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Manh Choh’s First Year: 8 Million Miles of Gold

by | Dec 18, 2024 | Featured, Mining, News

A Black Gold Transport truck pauses on the Manh Choh access road outside of Tok. Drivers logged about 8 million miles between Manh Choh and Fort Knox in 2024.

Photo Credit: Kinross Alaska

Manh Choh must wait its turn. The junior member of Alaska’s producing mines club relies on processing facilities at its big brother, Fort Knox Mine north of Fairbanks. Ore from Manh Choh near the Native Village of Tetlin piles up at the state’s largest gold mine until the processing mill switches from one source to another. The precious metals are kept separate even though both mines share an owner, Kinross Alaska.

The Manh Choh lease is held by Peak Gold JV, a joint venture between Kinross (70 percent owner) and Contango ORE (30 percent owner). Mining began August 29, 2023, but not until July 2024 did the Fort Knox mill pour the first bar of Manh Choh gold.

Marking a year of operations, Kinross Alaska’s External Affairs Manager Meadow Riedel delivered a recap for the Alaska Miners Association (AMA) on December 13.

Power Play

Kinross is a powerful player in the Interior, literally and figuratively. Fort Knox is the Fairbanks North Star Borough’s single largest property tax payer, paying about $13.7 million in property taxes each year. It’s also the largest customer of Golden Valley Electric Association. The amount of electricity consumed at Fort Knox for milling gold has held rates lower for the utility’s other customers.

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“It’s hard to quantify how much, but the drop from [rates in] 1996 was a very noticeable amount. If we went away, everyone’s electrical costs would increase in the Interior,” Riedel says.

Riedel knows a bit about electrical matters in the Interior; she is the former director of external affairs and public relations for Golden Valley. Prior to that, she was the media contact for the Alaska Department of Transportation & Public Facilities’ Northern Region.

Manh Choh has quickly become one of the Interior’s largest private employers, with an average of about 500 people a year splitting an annual payroll of about $75 million. Another 450 indirect and induced jobs, or jobs created because the mine exists, account for an additional $45 million in annual wages paid in the area. Riedel says the median wage at Manh Choh is about $130,000, not including benefits.

Kinross has held several community meetings and events, such as this summer barbecue in Tok.

Photo Credit: Kinross Alaska

More Eyes on the Roads

Sharing a mill with Fort Knox kept development costs lower at Manh Choh, but it requires a 240-mile pipeline of trucks hauling ore. And the ore doesn’t go into a common stockpile.

Kinross staff at the AMA presentation said there were three processing periods in 2024. During each processing period, Fort Knox suspends normal operations for about twelve hours while and the mill is reconfigured to process the Manh Choh ore, a process that takes about twelve hours. The first processing period took thirty days, the second twenty-eight days, and the final round of processing in 2024 took twenty-three days.

While the processing happensis quarterly, the flow of ore is constant. Black Gold Transport, a division of trucking company Black Gold Express, averaged sixty loads per day, around the clock. A truck pulls out of Manh Choh about every twenty minutes. Drivers logged a little more than 8 million miles in the last year, Riedel says, completing the four-hour one-way haul mostly without incident.

One unexpected benefit of the busier road, Riedel says, is that Black Gold drivers are often first on the scene of accidents, calling in crashes or vehicles in distress as they see them, and often waiting with people while emergency responders make their way to the scene. Drivers have responded to house fires or provided video recordings to Alaska State Troopers investigating accidents.

“These are things we did not anticipate when putting together this plan,” Riedel says. “This is a big role we’ve started to see the drivers play. The drivers are conscientious; they come at this from a safety perspective.”

Weighty Weather

Drivers are also quick to report road conditions on the Alaska, Richardson, and Steese Highways.

“It’s proving to be very beneficial to have folks out there,” says Manh Choh Ore Transport Superintendent Derek Lakey. “We are the first ones out there. We are giving DOT and 511 [the state’s road information hotline] tons of road information; we work closely with them.”

Originally, each truck was expected to carry about 50 tons. Lakey says the average is closer to 42 tons. Riedel says weather plays a role in that weight.

“It varies drastically, sometimes depending on the weather,” adds Manh Choh Mine Manager Patrick Filbin. “We see a lot of ice and snow. On days where we get warmer weather like this, drivers are having to stop and scrape the trucks.”

Filbin notes that Kinross is exploring solutions that could be sprayed on truck frames to keep ice down, which would help trucks stay within weight limits without having to stop and scrape. Each truck leaving Manh Choh passes over an onsite scale, he notes.

Gearing Up for Closure

Chief Michael Sam of the Native Village of Tetlin and General Manager Terence Watungwa, vice president of Kinross Alaska, hold the first gold bar poured from Manh Choh ore.

Photo Credit: Kinross Alaska

While still a baby among Alaska’s mines, Manh Choh has already begun reclamation. Riedel says mined areas have been planted over, and the operators are anticipating final closure soon. Manh Choh was planned with a limited lifespan: mining is expected to conclude in 2027, and processing at Fort Knox could end in 2028.

At that point, reclamation of the roughly 675,000-acre lease will be the primary task. Reclamation is estimated to cost between $40 million and $60 million, so the operators have posted a $63.5 million reclamation assurance bond with the state.

One AMA member at the December 13 meeting asked about the potential for expanding the ore body and keeping the mine open longer.

Filbin answered, “We are continuing to explore the lease package, but we don’t have anything that would extend that [timeframe] at this point.”

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