Inside Graphite One: A look at Alaska’s largest graphite deposit
Ben Townsend, KNOM, September 12, 2024
Located just over 30 miles north of Nome, the Graphite Creek property is believed to be one of the largest known graphite deposits in the world. The entire deposit spans about 10 miles along the Kigluaik mountain range, just south of the Imuruk Basin.
“That certainly makes it special from a mineralogic standpoint, a longevity of operations and job opportunities standpoint and of course, the area, just in its natural setting, is also quite special and unique,” said Graphite One’s vice president of mining, Kevin Torpy.
Torpy, an industry veteran, regularly travels back and forth from Nome to Graphite One’s camp, where the Canadian mining company has set up a large complex at the base of the mountains.
The camp is complete with a large laundry tent, a mess hall that serves half-pound smoked cheeseburgers, and high-speed Starlink internet. Employees are talkative. For the uninitiated, it defies expectations of a mining site. Torpy credits a carefully developed company culture.
“We as a management team all the way up to our CEO and down to our site supervision treat people like we want to be treated, we try and make it a fun place to work,” Torpy said. “Beyond that, every one of us is incredibly proud of what we do, and we like our employees to take pride in what they’re doing.”
The camp has about 30 tents, each containing dividers to create personal living spaces for the approximately 50 on-site workers. A large water treatment facility sits on the north side of the camp near the mess hall and laundry facilities. There are several large administrative tents, lined on the insides with foldable tables packed with gear.
Drill sites for core sampling are a short, muddy drive from the base of the mountains. There, the regularly relocated drill platforms pepper the mountainside. On the drive up, the droning sound of a rotating, diamond-bit drill only gets louder.
The drills are digging as deep as 500 feet to extract core samples. The samples, relatively homogenous in color and slick to the touch, are indications of high mineralization of graphite. The samples extracted from the mountain are placed in cardboard boxes and shipped back to Graphite One’s camp in Nome for further analysis.
The core samples also give clues to Graphite One’s team of geologists for where they may expect to find water, a crucial step in designing a mining pit down the road. Graphite One’s chief geologist, Kirsten Fristad, explained why the hydrology work the team conducted this summer is so important to the company’s future mining plans.
“You want to understand just how the water flows through the rocks that are there right now. As soon as you start making the pit shell, you’re essentially making a bathtub,” Fristad explained. “Any water that falls into the pit has to get treated before it gets released.”
The data is being fed into a software called Leapfrog Geo that generates a 3D model of the deposit. With the flick of a mouse, the team can pan around the model to look at the data from various angles. The software is also creating a more accurate total amount of graphite in the deposit, a key figure at the heart of Graphite One’s feasibility study.
The study is set to be complete by the end of 2024, thanks in part to funding from the U.S. Department of Defense. According to Torpy, the study will help Graphite One understand whether or not the project is profitable.
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“Really, the intent of it is to demonstrate whether or not there is an economically favorable project here,” Torpy said. “Is it economically feasible to build this operation as contemplated in that particular report, given the market conditions considered at the time.”