The Omega coal occurrence is located near Omega Hill approximately 102 kilometres southeast of the community of Tumbler Ridge.
The region is underlain by an assemblage of sedimentary rocks consisting mainly of continental margin and shelf facies rocks. This assemblage was deposited on and to the west of the Ancestral North American craton. These sedimentary rocks, for the most part typical continental shelf slope and basin facies, range in age from Hadrynian to Upper Cretaceous. Structurally these rocks are part of the Foreland thrust and fold belt of the North American Cordillera.
The coal measures of the region occur mainly in Cretaceous sediments deposited unconformably on older slope and basin strata. These sediments were subjected to fold and thrust tectonics which also affected the older rocks.
The Gates Formation (Fort St. John Group) is the major coal-bearing unit of the area and consists of siltstone, shale, sandstone, conglomerate and several cycles of coal deposition. It is generally subdivided into four subunits, termed the Upper Gates member, the Babcock member, the Middle Gates member and the Quintette member. The Quintette member, approximately 80 to 90 metres thick, consists primarily of massive, fine-grained siltstones and sandstones. The Middle Gates, approximately 90 to 100 metres thick, consists of a series of fining-upward sequences that culminate in coal development, and hosts all the economic coal seams of the Gates Formation. The Babcock member is a channel deposit sequence of massive sandstones, conglomeratic sandstones and chert pebble/granule conglomerates, averaging 20 to 30 metres thick. The Upper Gates member is a 30 to 40 metres series of shales and sandy shales with several thin, discontinuous coal seams. A very thin bed of ferruginous chert pebbles marks the top of the unit. Overall thickness of the Gates Formation is 270 to 300 metres.
Ten Gates Formation coal seams (numbered 1 to 10 from oldest to youngest) lie within a northwest-trending band of tight to open folds associated with a moderately northeast-dipping thrust fault sequence.
In 2005, the Omega property Coal properties became part of the Belcourt Saxon Limited Partnership, in which Peace River Coal and Western Canadian Coal were partners. In 2006, exploration on the large Belcourt-Saxon coking coal project was conducted by operator Belcourt Saxon Coal Limited Partnership and was confined to the completion of air rotary drilling on the Belcourt South (Holtslander) property and geotechnical assessment of a potential access corridor; however, significant geological modeling, coal quality testing, scoping and feasibility studies were conducted throughout the year on all the properties that comprise the Belcourt-Saxon project (i.e., Belcourt North (093I 014), Belcourt South (093I 014), Omega (093I 045), Saxon East (093I 016), and Saxon South (093I 046)).
The Belcourt Saxon Coal Ltd. Partnership became a joint venture between Anglo American plc (50 per cent) and Walter Energy Inc. (50 per cent). In 2012, Walter Energy Inc. reported 28.5 million tonnes recoverable reserves (proven and probable) for the Saxon properties, classified as prefeasibility, and a 2005 report estimated a resource of 53.1 million tonnes (indicated - Saxon East) and 167.3 million tonnes (inferred – Saxon East, South, and Omega; Exploration and Mining in British Columbia 2013).
In 2018, tenure ownership was transferred to Peace River Coal Incorporated.
