Profile ENGINEERING CHALLENGES

But although he has gained hands on experience in just about every aspect of the mining game, Wade hadn’t until recently put his name to a headline-grabbing gold discovery. Late last fall, results from a barren property on Newfoundland’s northern coastline suggested to Wade that he could be in control of a potentially large gold deposit.

A phase-1 drill program managed by Wade Engineering yielded a 56-ft intersection which averaged 0.46 oz gold per ton and a preliminary reserves estimate of 226,860 tonnes was calculated based on results of 16 holes. The resulting hoopla and subsequent joint venture with Placer Dome affiliate Equity Silver Mines suddenly cast the spotlight on a man who has never been afraid to tackle new and sometimes exotic projects.

Not many of the speculators who raced to buy Bitech shares last January know that Devran Petroleum, a company managed by Wade, attempted to extract oil via conventional mining methods from a property in Sarnia, Ont.

They may also be unaware that another Wade company was awarded a $350,000 federal government contract to examine the feasibility of developing fertilizer for the Chinese Agricultural Industry. “If it proves to be feasible and a financing package comes together, we could construct a plant in China to manufacture urea and ammonia,” says Wade who cancelled a recent trip to China because of the tense political situation there.

The son of a Joburke, Ont., grocery store owner, Wade is, as one colleague said, a man of many talents who appears to be as comfortable in the executive suite as he is in a mine shaft. The red braces and pinstriped suits which he frequently wears to work are de rigueur in most of Toronto’s investment houses. He is also a member of the posh Albany Club and the Haileybury School of Mines Alumni Association.

But having grown up in Copper Cliff, Ont., in the heart of the Sudbury mining camp, he became familiar with mining early in life and after dropping out of high school, set out to get some first hand experience in the industry.

During an initial tour of Canada, he staked claims in Casa-Berardi, Que., and worked briefly as a truck driver for three lumber companies in northern Ontario. He also assayed the discovery hole at the Wabowden, Man., claims, which later became Falconbridge’s Manobridge mine. However, his stay in Manitoba was cut short when mine manager Joe Brummer advised him, in no uncertain terms, to get back to school.

“I guess Joe saw something in me that I didn’t see,” says Wade who ran successfully for presidency of the Haileybury School of Mines student council.

Contemporaries like Ross Bennett, who ran Wade’s presidential campaign at Haileybury, say he was never a brilliant student but that he quickly gained the respect of early employers like Leitch Gold Mines. “He just kept getting hired to start things,” says Bennett who, as director of the government ‘s Innovation North program, assists university professors in getting research contracts.

During the mid 1960s, Wade helped to re-install mill equipment at the Rambler mine in Newfoundland. Before he graduated with an engineering degree from Michigan Technological University, he was also part of the crew that developed the orebody, now known as Newfoundland Zinc, at Daniel’s Harbour. Wade counts himself as one of the few people in the mining industry to have had his graduation photo taken with his three children sitting on his knee.

In 1972, after an 8-month spell as assistant chief engineer at Giant Yellowknife Mines’ Northwest Territories operation, he accepted an offer from the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce to work as the bank’s staff engineer.

A natural risk-taker, Wade eventually realized he was not cut out for the risk-averse banking industry. But the experience and introduction to contacts like Corona Corp. Chairman Ned Goodman proved to be good preparation for life as self employed engineering consultant. “If he was a script- writer, he couldn’t have scripted his background any better,” says Bennett.

“When I was working as a senior sales engineer at Lummus Co. Canada, I thought it was time to do it,” Wade tells The Northern Miner Magazine.

“I was 38 at the time, I had always wanted to do my own thing and I took a flyer.”

Using his home in Unionville, Ont., as an initial base, he started to build what he hoped would be a small engineering company. One of his first contracts was with a Texas firm that wanted help designing a modular hoist concept. While Wade says it was a good idea, the hoist died on the drafting table when the firm went under during the oil crisis. Another contract was offered by a group of Edmonton investors who wanted to build a silica sand plant on the banks of the Peace River.

In the interim, he has dabbled in colormetric separation, a technique used in the separation of ore from waste rock on the basis of color differential. “The technique results in a 99% recovery rate in about 44% of material sampled,” says Wade who plans to use a similar technique called Conductivity ore-sorting on Bitech’s Tache Lake, Ont., gold project.

He has also experimented with a concept known as “cookie jar mining.” The method, devised by Wade Engineering, uses proven technology to mine narrow pockets of gold that would otherwise be considered uneconomic because of the necessary dilution. As reported in The Northern Miner Magazine of October, 1988, Wade Engineering is seeking exploration companies who might be willing to try out the method on one of their own deposits.

“You have to kiss a lot of toads before you find the princess,” said Wade when asked to explain his seemingly inexhaustable appetite for new projects. While friends say he keeps more things on the go than most people should attempt to, Wade has always kept his eye open for promising exploration projects.

It was because of a geological model developed by ex-Haileybury colleague Derek McBride that Wade and Goodman formed a syndicate to look for properties in Newfoundland with similar geological characteristics to that of the Northern Empire gold mine near Beardmore, Ont.

In 1986, Wade Engineering had already obtained a contract to evaluate about 800 claims in the Hope Brook area. But it was 16 claims around the old Tilt Cove copper mine on Newfoundland’s northern coastline which caught McBride’s attention. As a geological consultant who had been prospecting and teaching in the Maritimes since 1972, McBride was intrigued by the structural geology of the claims. They appeared to have the characteristics he was looking for and after results from surface trenching assayed 0.5 oz gold over 9 m, he phoned Wade in Toronto to say that he had “found a gold mine.”

When the drill results were tallied up and reserve estimates announced, Wade quickly realized that in an inhospitable stock market climate, little Bitech didn’t have the financial wherewithal to develop the project on its own. Recognizing the need for a wealthy backer, he drew up a 4 1/2-page document titled Discussion Topics for a Joint Venture. The document contained the company’s financial requirements together with details of the discovery claims and various proposals for a joint venture. Bitech, he decided, would continue to manage the project while retain
ing a 50% stake in the profits if and when a production decision was announced.

While junior explorers like Bitech tend to have the terms of such contracts dictated to them by industry heavyweights like Noranda Inc. and Teck Corp., Wade managed, without making a single phone call, to attract a number of potential partners. Of the four applicants, Equity Silver seemed to have the credentials that Wade was seeking. As a 60%-owned subsidiary of Placer Dome, it could easily afford to put up development capital to fund a large mine (if one was ever found) and it was prepared to live with the one stipulation on which Wade wouldn’t budge — that Bitech be allowed to manage the project.

Potentially, the agreement with Equity Silver is worth $12.3 million in option payments to Bitech, which will contract all the exploration and development work to Wade’s engineering firm. To earn a 50% interest in the property, Equity Silver must spend an additional $12.2 million over four years. Wade says the deal will enable him to turn Bitech into a “real company” with cash flow.

While his sometimes hardnosed approach to doing business hasn’t exactly endeared him to some of Toronto’s junior mining analysts, Wade makes no apologies. After it was revealed at Bitech’s annual meeting that an extra 10 million Bitech shares were issued in exchange for a much larger Tilt Cove land position, Toronto brokers were literally running to their phones to tell clients to sell their shares. The company’s share price has subsequently fallen to around 45 cents from $2.25 on the Alberta Stock Exchange. “We made a business decision and in the long run it will pay off for Bitech,” Wade insists.

But even if drilling results at Nugget Pond don’t live up to expectations and Equity Silver elects to walk away, Wade has enough projects on the go to keep busy his staff of 14. With a $1 million advance from Equity Silver, he is already looking out for cash flow opportunities to inject into the Bitech portfolio. He is also keeping Equity Silver director and Placer Dome Vice- president Henry Brehaut informed on a daily basis of developments on Newfoundland’s northern coast line.

Wade counts himself lucky that he is able to work at what he regards as his hobby. “I’ve always been inquisitive and I enjoy a challenge,” said Wade who spends much of his time sifting through balance sheets and annual reports in search of new projects. But if the Newfoundland joint venture is absorbing much of his time at the moment, the future, it seems, is as unclear to Wade as it was when he left Haileybury for the first time, a quarter of a century ago. “I’m not sure where I’m going but I’m having a lot of fun getting there,” he says.

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