NWP Crown Mountain Project Updates

NWP Coal Canada Ltd is a Canadian resource development company working on the Crown Mountain Hard Coking Coal Project.

Following is their most recent news release:

NWP has improved the Crown Mountain Coking Coal Project (the Project) since publishing our Initial Project Description in 2014.
The most noticeable changes include:

MINE PIT SEQUENCE
• The 2014 plan to have all the pits open over a long period of time was revamped to compress the schedule for each pit and only open a new pit when absolutely necessary.
• The changes lead to a smaller initial footprint, a much earlier start to reclamation, and a focus on progressive reclamation.

MINE ROCK MANAGEMENT
• The 2014 plan was adjusted to align with the new mining sequence and to build a pilot mine rock storage facility even before mining begins. The mine rock storage was changed to be a hill in the center of the valley
• The pilot will allow for early understanding of the layer-cake mine rock storage approach and its effectiveness for selenium sequestration.
• The hill layout will improve water management by shedding water off the facility, reduce its overall disturbance footprint, and reduce direct impacts to grizzly bear habitat on adjacent avalanche chutes.

SITE ACCESS
• The 2014 plan to build a new haul road to the Project area wide enough for mine trucks was abandoned in favor of utilizing the existing access roads and off-highway b-train style trucks.
• This plan no longer develops a new linear disturbance in a region already under pressure due to the quantity of linear disturbances.
• By changing truck types, the road will no longer need to be a 22m wide running surface – it will now be 7m wide in narrow spots with a target width of 12m.

COAL DRYING
• Preparing coal for market involves processing with water, flotation and other separation techniques to remove ash and non-coal material. The coal needs to be dried to remove excess moisture before it can be railed and shipped to customer.
• The 2014 plan used thermal drying, where heat from natural gas burners raises the coal temperature above the water’s boiling point to dry the coal. That plan was replaced by hyperbaric drying, formally known as hyperbaric disc filtration (HDF), where steam is used to push water out of the coal across a filter.
• HDF uses far less natural gas than thermal drying with related reductions in air emissions (particulates, NOx, etc) and green house gases (GHGs).

RAIL LOAD OUT
• The 2014 rail loadout layout was adjusted many times as new archeological information became available. NWP’s archeology program found numerous archeological features including suspected ancestral burial sites.
• The current layout avoids direct impacts to archeological features; however, NWP acknowledges that the location of the loadout is not acceptable to many Indigenous groups and is currently investigating an alternative locations.

NWP CLOSING STATEMENT
Since 2014, NWP has made many more improvements to the Project than those discussed above. All the changes are incorporated into our combined Environmental Assessment Application (for the BC Environmental Assessment Office) / Environmental Impact Statement (for the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada).

NWP anticipates the combined submission will enter the Technical Review phase of the assessment very soon. That will include a public comment period and open houses where people can learn more about the Project.