After being mothballed a decade ago because of sagging mineral prices, a Sudbury, Ont., mine is springing to life.
But the Victoria project by Polish mining giant KGHM International is still years and hundreds of millions of dollars away from actually pulling minerals out of the ground.
The new mine in the Whitefish area in the western reaches of Greater Sudbury was announced to great fanfare in the early 2010s.
But when mineral prices went into a prolonged gully, the project — which aims to mine a mineral deposit that was the site of several previous mines, including a now ghost town named Victoria Mines — was mothballed for years.
Steve Dunlop, the Canadian general manager for KGHM who has worked on this deposit since it was owned by FNX, says they used the delay to better plan out of the mine and strengthen partnerships with area First Nations.
“So we’ve done subsequent exploration to that, proofed up a portion of that ore body,” he said.
“We’re convinced and it was a matter of mitigating some of the risks that are there.”
However Dunlop says they won’t have a full sense of the nickel, copper and platinum down below until they sink an exploration shaft, which is expected to happen sometime in 2023.
He says the total cost of building Victoria Mine — including a headframe, full water treatment plant and hydro substation— is expected to be over $1 billion.
Dunlop says they expect to have a workforce of 400 when they go into production, but it’s a bit early for miners to start dropping off their resumes.
“It will still be a number of years out for getting to full scale production,” he said.
“We have very high hopes for this.”
