Editorial Not a man underground by 2000

The Selbaie mine near Joutel, Que., has just finished installing a computer system that controls the entire milling process. James Lauder, an engineer in charge of the project, told members of the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (cim) at their annual meeting in Toronto recently that his company now has their people familiarized with instrumentation. He added, though, that “this will make automation of the underground even easier.” When you hear things like this from hands-on guys such as Mr Lauder, you have to think seriously what underground mining will look like at the turn of the century and what it will do to the costs of mining.

Some hands-off (management) people, like Ronald Woodbridge, president of the Canadian Advanced Technology Association, have a vested interest in promoting the idea of “Not a man underground by the year 2000.” He has confidently come out and said Canadian mines will pick up the idea and run with it. But who believed him when he said it a couple of years ago?

Now with million-dollar programs recently completed or under way to equip the larger mills in the country with process control computers; with microcomputers multiplying in other departments at our minesites; and with Inco Ltd. making a tremendous start in the direction of taking advantage of a very substantial domestic market ($1.2 billion a year) for radical new mine equipment, it seems not all that unlikely that in 13 years men will not have to subject themselves to the traditionally dangerous underground work environment. As recent tragedies in Sudbury and Murdochville illustrate, this environment continues to result in untimely deaths of miners despite all-out efforts to perfect safety procedures. Compensation claims, piling up in provincial government offices, from miners who have contracted lung cancer from silica dust in gold mines and radon daughters in uranium mines, also attest to the harshness of the mining environment.

But automation of mining needs research. And researchers need money. Like Prof Malcolm Scoble, director of mining at McGill University, told cim delegates: “The number of research people is not a problem in Canada. The opportunity lies in getting our electrical and mechanical friends involved in the innovation process.”

Irrespective of all the rhetoric we hear these days about mining industry research, if you look back 13 years to 1974, where did the state-of-art in mining stand then? Microcomputers were non-existent, pocket calculators had finally eradicated the slide rule, large-diameter in-the-hole drills were not underground, hydraulic drill jumbos were a dream and diesel scoops had barely made it on the scene. When you remind yourself of this, you realize anything is possible in the next 13 years. Having automatic drills that run and monitor themselves and having a computer program that you can communicate with in plain English and which is an expert in rock mechanics, for example, do not seem all that far-fetched.

From the investor’s point of view, to see all mining companies contribute just 1% of their revenues to mining research, as was suggested by more than one cim delegate, would be both a bearable and welcome initiative. It would be an investment in the future. And in the end it would lead to a leaner, more profitable mining industry in both base and precious metals.