Blimpin’ your ride

Last year, warm weather closed the ice road to the Diavik diamond mine on March 26 — a full two weeks earlier than usual. Diavik, a joint venture of Aber Diamond (ABZ-T, ABER-Q) and Rio Tinto (RTP-N, RIO-L) couldn’t get supplies in and had to spend a king’s ransom on hiring Hercules aircraft to fly in material like diesel fuel to power its generators.

That cost the company tens of millions of dollars, according to Tom Hoefer, a spokesman for Diavik Diamond Mines.

“The reality is that climate change is occurring and it’s just a roll of the dice what each new year will bring,” Hoefer says. “If we have another year like last, we’re going to be stuck because we won’t be able to get all our freight in.”

The experience forced the joint-venture company that operates the 600-km ice road servicing Diavik, BHP Billiton’s (BHP-N, BLT-L) Ekati and Tahera Diamond’s (TAH-T, TAHEF-O) Jericho diamond mine, to look at various other options for servicing the operations. Dirigibles, or airships, were one of them.

“Airships really shine when you don’t have any roads,” says Barry Prentice, a professor of supply chain management at the University of Manitoba’s I.H. Asper School of Business.

With the Arctic ice cap collapsing at a fast rate, companies in Canada’s northern regions will have to face the prospects of ice roads melting earlier and earlier each year. A study by scientists at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center published in April predicted that the summertime Arctic could be ice-free as soon as 2030.

Prentice sees mining and other companies operating in remote and inhospitable territory as a potentially huge market for airships. He also sees the aircraft as an environmentally friendly alternative to conventional, fossil-fuel driven, modes of transportation.

“They have low greenhouse gas emissions and they don’t require building roads through virgin forest or cutting across rivers,” he says. “They’re really an environmentalist’s dream.”

Two years ago Prentice co-founded ISO Polar Airships, a not-for-profit research institute dedicated to encouraging the use of airship technology for sustainable transportation.

Advances in technology and carbon fibre materials have made airships lighter and stronger. They now enjoy greater stability and control and no longer require a crew on the ground holding ropes to keep them steady. They are 20% heavier than air when sitting empty on the ground, and do not need to be held down, Prentice adds.

Their enormous size allows them to transport large loads. The dimensions of a cargo hold for an airship capable of lifting 50 tonnes, for example, is about 3 metres high, by 6.1 metres wide, by 24.2 metres long. By contrast, the dimensions of a truck’s box are about 2.4 by 2.4 by 16.2 metres.

“It’s a huge space,” Prentice says. “You don’t have to disassemble equipment to put it in, which is a huge advantage.”

Large airships would be well placed to move copper and zinc concentrates out of isolated areas to larger transportation centres. But airships could also be used for companies working in the oilsands or those building large infrastructure projects such as pipelines. The airships could also bring more affordable housing to remote regions, where the cost of freight for moving construction materials is so high.

As an amphibian craft, airships can land on water or land. Prototypes — such as one currently being designed by Lockheed Martin (LMT-N), have modified hovercraft technology and added hovercraft skirts to the airships. This allows them to land on water, taxi across lakes on a cushion of air, and climb right up on shore. Once they’ve come to a stop, their propellers can be reversed so that instead of pushing the craft upward, it keeps it down like a suction cup, enabling cargo to be loaded and unloaded.

Prentice points out the airships would mean fewer roads would have to be built — a big plus for the environment and for mining companies facing long waiting times for permits to build new roads.

“There would be a very small incursion — and once the mine is finished, it would be given back to nature and no one would even know you’ve been there,” he says.

Airships like Lockheed Martin’s prototype — designed to lift 50 tonnes — would be able to carry up to 19 miners and other crew.

De Beers is already using a Zeppelin airship to fly a combination of gravity and magnetic geophysical surveys across the Kalahari sands of Botswana (T.M.N., Mar. 3-9/07). The airship’s low noise and cruising speed, combined with advanced gradiometric technology, makes it a great tool for mineral exploration.

Prentice adds that the airships have lateral control, can track a grid and have advantages over fixed-wing aircraft because they “fly low, they fly slow and they have endurance.”

Crews can be on board for periods of up to 24 hours, and with virtually no vibration, they are excellent crafts to house sensitive geophysical survey equipment.

Realistically, however, airships won’t be seen in Canada for at least another three or four years, Prentice says, noting that the certification process is arduous and it will take time for airships — which are likely to cost more than $50 million each — to catch on.

As for Hoefer, when airships become commercially viable and can carry the types of load required, he says they will be an option worth looking at.

“They’re on the right track,” Hoefer says. “They’re certainly onto something and we think it will be of benefit to remote regions.”