Groundwater protection

Osisko Metals' Pine Point project is located on the south shore of Great Slave Lake in Canada's Northwest Territories, between Hay River to the west and Fort Resolution to the east. The Pine Point project has strong potential for mineral resource expansion. Hydro-Ressources was mandated to estimate the flows entering the 53 future mines during the preliminary economic study. Several field tests have been carried out by HRI technical staff since 2020, and to this day we are still working in concert with Osisko. Hydro-Ressources has completed its largest digital simulation project to date with this project.

The Cumberland zinc mine is part of a mining complex (Nyrstar Tennessee Mines) belonging to the Nyrstar company. It is a room and pillar type underground mine with a depth of about 500m. The deposit is located in paleo-karst, in a surrounding rock composed of limestone.

Located 350 km northeast of Chibougamau, the Renard diamond mine, Stornoway's flagship project, is the only diamond mine in Quebec. Following some incongruities of the piezometric measurements compared to the models developed at the level of operational dewatering, Hydro-Ressources proposes a series of tracing tests in profile in the surface holes as well as underground pumping tests in order to better define the site fault network. Understanding underground flows is essential for the design and planning of operational dewatering.

Goldcorp recently started operating the Éléonore mine, located in the James Bay region. It is an underground mine which will have a depth of around 1,400m. Currently, the exploration well has been completed to a depth of 690m and the production well and ramp are under construction (at approximately 900m). Goldcorp is also in the process of analyzing the recovery of the surface pillar via an open pit mining.

Los Gatos is an open pit underground mine located in the state of Chihuahua in Mexico. In 2018, despite the presence of 12 surface capture wells, mining operations encountered high water flows underground. In addition, this water of more than 60 degrees celcius made the challenge even more difficult. Thanks to profile tracing tests, it was possible to isolate a permeable fault and to build 2 underground capture wells with greater flow rates than all the other wells combined.

Excellon Resources is a Canadian company that operates a silver mine in the Durango region of Mexico. The company is currently mining at a depth of around 140m and the groundwater level is around 130m deep. In the sectors located under the roof of the aquifer, water infiltration is major and the pumping rate at the beginning of 2016 is 17,000 usgpm. A dewatering project is underway and the objective is to increase the pumping rate to 28,000usgpm. To carry out this project, a sequence of underground wells are under construction. The Technosub company installs the pumps in the mine.