Alberta’s Surface mining lab to close June, 1990

The plan, to be completed by June 30, 1990, will put 12 employees out of work. Nine of them hold doctoral degrees. This move comes at a time when the number of projects undertaken by the lab has been on the increase.

The lab is involved in about 46 projects of various sizes and also contracts field work out to consulting companies in the area. When the lab closes next June, the contract work will continue for a while and then will slowly be phased out, assistant deputy minister of mineral and energy technology Marc Denis Everell told The Northern Miner.

“The number of projects doesn’t mean much,” Everell says. “It is more important to us that the projects being conducted get the financial and verbal support from the mining industry. And we just haven’t seen that.”

SML is one component of the CANMET (Canada Centre for Mineral and Energy Technology) research lab in Devon, which will be hiring 12 new employee s to conduct research work of a higher priority to the industry, Everell says. The total research budget for the centre will remain the same.

“Surface mining research is not very appropriate work for the federal government to be conducting,” Everell says. “And in my conversations with the chief executive officers of western mining companies there are other areas of research that are more appropriate for the federal government to be involved in.” He gave coal combustion and environmental research as examples.

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