TOURS SCRAPPED: Kalgoorlie-Boulder tourists unable to venture into Super Pit due to mine’s ‘growth journey’

Visitors to Kalgoorlie-Boulder will no longer have the chance to venture into Australia’s biggest open-pit gold mine as a “significant growth journey” forces Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines to hit the pause button on bus tours. KCGM owner Northern Star Resources has cancelled all tours of the Super Pit on the south-eastern fringe of Kalgoorlie-Boulder, with no time line in place for when they might be up-and-running again. A Northern Star Resources spokesperson told the Kalgoorlie Miner the tours were cut along with all non-essential access to the mine. “KCGM has embarked on a significant growth journey at our gold mining operations, involving both the Super Pit and Mt Charlotte mining areas and the Fimiston processing plant, to ensure we can continue to safely produce gold and employ our local workforce for decades to come,” the spokesperson said. “As a result of the growth work under way, we have had to close the internal Super Pit lookout and curtail non-essential access to other areas across KCGM that used to be part of the popular public tours operated by Goldrush Tours.” While there is no clear time when tours will be back, the spokesperson said alternative routes were being looked at so tours could resume “as soon as practicable”. In the meantime, the public Super Pit Lookout remained open to all “to provide a great insight into the scale of the KCGM operations”. Its opening hours are 7am to 7pm daily. Goldrush Tours declined to comment on the situation. Northern Star is in the early stages of a $1.5 billion expansion of the Fimiston mill, aiming to have it churning out 27 million tonnes per annum by 2029, more than double the present output of 13Mtpa. When the project is finished, the company wants KCGM to be producing 900,000 ounces a year, which would put it among the five most-productive operations in the world. KCGM comprises the Fimiston open pit, Fimiston and Mt Charlotte underground mines, and Mt Percy project. When launching the expansion project in June last year, Northern Star managing director and chief executive Stuart Tonkin said: “What it does do is just gives absolute certainty around the permanency of Northern Star there, of the asset that is the pillar of Kalgoorlie, which is the Super Pit, and the future of it being an underground (operation) just gives everyone confidence to invest in the city, keep residential outlooks, whether it is businesses, homes, (they) can make decisions over (a) multi-decade outlook, which just underpins all of the future regional economic growth (in the Goldfields).” Another aspect of the company’s expansion is the Fimiston South project, currently under review by the Environmental Protection Authority. Northern Star is proposing to include a cutback to the Super Pit — known as the Ivanhoe cutback, which will be in the south-west corner adjacent to the South Boulder industrial area. The plan will also expand the Fimiston IIE tailings storage facility to include a third cell, add a new Fimiston III tailings storage facility, extend the waste rock dump and add supporting infrastructure. It is also seeking to relocate some supporting infrastructure including the environmental noise bund, roads, pipelines and transmission lines The proposed changes will expand the mine development envelope by 1881ha.