When I lived in the NWT, and worked in diamond mining… we used to joke that we were turning diesel into diamonds – just not through compression. Running those mines, so far from the grid, required everything to be run on diesel. It’s an insane amount of fuel burnt.
In winter, if there was no wind, you’d drive over the hill towards the mine and there’d be this yellow orange haze that settled into the area around the mine – like the walls of a smoker’s bathroom. It was gross.
When I lived in the NWT, and worked in diamond mining… we used to joke that we were turning diesel into diamonds – just not through compression. Running those mines, so far from the grid, required everything to be run on diesel. It’s an insane amount of fuel burnt.
In winter, if there was no wind, you’d drive over the hill towards the mine and there’d be this yellow orange haze that settled into the area around the mine – like the walls of a smoker’s bathroom. It was gross.
See page 3-25 for the 2019 numbers for a single mine – something like 60 million litres of diesel: https://registry.mvlwb.ca/Documents/W2021D0005/Ekati - Point Lake Project - Arctic IR 19 Response - 2019 AQMP - Sep 17_21.pdf
This isn’t actually a lot on the global scale, but in the NWT, with such a small population, it’s a lot.