North America

Anita Project Niobium-Tantalum Mine
Lac Saint-Jean, Quebec, Canada.	The mine is expected to produce 115,000kg of tantalum a year.	The mine will begin commercial production in 2012-13.

Arizona 1 Uranium Project
The Arizona 1 uranium project is one of four mines under full or partial development in the Arizona Strip.	Mineral resources at the site were estimated to be 120,000t at an average grade of 0.545% U3O8.

Athabasca Oil Sands
Suncor's Oil Sands plant, located north of Fort McMurray, Alberta. Suncor's vision is to more than double oil sands production to over half a million barrels per day in the next decade.	Syncrude Mildred Lake plant. The yellow structures are the bases of pyramids made of sulphur, behind which is the tailings pond.	Extraction separation cell. Suncor's primary extraction plants separate raw bitumen from the sand in giant separation cells.
Truck and shovel mining at Albian Sands.	Firebag SAGD well pad. The steam assisted gravity drainage technology uses underground wells to inject steam into the oil sands deposits and collect the bitumen released by the heat.	Map showing the extent of the Athabasca Oil Sands.
Oil sand bitumen is a mixture of sand, water and clay.

Aurora
The Aurora mining complex is located in North Carolina, USA.	Aurora is one of very few operations in the USA to use bucketwheel excavators for overburden stripping.	The phosphate ore is mined using draglines then slurried and pumped to the processing plant.
Schematic of the Aurora mill flowsheet.	Products are loaded on to enclosed barges for the journey to the export port at Morehead City.	PCS has received both US and state awards for its reclamation work at Aurora.

Bachelor Lake Gold Mine
In November 2004 Metanor Resources Inc acquired the rights to Bachelor Lake from Campbell Resources for $2.3m.	The mine consists of 177 claims and two mining concessions spread across 4,837.4ha of land.	By December 2008 the operating capacity of the mill was increased by modifying and installing new motors.
The mine is located at an elevation of 100m and is covered by coarse and sandy glacial deposits.	The total measured and indicated resources of the mine are estimated to be 841,591 metric tons at a grade of 7.79g/t Au.

Bajo de la Alumbrera
Bajo de la Alumbrera is located at an altitude of 2,500m in Catamarca province, some 1,100km north west of Buenos Aires.	Plant construction in the remote region of the Argentine Andes.	Geological cross-section though the orebody. Very little surface material needed stripping before mining began.
Developing the first few benches with the mine's new equipment.	Caterpillar 789B haulers make up the mine's truck fleet.	The flotation section at Alumbrera's concentrator includes Jameson cells developed and supplied by MIM.

Bear Run Coal Mine
An example of the advanced technologies used at the site.	An industrial spur is currently being built.	Bear Run is predicted to be the biggest surface mine in the eastern US.

Bingham Canyon
Bingham Canyon copper mine is two-and-a-half miles wide and half a mile deep. It is one of the most efficient copper producing mines in the world.	Bingham Canyon mine is the largest man-made excavation on earth.	Bingham Canyon mining equipment.
The power plant.	Four grinding lines composed of four semi-autogenous grinding (SAG) mills and eight ball mills and corresponding flotation cells.	The company operates two concentrators.
The technically advanced and cleanest smelter in the world is part of an $880 million modernisation programme.

Black Thunder
Coal at Coal Creek comes from two seams with a combined thickness of approximately 33ft.	Black Thunder is the largest producer of coal in North America.	The BE-1300 Dragline, originally built at Coal Creek, was walked across the prairie to Black Thunder.
The BE-2570 WS dragline known as 'Ursa Major'.	Electric shovels loading the haul trucks at Black Thunder.

Brunswick
The surface installations at the Brunswick No.12 mine.	Three-dimensional image of the No.12 orebody.	Ore is recovered by blasting then dumping, followed by crushing and finally hoisting to the surface for treatment.
Oversize rocks in the stopes are drilled and charged using the Weasel remote-controlled rig.	Using a raiseborer to drill orepasses from one level to the next.

Buckhorn Gold Mine,
The proposal for the Buckhorn gold mine changed from being an open mine to an underground mine.	Buckhorn is located just south of the Canadian border.	One million ounces of gold are estimated to be in reserve at the Kinross Buckhorn gold mine.

Campbell
A shaft hoist in operation at the Campbell mine.	A loader with a scoop of gold-bearing rock.	A jackleg drill in operation.
Driller at the Campbell mine.	Gold pour at Campbell.

Carlin Trend
Newmont land position, Carlin, Nevada.	The gold quarry pit, Carlin Trend, Nevada.	Underground mining on the Carlin Trend.
Underground operations at Carlin Trend.	The Twin Creeks mega pit.	The refractory ore treatment plant (roaster) at Carlin.
Close-up of the refractory ore treatment plant.	The plant is highly computerised and is the largest of its type in the world.

Coal Mountain
Location of Coal Mountain.	Landscape of Coal Mountain.	Typical cross-section at Coal Mountain operations.
Coal Mountain processing plant.	Trucks and loader.	Canadian Pacific Railway Co’s 112-car unit trains to transport its products to tidewater.
Westshore terminals, with an annual throughput capacity exceeding 22Mt.

Copper Mountain Project
Copper Mountain is an open pit porphyry copper mine.	The deposit at the project site is classified as an alkali porphyry copper deposit with gold admixture.	The project mining property and associated permits are under Similco Mines, a wholly owned subsidiary of Copper Mountain Mining Corporation.

Cordero Rojo
Cordero Rojo seen from high up on one of the mine’s loading silos.	Draglines are the main stripping tool at Cordero Rojo.	Looking along one of the operating pit areas.
The P&H drilling rig, used for overburden blasting.	Loading coal using a P&H shovel and Komatsu Haulpak 830E trucks.	A Komatsu Haulpak 830E electric-drive hauler.
Cordero and Caballo Rojo have their own coal storage and loadout silos.	Unit trains carry Cordero Rojo coal to Midwestern US customers.

Cortez Gold Mine, NV
The jewel of the Cortez joint venture, Pipeline will have PDG's lowest costs. Foreground is the Crescent pit, with the Pipeline pit behind and the new mill.	The first gold doré bar at Pipeline.	Mining the Pipeline pit.
The Pipeline mine feeder system.	Grinders in the mill.	The Pipeline project under construction in 1996.
Carbon Columns, part of the gold recovery process at Cortez.

Crandall Canyon
Satellite view of the Crandall Canyon mine site, just off Utah State Route 31 in the Manti-LaSal National Forest.	Longwall underground coal production; this technique played a major part in boosting the mine’s production.	Map showing the extent of the mine.
A high resolution dual lens camera system waiting to be lowered into an 1,868ft shaft as part of the rescue effort.	Diagram detailing the boreholes drilled during the rescue attempt.

Cripple Creek and Victor,
Blasting at Cripple Creek and Victor mine, now 100% owned by AngloGold	A Cripple Creek and Victor employee; some are now in prison after stealing around $3m of gold from the mine since 1999.	The CC&V Cresson Project is a low-grade, open-pit operation.

East Manhattan Wash
A comprehensive bulk sampling programme at the mine was completed in May 2009.	Samples taken ranged between 0.05ppm to 0.32ppm gold.

Ekati
BHP Diamond's site map.	The Koala pit in the foreground with the plant site in the background.	Installation of the secondary scrubber feed conveyor at the Ekati plant.
The Koala plant site showing the process plant and coarse ore storage.	The Koala site camp with fuel storage to the right and power plant.	Diamonds from the Ekati mine.

Fording River
The location of Fording River coal mine.	The Fording River coking coal mine produced 7.9Mt of clean coal in 1998.	11,400t of cleaned coal leaves on its 1,175km trip from Fording River operations to the deep-sea port of Roberts Bank.
Electric shovel and truck in operation.	The coal preparation plant.	Washing and drying process schematic.
Typical Eagle Mountain cross-section at Fording River Operations.	Landscape of Eagle Mountain.

Galore Creek Project
Discovered in 1955, the Galore Creek gold project is one of the largest copper-gold-silver mines located in north-west British Columbia.	The Galore Creek gold mine has approximately 1,300mt of high-grade copper, gold and silver resources.	The proposed 90km road will improve access to the mine, largely eliminating the need for helicopter transportation.

Godfrey Gold Property, Ontario
Godfrey Gold project map.	Map of the Timmins area.

Great Panther Topia Mine
The Topia is located in Durango State, Mexico.	The Topia mining district is among the oldest in Mexico.	Most of the mine’s veins lie on the Great Panther property.

Greenhills
Location of Greenhills coal mine.	Landscape of Greenhills.	Typical cross-section at Greenhills operations.
GPS technology in surveying and drilling applications.	Open-pit coal mining at Greenhills schematic.	A Marion 301-M with a 45m³ capacity bucket.
Truck and loader.	Greenhills washing and drying process schematic.

Highland Valley
The Valley pit, source of most of Highland Valley’s ore, with the Lornex pit behind.	Highland Valley's mining operations are centred on P&H shovels and a Caterpillar haul fleet.	Twin semi-mobile in-pit crushers handle the run-of-mine ore, feeding the conveyors to the mill.
The grinding circuit in the Highland mill.	The Valley tailings pond is contained at one end by the L-L dam.	Reclaimed tailings are home to the cattle.

Idaho Cobalt Mine
Cobalt refining operations at Big Creek, Idaho.	Equipment on site in Salmon, Idaho.

Jacobs Ranch Mine
Jacobs Ranch is allowed to produce 55 million tons of coal every year.	The mine was acquired by Rio Tinto through its subsidiary Kennecott Energy from Kerr-McGee Coal in 1998.

Johnson Camp Mine,
The Johnson Camp Mine includes two existing open pits, one of which is the Burro pit.	The Johnson Camp Mine uses the solvent extraction, electrowinning (SX-EW) process.	There are two raffinate ponds at the Johnson Camp site.
Copper barron raffinate is used for leaching of copper ores.	Copper hit a record price of $8,820 in March 2008.	The Johnson Camp is expected to produce 25 million pounds of copper cathodes annually over a mine life of 16 years.
Nord has already purchased the primary crushing station from the Newmont Gold Quarry operation for use at Johnson Camp.	Sandvik H6800 secondary crushers are to be used at the Johnson Camp site.

Kidd Creek Copper and Zinc Mine, Ontario
Kidd Creek is situated close to the city of Timmins in northern Ontario.	The steeply dipping orebody was mined first as an open-pit, then in progressively deeper stages underground.	Two shafts dominate the surface at Kidd Creek’s mining division.
Drillers underground at Kidd Creek.	Kidd Creek’s metallurgical division is separate from the mine, and consists of both smelters and refineries.	The concentrator at Kidd Creek produces base metal concentrates for smelting and refining.
The Kidd Creek copper smelter flowsheet.	Zinc ingots awaiting shipment at the Kidd Creek zinc plant.

Lone Mountain
The mine is located in a district that hosts the Santa Rita-Chino and Tyrone open-pit copper mines.	Mineralisation in the lone deposit includes copper porphyry, polymetallic skarns and a large copper oxide-carbonate-sulfide blanket that lies near-surface.	The intrusive rocks present in the prospect are composed of quartz monzonitic-granodioritic-latite.

Morenci Copper Mine, Arizona
Phelps Dodge's Morenci operations are in southern Arizona, 250km southeast of Phoenix.	An electric mining shovel and its trucks in the pit bottom.	A P&H 2800 mining shovel loading a Caterpillar 973 hauler.
Hauling waste rock to backfill the worked out pit requires a big truck fleet.	One of Morenci's Caterpillar 797, 272t (300st) capacity mechanical-drive haul trucks.	Higher-grade ore is heap-leached within the pit, with the leach liquor being pumped up to the solvent-extraction plant.
Low-grade ore is ball-milled before being agglomerated and dump-leached to recover its copper content.

Musselwhite
Aerial view of Musselwhite.	Schematic of a section through the Musselwhite mine.	A longhole drill in operation underground.
Trainee miners operating a jackleg drill underground.	Ore transportation at the mine.	The Musselwhite mill with grinders in the foreground.
Pouring gold at Musselwhite.

Myra Falls Zinc, Copper, Gold
The Myra Falls mines are located in the Strathcona provincial park in the Myra valley on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada.	Exploration near the Myra Falls mine. The mines are located in a stratigraphic sequence of volcanic rocks over 6km long and 450m thick.	Long-hole drilling underground at Myra Falls.
The ore milling section in the Myra Falls concentrator. Mined ore is hauled to an underground crusher and then hoisted to the surface.

NovaGold Rock Creek Project,
NovaGold's Rock Creek project is set to produce an estimated 100,000oz of gold per year.	Rock Creek has been designed as a 7,000t/day conventional open-pit year-round operation.	Using inexpensive gravity methods, combined with flotation and cyanidation, overall gold recovery at Rock Creek is anticipated at 88%.
Detailed design and engineering for the mill facility has been carried out by Samuel Engineering Inc, of the US.

Peñasquito Polymetallic Mine, Zacatecas
The Goldcorp mine at Peñasquito will produce gold, silver, lead and zinc.	RoM sulphide ore will be processed through a conventional crushing, milling and flotation facility at the Peñasquito mine.

Pinto Valley

Raglan Nickel Copper Mine, Quebec
Raglan is located in the far north of Quebec, in an area accessible only by air, or by ship during the ice-free season.	Raglan’s mining crews operate on a fly-in/fly-out basis, with high-quality camp accommodation provided for those currently on duty.	Very harsh natural conditions make mining at Raglan a challenge.
Drilling in one of the early open-pits.	Drilling underground, where brine is used instead of fresh water for flushing the drill holes.	The Raglan concentrator flowsheet.
Raglan’s concentrates are shipped to Falconbridge’s Sudbury smelter, using ice-breaking vessels that have lengthened the annual shipping ‘window’ considerably.

Red Dog
Red Dog occupies a very small ‘environmental footprint’ in the Alaskan wilderness. Red Dog’s capacity has recently been uprated from treating 2.5Mt/y of run-of-mine ore to 3.2Mt/y.	Construction of the new concentrate storage buildings at Red Dog’s port.	Red Dog mill flowsheet.
Cross-section through the Aqqaluk and Paalaaq deposits, where exploration is continuing to increase Red Dog’s reserves.	Cross-section showing the location of the present pit.	The zinc flotation circuit at the Red Dog mill.
Loading concentrates during the brief shipping season.

Rocanville Potash Mine,
The Rocanville mine is one of six operated by PCS in southern Saskatchewan, Canada.	Rocanville’s headframe, processing building and potash storage are all constructed for protection against the Canadian prairie winter.	Production at Rocanville comes from the mine’s fleet of Marietta four- and two-rotor miners, developed specially for high productivity in potash.
Each miner rotor cuts a circular profile, giving a three-pass cut to produce a final room width of 20m.	The potash recovery building is equipped with electrostatic dust precipitators, designed to minimize dust emissions to the environment.

Ruby Hill
Ruby Hill open-pit gold mine.	Loader depositing ore into haul truck (Caterpillar 777D).	Ore being stockpiled from the secondary crusher (low-grade ore).
The ball mill inside the process plant.	View of the agglomerator (lower left) looking out to the heap-leach pad.	View of the top of the heap-leach pad (hose is for delivering cyanide solution onto the ore).
The process plant.

Snap Lake Mine
The diamonds extracted in the process plant are sent to De Beers' valuation facility in Yellowknife.	The process plant was commissioned during August 2007 and diamonds were recovered in the same month.	Construction of the Snap Lake project commenced in 2005 with an investment of $975m.

Star Diamond Project
Kimberlite core sample.	Star Kimberlite is among the largest diamond bearing kimberlites worldwide.

Stillwater / East Boulder
Location of the Stillwater and East Boulder projects.	The Stillwater mine lies in the Stillwater Valley.	Handheld drilling is still a vital part of Stillwater’s production system.
Loading out broken ore using an LHD.	One of two tunnel-boring machines being used to mine access drives.	Underground development is already under way at East Boulder.
Molten matte containing palladium and platinum is emptied from the furnaces.

SUFCO
SUFCO is located in central Utah and is served by truck haul routes to its rail loadouts.	The terrain around the mine site is very rugged, presenting space problems for the surface infrastructure and variable rock stress conditions underground.	The Joy 7LS-3 shearer underground, capable of producing over 4.5Mt/y of coal on its own.
The surface facilities at SUFCO, where the mine loadout can handle two 38t-capacity trucks per minute.	The rail loadout, where Union Pacific trains are loaded for the journey to Los Angeles.

Syncrude
The Mildred Lake facility. The yellow structures in front of the tailings pond are sulphur stockpiles; the extraction plant is just to the right of this photograph and most of the mine lies to the left.	P&H electric cable shovel loads a CAT 797 haul truck.	Wood bison – over 300 live in habitats developed by Syncrude in partnership with the Fort McKay First Nation. The company plans to leave regenerated lands once mining ends.
The oil sand feed to the cyclofeeder (North mine).	Inside a flotation cell at the Aurora extraction facility.	The hydrotransport pipeline leads to the primary separation vessel (Aurora).
Komatsu Heavy Hauler (North mine).	The Syncrude plant site.	Aerial view of Fort McMurray, showing the Grant MacEwan bridge over the Athabasca River.

Twentymile
Twentymile is located in northern Colorado, 30km from Steamboat Springs and 180km north west of Denver.	Twentymile’s coal stockpiles dominate the mine site, the area behind the current mine having been worked previously by a strip mine and then restored to productive ranch land.	Installing rock bolts and protective steel mesh in a gateroad development heading.
Coal being discharged from one of the electric-powered shuttle cars used in gateroad development.	The Long-Airdox Electra 3000 shearer, which can cut a 900 mm-thick slice of coal at speeds of over 40 m/minute along the longwall face.	The rail loadout at Twentymile; 95% of the coal produced is sold as mined, with only crushing and screening to size.
Twentymile is serviced by the Union Pacific Railroad, which runs two or three 10,000t-capacity unit trains per day from the mine.

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