Western Copper Corp

estern Copper’s mountain-side airstrip is the first taste of spectacular things to come for visitors to the company’s Casino property. After landing on an upward slope looking skywards, visitors are soon distracted by the peripheral view of the massive porphyry deposit adjacent to the runway.

The Casino deposit, located in the Dawson Range Mountains some 380 km northwest of Whitehorse, is not only huge in size but it’s also unique among Canadian porphyry deposits as it escaped the most recent glaciation and because of that it has a substantially preserved oxide gold Leach cap, a well-developed Supergene copper-enriched zone and a Hyrogene copper-gold zone.

Casino has NI 43-101 proven and probable reserves of 8 million oz of gold, 4.4 billion pounds of copper, and 475 million pounds of molybdenum contained in approximately 1 billion tonnes of ore.

Based on a recent pre-feasibility study, the Casino project would be developed as an open pit with a projected mine life of 30 years. As the largest undeveloped copper-gold reserve in North America, Casino would offer the opportunity to develop a pit that would be 1.6 km wide, 2.2 km long and up to 600 m deep.

The copper-gold-molybdenum deposit would be developed as a conventional truck-shovel open-pit mine, initially processing the gold bearing oxide cap as a heap leach operation. The average thickness of the copper oxide zone and copper sulphide zone are 10 m and 60 m respectively.

Drilled and blasted rock will be loaded onto rigid frame haul trucks by electric shovels.

Oxide ore will be transported from the mine to a run-of-mine heap leaching facility by off-highway haul trucks. Gold bullion from the oxide gold ore will be shipped by truck to metal refiners and copper will be recovered, as a precipitate, by the SART process to control the quality of the leach solution. This precipitate will be shipped to smelters.

Sulphide ore processing would commence approximately 2.5 years later at a nominal rate of 120,000 tpd in a concentrator, which would produce a copper concentrate and a molybdenum concentrate.

Sulphide ore will be transported from the mine to the primary crusher by off-road haul trucks. Mineral concentrates of copper and molybdenum will be produced by mineral flotation technology. Copper concentrate will be thickened and filtered and sent by no-highway haul trucks to nearby ports. Molydbenum concentrate will be dried and placed on supertracks for transport.

Power and water to the mine will be provided by an on-site 100 MW coal-fired power plant and the Yukon River will be pumped 17 km to the site.