Canada Coal holds 75 licences comprising 2.4 million acres on Ellesmere Island and Axel Heiberg Island in Canada’s far-north territory of Nunavut.

The company’s flagship Fosheim project resides about 22 miles from the remote Eureka weather station and only about 500 miles from the Arctic Circle.

A historical inferred resource of the 100 coal seams on the Fosheim Peninsula was calculated in the order of 21.9 billion tonnes of coal in 1981.

Inferred coal resources for the area within 200m of the surface have been estimated at 21Bt, not NI 43-101 compliant.

Canada Coal president and chief executive Braam Jonker said the company was excited to begin operations at Fosheim now that all the permits were in place.

“We are very pleased with the cooperation and support that we have received to date from both the regulatory authorities and the community,” he said.

“We believe that the company has the potential to add meaningful economic value to the territory of Nunavut and the community at large whilst also creating significant shareholder value.”

With concern for the environmental ramifications of mine development, Nunavut newspaper Nunatsiaq News probed Jonker on exploration of the sensitive Axel Heiberg Island which hosts a prehistoric fossil forest.

“The fossil forest area, we will never touch that,” Jonker told Nunatsiaq.

“I’m a big supporter of responsible mining, doing it in such a way that impact on the environment is minimized.”

Jonker said even if only a fraction of Fosheim’s deposits were accessed, it could mean between 250 million tons and 500Mt of recoverable metallurgical coal.

“If I wasn’t confident about it, I wouldn’t be doing it – but it is exploration,” Jonker was quoted as saying about the High Arctic program.

“Sometimes it gives you a diamond and sometimes it gives you nothing.”