Mining of the Duparquet deposit has been designed as an open pit with a planned production of 3,650,000 tonnes per year (3.65M tpy) or 10,000 tonnes per day (tpd).
The life-of-mine (LOM) for the Duparquet Pit was based on supplying the mill with 3,650,000 tonnes of ore per year. Initially, 4.1 Mt of tailings would be reserved to supplement the mill when necessary, but it was later decided to process the tailings at a rate of 750,000 tonnes per year right from the start in order to clean the tailings area to make room for the waste stockpile #2 for the west pit.
The LOM for the Duparquet Pit will be spread over 11 years, preceded by a 4-year pre production period.
The designed pits are approximately 3,508 m long by 1,120 m wide and 360 m deep.
The Duparquet pit design is based on double benching with 10-m single benches.
A minimum catch bench of 8.5 m has been considered in the preliminary geotechnical study when using double benches.
Also, the existing pit contains approximately 5.7 Mm3 of water. At the start of the project, it is estimated that 2 Mm3 need to be dewatered, and that it will take approximately six (6) months.
The mining schedule will require the extraction of 39,363,029 tonnes of ore and 291,213,881 tonnes of waste rock, resulting in a LOM strip ratio of 8.26 to 1. The overburden consists of 23,398,919 tonnes. Taking into account the overburden, the LOM strip ratio is 8.93 to 1. The ........
