Water Management

Managing Today's Excess Water to Ensure Future Availability

The Resolution Copper Project is located near Superior, Arizona. The large world-class copper resource lies more than 1.5 kilometres below the surface, adjacent to but deeper than an old mine that was closed in the mid-90s. To undertake further exploration and begin development of the mining site, almost seven billion litres of water that have naturally accumulated in the old mine need to be removed. (When water inflowing to the site is taken into consideration, the total amount of water that must be removed over the course of the dewatering process will be closer to nine billion litres.)

A water treatment facility has been constructed to prepare the water for discharge once it is pumped to the surface. Draining the old mine could take from two to three years, but the bigger challenge has been determining where the removed water should go once treated. Because this resource is so valuable to the arid Arizona landscape, we want to ensure that it's fully utilized and that the environment is not negatively impacted.

Resolution Copper is working with the New Magma Irrigation and Drainage District (NMIDD) to supply the extracted water for agricultural use in Arizona. A February 2009 article by William D. Baker, president and attorney, Ellis & Baker, P.C., which appeared in the Arizona Journal of Real Estate and Business, examines the merits of this unique approach. A second article in Southwest Hydrology by Jeffrey C. Silvertooth and Janick F. Artiola of the University of Arizona, and Joel E. Kimmelshue of NewFields Agricultural & Environmental Resources LLC, speaks further on the use of the treated water for beneficial agricultural use. The project involved constructing a 27-mile pipeline to transport the water from Resolution Copper's treatment facility in Superior to Magma Junction. Construction took 15 months and was completed at the end of January 2009 with no safety or environmental incidents. By year’s end, we had treated and supplied 552.6 million gallons of water to the NMIDD.

NMIDD combines this water with Central Arizona Project (CAP) water for use by farmers in irrigating their crops. CAP delivers renewable water from the Colorado River by canal to central and southern Arizona so that surface water can be used instead of depleting groundwater for agricultural, municipal and industrial uses.

Our company is also working with the NMIDD and the Hohokam Irrigation and Drainage District to store water for processing the ore and cooling the mine in the future. In 2006, Resolution Copper began purchasing and banking excess CAP water with the irrigation districts. We plan to continue this process as long as CAP has excess water available and we are currently purchasing excess water at nearly three full years of production per annum. To date, we have banked approximately 200,000 acre-feet. Because excess CAP water will not always be available for purchase, we are also exploring additional long-term sources of sustainable water to meet our future operational needs.