B.C. collaboration produces digital compilation of mine tailings and waste rock with eye on critical minerals

Geoscience B.C. – a not-for-profit society managing independent geoscience research – has now produced a digital compilation of mine tailings and waste rock for British Columbia with an eye towards critical mineral development. The project was the result of a collaboration between Geoscience B.C. and other organizations.

The proposed Critical Minerals and Metals in BC Mine Tailings and Waste Rock research project gathered existing publicly available data to produce a searchable digital product that uses Canada’s critical minerals list as a guide to inventory legacy and current mineral deposits and their respective mine tailings and waste rock sites across the province.  Foresight Canada, Arca, and New Gold all provided financial support for the project. The Mining Association of British Columbia and the Association for Mineral Exploration British Columbia have also voiced support for the initiative.

The digital compilation includes mineral occurrences, geographic, environmental and infrastructure data within a geospatial project containing the location and known characteristics of more than 1,000 tailings and waste rock sites from more than 500 current and legacy mining sites with critical minerals. The geospatial dataset also includes information relating to an additional 2,000 occurrences that may have tailings and waste rock material of interest for critical minerals and metals extraction. The compilers also informally ranked the sites based on their critical mineral development potential.

Purple Rock completed the project with additional support from Foresight Canada. Foresight contributed data related to transportation routes, power infrastructure, labour pools and cleantech innovators. In addition, the abandoned mines branch of the B.C. Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals contributed data to the project.

Geoscience BC’s vice president of Minerals Christa Pellett commented. “The results of this project provide a key starting tool for industry, government, communities and indigenous groups to understand BC’s potential for remining or extracting minerals or materials from closed mines or the unprocessed rock left behind from mining.”

Foresight Canada – one of the partners – believes the project’s database will be “transformative” in positioning British Columbia to provide critical minerals to global supply chains.
More information about the project is posted on www.GeoScienceBc.com/projects/2022-005.