Snap Lake Mine is on the verge of active closure.
In an email to SA国际影视传媒 on Nov. 7, Terry Kruger, a senior communications officer with De Beers Canada, said the closure is 96 per cent complete, which is where they expected to be at this point.
What had to go
Remediation at the mine is broken down into two parts: active closure and post-closure.
Active closure includes demolishing things at the mine and adding vegetation to the site to help with the ecosystem, while post-closure means monitoring what the mine did during its active phase to see if it paid off.
According to Kruger, here are the numbers:
- Almost 100 buildings on the mine site that had to be demolished;
- The largest structure on the mine was the process plant, which was the equivalent of 14,500 cubic metres of steel and other materials;
- Approximately 600 kg of native grass seed will be used on site;
- Seeds harvested from the site in September 2023 were used to grow approximately 2,200 shrubs that were planted on site this year;
- About 1 million kg of equipment was salvaged from the site by a company that specialized in reselling used mine equipment;
- More than 20 truckloads of steel were removed from site for recycling by a Yellowknife company and another 30 loads planned for removal in the final winter road of 2025;
No one will be on site at the mine until start of the winter road construction, said Kruger, which won't be until February 2025.
"We're confident we'll be able to get all material out before the end of March," Kruger added, noting that includes things like equipment, accomodation modules and anything that isn't required for post-closure monitoring.
A long time coming
Though Snap Lake will be the first mine to completely shut down, Diavik Diamond Mine is also on its way out with an expected end of operations in 2026.
When asked what advice she'd give to other closing diamond mines, Michelle Peters, the closure manager for the mine, had two words: start early.
"Leaving closure as an afterthought is really not an option. I think any responsible operator will want to have a closure plan in place," said Peters.
Snap Lake was, at the time, the only fully underground diamond mine in the territory, and ceased production in December 2015 due to what the company called a drop in the market price of diamonds and a necessary costly license exemption. It was put in to what was called "care and maintenance" in case operations were restarted, but the closure phase started in 2022.
More than 430 people were laid off as a result and it's been reported that the mine never turned a profit. It was the first De Beers mine opened outside the African continent, and the company stated that it produced an estimated 1.2 million carats of diamonds during its lifetime.
Kruger said the last step will be for De Beers to work with the closure contractor Met/NUNA to formally confirm that all work has been completed according to closure designs and the scope of work
That's expected to happen sometime between March and April 2025, he added.
MET/Nuna is a joint venture between the North Slave M茅tis Alliance (NSMA) and Inuit-owned Nuna Logistics, who were awarded the contract back in 2021.
The mine has so far removed all the infrastructure at the site, said Peters, adding that the mine's underground has also been flooded.
What is left at the mine includes what Peters called a legacy gazebo that was first used for traditional elders. It now serves as Snap Lake's environmental monitoring agency, she said.
"That's one of the last pieces of infrastructure that will remain," said Peters. "We also will have a small post-closure camp that is a temporary structure with generator fuel - just the necessary equipment that we will require to continue to do post closure activities."
The hardest part about remediating the mine, said Peters, has been aligning all stakeholders to its closure objectives.
"From as early as 2012 when we had an interim closure plan for the mine, we progressively added detail to that closure plan, and we could not get to the point where we executed closure," said Peters. "To get the agreements and the authorizations was the first big step for us."
Peters said De Beers has an approximately $130 million contract to remediate the mine, which has seen a few changes along the way that increased it slightly.
"It's a sizable investment to do closure, and I think it's one that will be well worth it," she said.
