but there are no houses that we have to support,” Kent says. Instead, workers will be drawn from and commute from Hay River, which is 40 kilometers away by roads that the provincial government keeps cleared and passable 365 days a year. “It’s a fairly thriving community,” Kent says, with an airport and scheduled flights to and from Yellowknife/Edmonton several times a day, as well as a Canadian National railhead and a regional hospital. The operation of the mine will also bring technology from the potash industry and help produce strong cash flow and enhanced profitability. For instance, because some of the underground deposits left behind in the original mining areas are in an aquifer, they are subjected to groundwater
48
www.bus-ex.com DECEMBER 10
intrusion. Tamerlane plans to use a freezering technique to address this problem. The environmentally friendly freezing process uses brine as a refrigerant to freeze the ground adjacent to drill holes which are arranged in a circle around the deposit. This frozen ground prevents water from entering the mine. Elsewhere, Tamerlane plans to deploy vertical conveyor systems to help bring ore up to the surface, borrowing from technology used to build subways in New York City and salt mines in Louisiana. The company also plans to use dense media separation, or DMS, on the property, an approach brought into the zinc-lead industry about 15 years ago, after Pine Point was taken offline. In early November, Tamerlane announced it had obtained $10 million in financing, an amount meant to bridge the venture to a larger closing. “We just started the process of lining up the funding in the