Summary:
The Quintette Mine is divided into two areas known as Quintette Legacy and Quintette Restart, which covers the resource for the Mount Babcock area.
The Quintette Legacy is part of the historical mining operations of Mesa Wolverine. The Quintette Restart, at which mining operations commenced on September 5, 2024, has resource and reserve estimates with an effective date of September 4, 2024. Quintette Restart includes the Window Pit as part of the Mount Babcock development area.
The Mount Babcock deposit, part of the Quintette Restart, is located within the Peace River Coalfield and forms part of the Rocky Mountain Foothills structural belt which lies east of the Canadian Rocky Mountain Trend.
The Gates and Gething Formations are the primary coal-bearing stratigraphic units throughout the Foothills region, with the Gates Formation being the main coal-bearing unit within the Mount Babcock deposit. The Lower Cretaceous-age coal seams from these two formations were subjected to varying depths of burial prior to the Laramide deformation and mountain-building episodes. The subsequent structural deformation resulted in increased pressures and heat flows that have imparted metallurgical properties to the coal seams as evidenced from the vitrinite reflectance, swelling characteristics, and overall maturity of the coal seams.
The coal seams in the Mount Babcock area formed during the Cretaceous period within the Western Canada Basin in a series of transgressive-regressive cycles during the Columbian Orogeny. Environments of deposition varied laterally and vertically from marine through pro-deltaic and near shore, to delta plain and alluvial. Lithologies include mudstone, siltstone, sandstone, conglomerate, and coal. The subsequent Laramide Orogeny resulted in most of the present-day faulting and folding of the coalbearing sediments in the Mount Babcock deposit.
The coal seams of potential economic significance occurring on the property are contained mainly within the Falher Member of the Gates Formation. Drilling in the Mount Babcock area intersected a sequence of seams ranging from A to C within the Notikewin Member (Upper Gates), and from the D to K within the Falher member (Middel Gates). The coal seams within the Falher member demonstrate lateral continuity with mineable cumulative thicknesses ranging from 15 m to 17 m.
Due to significant thrust faulting, the Mount Babcock deposit has been categorized as having a “Complex” geology type. It is also categorized as a surface mineable deposit.
The Mount Babcock deposit covers approximately 1,500 ha at the top of Mount Babcock, with the Gates Formation cropping out on the northwest side of the mountain. The primary structure is a broad, box-like anticline that plunges up to 10° to the southeast. The bulk of the mineable coal occurs in the gently dipping, un-faulted area between the bounding anticlines of the box fold (Sharman, 2015). The southwestern limb steepens on the southwest side of the anticline, with dips reaching 60°.
There are several fault systems in the area that strike northwest-southeast and dip to the southwest (Sharman, 2015). The faults have reverse displacement and repeat the seams and surrounding strata. The most prominent of these is the Northeast fault system. The northeast fault system is composed of a main fault and several splays located to the northeast of the main fault. Between the splays of the fault system and northeast of it, bedding dips are steeper, up to 50° in slope. To the southwest, bedding dips are gentle, up to only 10°.
Other faults in the Babcock coal deposit occur on the southwest limb of the broad, box-shaped culmination of the Babcock anticline and do not have significant dip changes associated with them. The area immediately on either side of the faults is often a damage zone of fractured rock and minor folding, which may form preferential pathways for groundwater circulation.
Steep dips and faulting on the northeast side of the Mount Babcock form the limit of mining activity to the northeast, while the increasing depth of cover near the top of the mountain forms the limit of mining activity to the southwest due to high strip ratios.
In the Window Pit area, on the northeast side of Mount Babcock, a thick (locally over 100 m deep) pocket of unconsolidated glacial drift (Teck, 2012) covers the Gates Formation bedrock at the crest of the anticline.
Based on the above discussion, the Babcock coal deposit is classified as a complex geology type.
Mineralization
The exploration activities identified nine coal seams on the property. The seams are named (from top to base) A, B, C, D, E, F, G, J, and K. The seams from A to G are typically present as single ply seams, while seams E, J and K are often split and occur as multi-ply seams.
The continuity of the Mount Babcock coal beds has been confirmed by numerous boreholes, bulk samples from adits and production faces, and coal production data from the previous open pit mining of the Windy Pit area.
The nine coal beds demonstrate lateral continuity, with cumulative thicknesses ranging from 15 m to 17 m. Seams A, B, and C rarely reach minable thicknesses. However, the six main coal seams that are thick enough for open-pit mining are Seams D, E, F, G, J, and K1/K2.