‘We’re aware of it, we’re on it,’ Ekati says of benzene issue

An Ekati diamond mine executive has outlined the steps being taken to protect workers over a benzene concern at the site – and addressed some of the mine’s recent statements.

Benzene is an organic compound found naturally and also produced in some industrial processes. Long-term exposure is linked with cancer, particularly leukaemia.

The NWT mine’s process plant – where ore is crushed to find diamonds – was evacuated last weekend over elevated benzene levels and workers were told for a time to wear respirators. Levels have since fluctuated.

Earlier this week, Cabin Radio reported some workers’ fear that the issue had not been adequately communicated to them. They worried for their health, particularly given benzene’s effects are not necessarily apparent for some time.

In an extensive interview on Thursday, Ekati owner Burgundy’s vice-president of operations, Jeff Reinson, said the company had “been proactively taking measures to be protective of our people.”

Reinson said the company had set up monitors to track benzene levels, was improving ventilation in the process plant and was prioritizing the health of its staff.

“If we see anything that’s going to be not protective of our people’s health, we’ll stop doing it until we can find a way to make sure we can do it safely,” he told Cabin Radio.

Reinson said benzene had become an issue while workers drilled at Ekati’s Sable pit in August. Work there had been temporarily stopped as a result.

Now, ore from Sable is entering the process plant and benzene is again a problem, but Reinson said that doesn’t mean it will continue to be a concern through the remaining months of mining at Sable.

“I think we’re just mining through a zone that’s got a particularly high degree of organic matter in it,” he said. (Reinson also said last weekend’s process plant evacuation was unnecessary and characterized it as an “unfortunate” overreaction.)

‘The mine plan can’t support that’

More broadly, Reinson defended Burgundy’s recent letter to NWT Premier RJ Simpson that called for more government assistance for diamond mines while prices are low.

In that letter, Burgundy said Ekati’s financial viability was being eroded. The company said the GNWT had to do more and some regulatory requirements needed to be eased or else it might go “elsewhere.” Simpson’s office has said he is reviewing the letter’s contents.

Burgundy is understood to have thought the letter would be private, not realizing it would end up on a regulatory public registry. (On Thursday evening, Cabin Radio could no longer find the letter on that registry.) The publication of Burgundy’s plea for assistance came within a day of a separate Burgundy press release that stated Ekati “continues to outperform expectations.”

Asked if both versions of Ekati’s status could be true at once, Reinson said Ekati had a bright future but only if the regulatory burden is lessened.

“We’re not looking to shortcut any environmental management control, we’re not looking for an exception to do things that aren’t protective of the environment,” he said, “but we recognize that with all of those individual projects, it’s a challenge to get through the permitting process. There are such extended, prolonged periods of time.

“You start mapping those things out and all of a sudden, the future of Ekati becomes stretched out over 10 years to get permitting done for these developments. Quite frankly, the mine plan just can’t support that timeframe.”

Below, read a transcript of Cabin Radio’s interview with Reinson.

This interview was recorded on October 3, 2024. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Ollie Williams: What’s been happening at the process plant?

Jeff Reinson: Burgundy Diamonds and myself personally are committed to operating transparently and keeping safety as a primary value for us in everything that we do. We always want to do our work in a manner that’s protective of human health and the environment – that’s just fundamental to what we aspire to be as leaders and as a business.

What we’re dealing with here is a little bit broader than benzene. Kimberlite is not just purely rock from kilometres within the Earth. It’s often redeposited after eruptions and that often includes organic masses that are almost analogous to an old compost. You get these pockets of compost within the kimberlite.

As we mine it, the pockets of this organic matter become exposed to the air and they can be noticeably stinky, because they contain compounds such as benzene and other volatile organic compounds.

We recognize it can affect human life and human health. We’ve been monitoring this. The first time was in the Sable open pit back in the summertime, August timeframe. We had some exploration drilling going on from the bottom of the Sable pit into the kimberlite and we started getting some stinky stuff coming up. We recognized, “OK, we’d better monitor this and make sure we understand what’s coming out.”

Because you’re outside and it’s ventilating, it really was not a massive concern for us at that point. We had to make sure we were understanding what the exposures to the workers were at that point in time.

We’re now down mining closer to that horizon in which we found it in the drill core back in August. Sure enough, we’re getting the stinky off-gassing coming up. As we move that ore from the open pit to the process plant and start crushing down the kimberlite into smaller rock mass, we’re getting more and more off-gassing.

We’ve been monitoring this closely within the plant for the last week and a half to two weeks, and making sure we’re not putting our people at risk and exceeding any of our occupational exposure limits.

I understand there was an evacuation at the plant last weekend because of high levels of benzene.

That was a bit of an unfortunate circumstance. Our supervisors in the maintenance team misunderstood what was the circumstance and decided out of a cautionary approach to take everybody out of the plant, and we went back to work shortly thereafter, after more description of what was happening and what the circumstance was.

So that was an evacuation that essentially didn’t need to take place, but did?

Correct.

I’ve seen internal documentation at Burgundy that does suggest there is some concern around benzene levels, particularly in a confined environment. How have you been communicating the risk to the workers themselves, and how long have you known there might be a risk like this in the process plant?

It’s in that eight to nine days range. This stuff’s pretty smelly, right? We’ve been getting our air monitoring out and monitoring those zones within the process plant.

A diamond processing plant is quite vertical. At the top is where the coarse ore feed comes in, and then it works its way down the process plant. At the top end is where the primary crushing comes in, and that’s where we’ve seen some of our measurements are showing higher levels of gas, levels of ppm. We haven’t put any of our people in the position of exceedances on the occupational exposure limits, but we do want to make sure that we’re continuing monitoring.

We want to make sure we’re improving our ventilation so we can get rid of any of the exposure altogether. We’ve got the doors open and the windows open, and that’s been quite effective. On days where we have all of the doors fully open, we typically see zeros [in terms of benzene detected] across the board. We’re installing some ventilation plants.

The other big action that’s quite effective is [related to] the ore that comes out of the Sable pit. We’ve initiated having an excavator turn the ore pile a little bit more, like a compost pile, so [the gas] volatilizes [or disperses] more fully before we even haul the ore over to the plant. Early indications are we’re finding that to be quite effective in eliminating the hazard altogether.

A lot of our focus has been on just eliminating the hazard so it’s not even introduced into the process plant. But given that it’s already been there, we need to make sure we’re not exposing our people to health risks in the short or the long term.

This was initially identified in the ore at the Sable pit. Given that the ore would have to make its way over to the process plant, presumably it was a foreseeable consequence that benzene would be an issue in the plant as well?

I’m not sure I would phrase it that way. This isn’t the first kimberlite in the world that’s got organics locked up in it and releasing VOCs [volatile organic compounds]. When you’re mining the ore, the VOCs tend to come out really quite rapidly and readily, so it just doesn’t ever become much of an issue in the process plant.

By the time it gets to the process plant, it’s largely volatilized or off-gassed, if you want to use that term. It’s not quite as straight a line as saying, “Well, we saw it then. We must expect it to happen in the process plant.” It’s pockets. It’s not something one would expect you’re going to be dealing with until the end of mining Sable.

The end of mining Sable isn’t that far away, as I understand it – February 2025. Are you expecting it to be a possible issue until then?

I couldn’t say, Ollie. I wouldn’t expect it to be. Thus far, it’s been quite pockety. As we’re moving the ore to surface, we haven’t seen it always present. Will that change going forward? I wouldn’t expect it to. I think we’re just mining through a zone that’s got a particularly high degree of organic matter in it.

Some staff say they weren’t really told exactly what benzene was or the risk it posed. They have worries about their exposure to this. What reassurances are you providing to workers that their health was not jeopardized by this and is not going to be?

We try really hard to communicate openly and transparently with our workforce on all matters.

Every two weeks we have rotations come in and off the site. As part of that, we have welcome-back messaging. People come in and stand in the gymnasium and I’ll let them know what’s gone on in the last two weeks, if they haven’t been here – if we’ve had any safety incidents or near misses, describe what’s happened and what lessons we’ve learned.

As part of the welcome-back today, there was a message around what benzene is and what’s happening and what we’re doing to manage it, and what immediate actions we’ve taken. You know, give some reassurance to the workforce that we’re not putting your health at risk. And if you’ve got additional concerns you can ask your supervisor. We can work through any more detailed understanding.

In addition to that, we do daily safe shift meetings. That’s where our supervisors and superintendents sit with the crews before every shift and talk about emerging issues, and safety incidents that have taken place in other parts of the property. We’ve been talking about the benzene: what benzene is, where it comes from, why it’s part of this, trying to provide a reassurance to the workforce that we’re aware of it, we’re on it, we’re not ignoring this situation. We’re making sure we’re taking appropriate action to deal with it.

We’ve made half-mask respirators optional for people. If they feel more comfortable to have a respirator on, they’re available for people. We’re just fresh out of a Covid world where there’s some pretty ranging views about putting masks on people and protecting people, and I suspect that’s part of the anxiety that the workforce is feeling at the moment. We’re just fresh out of the Covid perspective and now there’s this other potential hazard. We’re trying really hard to communicate that to the workforce very broadly, through different means,

Were there any periods over the last few months where work at the Sable pit was stopped because of high levels of benzene?

We were doing some exploration drilling there. That’s really where we started to understand, “Oh, wow. We want to look at this.” We put that work on hold until we better understood. And again, the ventilation was the key. We wanted to make sure we got good ventilation in the core shack so we were not putting the core loggers and the drilling crews with any unnecessary exposure there. That was back in the August period.

Burgundy has just withdrawn its application to regulators for permission to turn the Sable open pit into an underground operation. How much of a factor is the concern about benzene, which presumably could be a big issue underground at Sable?

That’s a good question. The answer is, like, zero.

I’ve spent a lot of time in my early life in northern Saskatchewan in the uranium mines, dealing with off-gassing. Radon gas is the big concern in the uranium mines. Developing an underground mine with proper and good ventilation is fundamental to what we have to do, regardless of what kind of gases come with the underground mining.

So yeah, no, not an impact at all as to why we decided to pull the application there at Sable.

Why did you pull the application?

That’s a more complicated question.

Really, we’re looking at reprioritizing what we’re doing with the mining. When Burgundy took over the asset in July 2023, it had a vision of what the future life-of-mine plan would be. We’ve done a lot of work in the last 12 months, and that work has been focused on Misery [another pit] underground as well as Sable underground. And what we’ve discovered is we think we’re wise to reprioritize more development at Misery underground, because we’ve got a bigger ore body.

We’re quite excited about the future of Misery underground, compared to where we were 12 months ago. So we’re really just reprioritizing the mining sequence.

In addition to that, Misery sits out by the Point Lake open pit, and we’re transitioning from the Sable open pit to the Point Lake open pit. Having all of our workforce and mining operations taking place in a relatively same region, there’s a lot of opportunity there for us on efficiencies – and obviously we’re challenged, from a business perspective, to create as much efficiency as we can to weather the storm of diamond prices that we’re dealing with at the moment.

I saw the letter last week to the premier about that issue. In the same week, Burgundy put out a press release saying Ekati was performing above expectations. Are both of those things true?

I would say, you know, yes. It seems like they’re maybe not true but we’re challenged from the regulatory environment for different reasons.

If you look at the future of Ekati, we have future development that we’re very excited about – including extensions to the Misery underground, extensions to the Sable underground, extensions to the Fox underground, potential expansions of the Point Lake open pit – we’re very excited about all that future.

But from a process perspective and permitting perspective… we’re not looking to shortcut any environmental management control, we’re not looking for an exception to do things that aren’t protective of the environment, but we recognize that with all of those individual projects, it’s a challenge to get through the permitting process. There are such extended, prolonged periods of time.

You start mapping those things out and all of a sudden, the future of Ekati becomes stretched out over 10 years to get permitting done for these developments. Quite frankly, the mine plan just can’t support that timeframe.