WHITEHALL — The Golden Sunlight mine near Whitehall, which stopped mining for gold in 2019, could be getting new life.
Governor Greg Gianforte took a tour of the facility on Friday to learn about a new project that could extend operations there another 10 years.
The governor learned for officials from Barrack how the plant will reprocess old mine waste tailings to extract extra gold and sulfur, put into a concentrate and trucked to a plant in Nevada. The buried tailings will be taken from this field, processed in the plant and the benign tailings will be dumped in the open pit on the mine yard.
“This is a great project because we're cleaning up a tailing that has some materials in it that could potentially contaminate the environment, and in the process of cleaning it up, we're going to refill the pit and Barrack can do that profitably while creating jobs right here in Whitehall. It's a win for everyone,” said Giantforte.
The Department of Environmental Quality is in the process of review the plans for an environmental impact study before the permit can be approved. The study could be ready by September.
