Bridge Creek region public environmental report for the Burnside Project

Abstract

This is a two volume PER for the proposed Northern Gold open-cut gold mines at Kazi, Western Arm and Bridge Creek. Ore would be trucked to existing plant. Tailings would go to the existing Cosmo Howley pit. The environmental setting, project description, waste rock disposal, water management, tailings, workforce, environmental impacts and proposed safeguards are all discussed. Some 1.24 million cubic metres of ore is to be mined by open cut methods and transported by road train, via a dedicated Haul Road (with an underpass under the Stuart Highway), to Burnside for processing at the existing facilities which are to be refurbished. The tailings produced in processing would be discharged to the existing Cosmo Howley pit, which has been used for this purpose for some years by the previous mine operators. The proposed three mining areas are covered by existing mining leases. It is estimated that approximately 7 million cubic metres of waste rock and soil would be produced from the three mines and would be placed into above ground dumps located adjacent to the pits. The three deposits are intended to supplement ore sourced from the Howley line mines to maintain viability of the Burnside operation for several years. Mining of the three deposits is currently planned to take approximately 3.2 years. This Public Environmental Report (PER) has been written to cover mining operations only at the three mines sites, in response to guidelines provided by the Northern Territory Department of Mines and Energy (DME). The PER has been structured to generally follow these guidelines which are reproduced in Appendix A. This PER does not cover mining and processing operations at Burnside and the Howley line mines (which are on existing mining leases) except to provide background information and to indicate proposed modifications to the processing operations.