Open pit is first option for extracting the deposits at Albany. However, this would involve the removal a large volume of waste rock and other environmental issues.

Another option would be to have an underground (UG) operation using the bulk mining technique: block caving which would produce some benefits such as not having to remove a large volume of waste rock to get at the two vertical pipes of graphite ore. This would certainly make the EA easier to handle (no eye-sore for some people, out of sight out of mind).

The tightly packed geometry of the two vertical pipes is amenable to block caving technique.

Imagine a bird feeder, say, the octagonal garzebo shape with a transparent plastic tube in the middle where the seeds (sunflower seeds, corn kernels, etc...are kept). The birds would come and take the seeds from the bottom, and after a few days plastic tube would be empty and the home owner would need to fill the tube again.

- birds take seeds from bottom = extraction of ore from below to be hoisted up or processed in-situ (just like NOT plan for Eagle Ni mine in the RoF, note: this Ni deposit is also vertical, almost).

- seed level in the plastic tube going down = depletion of the ore in the pipe. In the case of block caving operation, the top level may not come down like the seed level in the feeder, but it may create (sometimes suddenly as a sink hole, i.e. the surface would come down to fill the void below). If surface deformation occurs, the affected area would still be smaller than the open pit, i.e. a smaller footprint which could be filled with waste rock, tailings, etc. either from below or above.

I would leave the actual details to mining engineers, but block caving alone, or a combination of open pit (initially) and block caving (later) are possible options. An underground operation has some potential advantage for expanding the resources if the deposit is still open at depth, which is quite likely for the Albany pipes. Two pipes could be joint together at depth.

Just my speculation. Comments welcome.

goldhunter