Wyoming’s potential new gold mine just cleared state regulatory hurdles and is moving forward with a feasibility study, one step closer to extracting gold from the ground.

Turns out there really is gold “in those hills” – the hills that border Curt Gowdy State Park.

“We received a mining permit in April/May of this year, but it was conditional,” US Gold CEO George Bee told Cowboy State Daily on Wednesday. “This was conditional on obtaining a discharge permit and providing a bond for the remediation of our initial disturbances, which we did in May.

“We were then simply waiting for the air quality permit, and we have just obtained it, which now frees us to finalize all our studies and move on to development. »

The feasibility study will be the final step before actual development and will be used to secure financing for the CK Gold project that US Gold is developing about 20 miles west of Cheyenne. And it could be a lucrative business. The company said there could be 1 million ounces gold there.

“Lenders want to know the final economic numbers,” Bee said. “So we optimize. We incorporate all the agreed elements into the permit application and update all the figures we previously had.

This includes inflationary pressures that have pushed the estimated initial capital from $222 million a few years ago to somewhere between $290 million and $300 million today.

The company won’t start hiring in earnest until it has financing in place, Bee said, although it now has a link on its site to interested suppliers and potential employees.

“We may well be able to look at increasing our workforce and signing contracts with suppliers etc. in the latter part of next year for initial construction,” Bee said. “But construction will take around 18 months and it all depends on the financing being finalized.”

Bee said the company plans to hire 231 people initially during the construction phase of the project, after which it will employ 255 people over the 10-year life of the mine.

They would also work with several service providers during the operational phase, which would employ approximately 183 additional people. Indirect jobs serving both mine employees and service provider employees would total approximately 69, or just over 500 jobs supported by the mining operation over its lifespan.

“The good thing is, they’re all going to be good-paying jobs,” Bee said.

New life in the old ghost town

Beyond Curt Gowdy State Park on County Road 210, the remains of the old Copper King Mine can still be seen near the ghost town of Hecla, Wyoming.

“There were about 800 people there at one point,” Bee said. “And there were a number of miners operating small deposits in and around the area. So there are quite a few, historically, there has been quite a bit of work.

At the CK gold mine site, there is still a shaft and some lateral development on the mining site, which was abandoned in the 1920s.

“At that time, the ancients were looking for very high quality materials,” Bee said. “At the time, God was pegged at $35 an ounce and copper wasn’t very attractive. The scores must therefore have been very high.

Unfortunately, the higher grades at the CK gold mine are not continuous.

“There are some really good notes there, but because they’re not very continuous, it ended up playing out,” Bee said. “And for the miners, life was difficult. »

Bee said he was told the miners ended up blowing up the boiler because they weren’t paid on time. That was the end of the mine, until US Gold came along and took a second look.

“We’re not really mining the high grades that the old guys were interested in,” Bee said. “And copper and gold prices are rising, which allows us to use large equipment to extract much lower grade. Whereas the ancients needed very high quality materials to transport them to a stamping factory and then try to recover the metal on site.

In fact, US Gold was initially going to sell its Wyoming property to fund exploration in Nevada.

But before selling, they asked Bee to take a look at the property, and he told them they’d be crazy to sell the mine.

“It’s a beautiful mine located in a great jurisdiction, and it’s technically very simple,” Bee said.

Selling it would be like chasing the proverbial bird into the bush while already having a perfectly good bird in hand.

These days, it’s much harder to find money for exploration than for development, Bee added.

“Taking a known deposit, Copper King, and turning it into the CK Gold project and developing it has been a better route at a time when exploration funding has been very difficult to come by,” he said .

The merger will not take place in Wyoming

The CK Gold project will mine both copper and gold from a sulphide mineral called chalcopyrite, but there will be no on-site smelting.

They will use a process called foam flotation, which involves grinding the rocks fine enough to form a slurry when mixed with water, then introducing foamy bubbles into the system.

“The bubbles rise to the surface and there is a collecting agent,” Bee explained. “Minerals don’t like water, they prefer bubbles, so they stick to it.”

The mineral-laden bubbles then overflow from the tank into a collection bin.

“We then collect that and sell the concentrate to a smelter,” Bee said. “So it could be in Quebec or Salt Lake City or even Asia. We will sell the concentrate wherever we get the best price.

This approach means that there will be no emissions on site, as there will be no melting, and also minimal use of chemicals.

The company also plans to recycle the water it uses in the process, to save this resource as well.

“Normally, mines do a dam and once they remove the concentrate, they let the rest of the slurry go into a large paddock, where the water evaporates and the tailings solidify,” Bee explained. “But in our case, we will spend more money on a filtration press to extract all the water from the tailings, so we can recycle it and save water.”

This will leave a filter cake – something like the coffee grounds left after brewing a pot of coffee. This wet sand will eventually be covered with rock and a layer of topsoil so that it can be revegetated with native plants and grasses.

“It’s more expensive, but it’s a more responsible way to manage those residues,” Bee said. “And we’ll strategically leave a few piles of rocks and boulders, because that’s where some creatures like to live. We want to restore it as close as possible to the type of habitat that existed initially.

Renee Jean can be reached at [email protected].