ehrlich, left. - photo courtesy of De Beers Canada

In late December, the company – together with partner Mountain Province Diamonds – submitted its Gahcho Kue environmental impact statement – 11,000 pages of it – to the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board.

Now, a Gahcho Kue Environmental Impact Review Panel will pour over every word of the assessment, ultimately deciding whether the project, potentially the NWT's fourth diamond mine, is on sound environmental ground.

Yellowknifer recently spoke with Cathie Bolstad, De Beers Canada's manager of public and corporate affairs, to talk about the environmental assessment and how Gahcho Kue will different from De Beers Canada's first Northern mine, Snap Lake.

On the mine's location near the Bathurst, Ahiak and Beverly caribou herds

Bolstad: Beers has done a lot of work to look at what that means, how they move, what literature and information is out there, and as part of the chapter of caribou, De Beers actually has identified what are some of the potential impacts.

(For example) if there's dust deposition that's a possible impact on the vegetation, then what programs can a mine put in place to ensure their carbon and energy management is mitigating its impact dust.

All of those will be the subject of discussion and debate during the environmental impact review and I think it's an important discussion to have. The North has experience – the communities and the mines – mitigating those effects and monitoring mines and so it will be a very thorough discussion.

GQ: What logistical challenges will the construction of Gahcho Kue pose for De Beers?

Bolstad: Some of it, of course, is that we're in a remote Northern location dependent on an ice road to get our construction items in there, so that, when you talk about logistics, timing and weather is everything. Some of the decision points around the permitting process – which, of course, are not in the control of the company; they are set by the timelines of the process – have to at some point align with the capital investment decision making progress that the project owners have in terms of advancing that project to meet their goals.

Those are some of the logistics. They're not logistics unknown to De Beers. We managed those logistics for the approval and construction of Snap Lake, but it's (a matter of) getting the right things in at the right time within your decision making framework, which includes a regulatory decision making framework that is absolutely pivotal to an investor's decision to proceed or not.

GQ: Did you learn anything building Snap Lake that you'll apply to Gahcho Kue?

Bolstad:...one of the examples that you would see in the Gahcho Kue project is a different approach for our proposed construction of the accommodations camp. Rather than bring in a temporary camp, we're bringing in and building the permanent camp for the construction workers that are coming in, so that you're not doing two camps.

Rather than do it twice, do it once, and minimize your impact as you come in.

GQ: Conceptually, how is Gahcho Kue different from Snap Lake?

Bolstad:It will be different from Snap Lake; it will be similar to the Victor mine that we have in Ontario in that it's open pit and it certainly will be similar to what Northwest Territories residents are used to seeing with respect to diamond mines, and that's because the kimberlite deposit for Gahcho Kue – the three kimberlite pipes that we're mining – are really shaped like a carrot in terms of their deposit down into the earth.

What's different about Gahcho Kue compared to the two open pit diamond mines north of us, is that the kimberlite deposits are actually quite close in proximity. So what's being proposed is the sequential mining of the pits so that when you finish mining the first pit, and you start mining the second, you're depositing (waste rock) back into the first pit.

We took four aboriginal communities to site this summer. We showed them the plan of the project ... and the comments we're getting back are 'Wow. This is a lot smaller than we thought compared to what we've seen before.' So we're luck that this is the nature of what Mother Earth has given us in terms of the deposit.

GQ: How will the recruitment of workers be different this time around?

Bolstad: First of all, the skill sets required for Gahcho Kue are very different skill sets than what we require for Snap Lake. Snap Lake was an underground mine from the get-go and it's a highly-skilled workforce that is working underground and in the process plant. One of our learnings is that there's a lot of work that's been done by ourselves and the other mines and our training partners on developing programs that have trained people to work in both Ekati and Diavik and Snap Lake. And as the mine lives for the earlier diamond mines progress (and as they move underground and the required skill sets become different), the skill sets of the people operating in the open pit are skill sets that are becoming available.

So we need to make sure we're out there tapping into where those availabilities are, working with communities to understand that, as more other companies are going underground, we need more skills above ground.

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