Coal project looks promising for Hudson Bay area
After completing their 2011 drill testing program, Goldsource Mines Inc. has reported a 47.8 per cent increase in indicated resources. That puts the resource estimation at 117 million tonnes in the 130,000 hectare section of land owned by the company, with some deposits measuring up to 120 metres thick.
“There’s not a lot of deposits that are bigger than that in Canada,” said Eric Fier, chief operating officer of the company.
The company holds itself to a threshold of 100 million tonnes before it considers a project to be worth investing in. They are now developing technology to turn that coal into a profitable source of energy.
Due to the low quality of the coal, Fier said they are looking at a coal-to-liquids process or gasification as a means of processing the coal.
“Basically, you’re trying to reduce that piece of coal down to carbon and reduce the ash…. And you’re moisture,” he said. “And then at the end of the day, you squeeze it and you get barrels of oil.”
Fier said the amount of coal available in the deposits would make “a lot of barrels of oil” and the benefit for the province would be huge.
“You’re probably looking at a fifty year project, and a lot of jobs,” he said. “Depending on where you decide to process and make the product that you want to sell, the jobs could be anywhere from 300-1000 jobs that are pretty much permanent jobs.”
The company will continue to drill test the Hudson Bay site and different processing technologies. Fier said they still need to do more feasibility studies, but with indicated resource estimates already over the 100 million tonne mark, the likelihood of developing a mine is high.
“At some point these deposits will be mined and processed,” said Fier. “And I would call that positive impact for Saskatchewan and the Hudson Bay area.”
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