Goldcorp goes all out to make its new mine a great place to work
Guy Belleau acquired a passion for geology as a youth fishing the rivers and streams around his home town of Lévis on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, directly opposite Quebec City.
When the fish weren’t biting, Belleau studied the shoreline rocks, hoping he might stumble upon embedded gold. “The rocks were always on my mind,” he says. “And geology has been in my blood ever since.”
That youthful passion led to a career as a mining engineer and jobs at mines in Val d’Or, Abitibi, Mattagami, Chibougamou and Newfoundland, though none quite compared, in scale or personal satisfaction, with his current position as general manager of Goldcorp Inc.’s Éléonore Mine in the James Bay region of northern Québec.
Éléonore is one of three mines that Vancouver-based Goldcorp is bringing into production this year and, according to the corporate website, it is “a key component of our next generation of growth projects.”
The company expects to produce 40,000 to 60,000 ounces of gold at Éléonore by year end and the operation has been designed to yield between 575,000 and 625,000 ounces of low-cost gold annually (following ramp-up to full capacity expected in H1 2018) and process 7,000 tonnes of ore per day.
Belleau has been working at the site, located some 400km by road, but 200km by plane, east of the Cree coastal community of Wemindji, since the fall of November, 2009, three years after Goldcorp acquired the property from Virginia Mines, the Quebec City-based junior company that discovered what proved to be a vast deposit. And with construction nearing completion, Belleau could hardly wait to get into production.
“After the past five years of thinking about a world-class gold mine operation, of going through the concept, the design and the permitting, through the hiring and the construction, it’s coming,” he says. “We can smell it. We can almost touch gold.”
Goldcorp has invested about $1.8 billion into a mine that has megaproject written all over it. The company started in November, 2009 with an advanced exploration camp which consisted of several portable trailers that served as office space and bunkhouses for the staff. Construction began in February 2011 after Goldcorp had received all the necessary permits from the Quebec government and had signed a collaboration agreement with the Cree Nation of Wemindji and the broader Cree Nation Government.
Initially the company had to move materials and supplies to the site by barges in the summer and ice roads in the winter. Since then, Goldcorp has built a 70-kilometre all-weather road that connects the mine site to a Hydro-Quebec road that terminates at a dam on the Opinaca Reservoir, and the company also erected a power line adjacent to the road.
The road will be used to transport equipment and supplies, but the company has also built a fully staffed airport at the mine site and employees will be flown in from Rouyn-Noranda, Montreal, Chibougamou and Wemindji on Dash 8 turboprops with a capacity of 39 passengers. “It’s one of the busier airports in the province,” says Belleau.
Throughout 2014, the airport has been handling 40 to 70 flights per week as the company shuttled construction crews in and out. At any one time, there have been up to 1,400 workers employed around the clock, the camp has grown to 950 rooms, each with two beds, and by the end of August the cafeteria had served one million meals.
However, Belleau notes that Goldcorp has gone the extra mile to ensure that workers enjoy comfortable accommodations and good food.
“We’ve raised the bar,” he says. “The rooms are like you get at a five-star hotel. You’ve got a 42-inch flat screen TV in each one with movies on demand and all the channels in French and English that they watch at home. We have a five-week rotating menu. In other words, what you eat tonight, you won’t see for another five weeks.”
The mine will create 2,000 jobs in 2014 and 1200 in 2015 with 700 people full time at the site. Workers will be housed two to a room, but their shifts are staggered so that only one person is occupying a room at any given time. They will work seven days straight, followed by seven days off, meaning that they will have a total of six months per year at home, not including four weeks holidays.
As well, the flights in and out are relatively short; one hour from Chibougamou, one hour and 20 minutes from Rouyn-Noranda and one hour and 40 minutes from Montreal.
“You finish your days in and, bang, you can be home having a beer with your wife in under two hours,” says Belleau.
Goldcorp has also forged a healthy partnership with the Cree governments and the company has already hired and trained 305 Cree workers at the mine.
Some are working underground, others in the mill and still others in the cafeteria or the janitorial services department but the company has developed special training programs, both on-site and off, that allow aboriginal employees to start at entry level positions and advance to sophisticated mining jobs.
“We have people who started washing dishes in the cafeteria and now they are key underground operators,” says Belleau.
By early September, the company had sunk a ramp from surface to a depth of 800 metres while the production shaft had been sunk to 945 metres and was still about a year from completion.
Goldcorp was set to begin mining the high-grade vein deposits on three fronts and at depths of 350 metres, 400 metres and 650 metres.
“We will go down to at least 1,500 metres one day and the deposit is open at depth,” Belleau says. “We don’t know where it’s going to go beyond that.”
At the same time, Goldcorp holds a very large land position around the Éléonore Mine and will be pursuing an aggressive exploration program in years to come.
“We believe this is just the beginning,” says Belleau. “We’re just scratching the surface. We’re putting a lot of money into exploration and I’m quite confident that in a couple of years we’ll be talking about the next mine.”
In the meantime, though, the focus is on starting and ramping up production at Éléonore.
“We’re putting in world-class infrastructure,” he says. “We’re using the latest technology underground and in the plant. This is a fully mechanized operation and nobody will lift anything. We’re putting a lot of emphasis on our people, on safety and on partnerships. That leads to success in terms of productivity, efficiency and cost.”
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