Jim Currie is co-winner of the E. A. Scholz Award

Jim Currie. — photo courtesy of Pretium Resources Inc.

Jim Currie and Bob Gallagher are receiving the The Association for Mineral Exploration British Columbia (AME BC) 2014 E. A. Scholz Award for excellence in mine development. They will receive their awards at the AME BC Awards Gala on January 27, 2015 during Mineral Exploration Roundup at the Vancouver Convention Centre West.

“Successful development of a mine is extremely challenging and requires contributions from many dedicated people,” said Adam Simmons, chairman of the AME BC awards committee. “With the leadership that Jim and Bob supplied, they were able to successfully and economically develop one of Canada's largest underground block caving operations, a truly remarkable feat.

“Together they were successful in arranging financing for the project, from early exploration through to mine development. Of particular importance was the early decision to use the block caving underground mining method to support economic extraction of the copper- and gold-bearing ore. Additionally, their support of the programs run by the BC Aboriginal Mine Training Association led to the successful employment of many local community members.”

Currie, who is now VP and chief operating officer of Pretium Resources Inc., said he was surprised when AME BC president and CEO Gavin Dirom phoned to tell him he had won the award.

“I was flattered but also humbled,” Currie said. “I'm a team guy. Any success I've had has been due to the good teams I've been part of.”

Currie has over 34 years of experience in senior management, engineering and operations in the mining industry. He says his mining career was the result of “a total fluke.”

“I attended Queen’s University, initially in geology,” Currie said. “In my second year, I woke up one morning in my crystallography class—where I always fell asleep because it was so boring—and decided I needed a change.”

He looked at the engineering course calendar and decided that mining engineering was the easiest. In addition, he could get the most credits for the courses he had already taken.

“To that point, I had never been within 20 miles of a mine in my life,” Currie said.

After graduation, Currie worked as mine engineer at the Endako Mine in Fraser Lake, then for the consulting company Golder Associates in Vancouver for four years. After that Currie was mine engineer for Fording Coal and chief mine engineer for Brenda Mines.

“In more recent years, I did a lot of work overseas in Burma, Bolivia and Mauritania before working back in Canada with New Gold and other companies,” he said.

Currie led the team at Behre Dolbear Consultants that did the original scoping study on New Afton for DRC Resource Corp—which later became New Gold Inc.—in 2001.

“I joined New Gold, which was the surviving entity in a three-way merger, in mid-2008 as VP operations and stayed with the project until late in 2011,” he said.

When Currie joined the project in 2008, construction was already under way.

“In response to the financial crisis at the time, construction was put on hold for one year, and our underground contractor was demobilized,” he said. “Over the course of 2009, we built up our own underground mining team and continued the underground development ourselves.”

Currie said that when he did the scoping study, the only mining method that was economic for $0.95/lb. copper was block caving.

“It was gratifying to see that block caving actually worked and was economic at a rate of 11,000 tons per day, which is much smaller than your average block cave mine,” he said.

New Gold worked in partnership with the local First Nations, the Tk'emlúps te Secwepemc and Skeetchestn Indian Bands.

“We worked very closely with them in developing and operating the project,” he said. “We gave them work they'd be successful at, such as freight haulage, sand and gravel supply and trucking concentrate to the port in Vancouver. Between approximately 15 per cent and 20 per cent of the work force at New Afton are First Nations.”

When New Gold decided to build the mine itself, it hired many workers who had never worked in a mine before and trained them from scratch to be miners.

“It was always fun to walk underground at New Afton and ask people what they had done before they became miners,” Currie said.”The answers ranged from driving truck to stacking lumber to working in grocery stores.”