New Gold's Blackwater Project, southwest of Prince George, is temporarily pausing its environmental assessment as groups comb through a new proposal.
It shouldn't affect the overall timeline, said project manager Tim Bekhuys, adding the changes were submitted about three weeks ago when the company also requested a pause in the process.
One of the chief changes to the propsed $1.8-billion gold mine was creating a water treatment plant within the mine - not part of its 2013 feasibility study.
"That allows us really to recycle the water and give us greater control of the water, which is right out of the recommendations of the Mount Polley panel," said Bekhuys.
After the tailings pond breach at the Likely mine, an independent panel made seven recommendations prevent the failure from happening again.
"The second big change that we've just made - in last few months - was we eliminated a waste rock dump," said Bekhuys, from two to one dump.
"Essentially what we're doing is making one of the piles larger - higher - as as opposed to spreading it out wider across the landscape," he said. "By doing so it decreases the overall footprint of the mine so that it's not as large an impact on the landscape."
That won't affect the amount of gold and ore mined - which could mean processing about 60,000 tonnes of material per day.
Early feedback also suggested that the Blackwater River was a sensitive area.
"So we moved all the mine components out of that drainage," he said.
"One of the other things we realized is that we're fairly close to Tweedsmuir and Entiako caribou herd and that there is winter range in the area, so we've also moved all of our facilities away from sensitive areas as well."
It's too early to confirm a construction start date, as that depends on the company finishing construction on its fifth mine - Rainy River - in Ontario, which Bekhuys said should happen by second quarter next year. It'll also depend on the future price of gold and availability of materials.
It's the second time Blackwater has paused the environmental assessment, not surprising given the volume of paperwork Bekhuys said. Earlier this year, Blackwater submitted its environmental impact assessment, close to 23,000 pages.
"We heard back from a lot of the indigenous communities and others that this is a lot of paper to look at, so we requested a suspension of about 40 days or so," he said of the first break, adding neither should affect the overall development schedule and instead shows the process works.
"The idea at the end of the day is to get a better project, to get feedback from everybody, to listen and act on those comments."
