Montreal, Que. — The technical sessions at the recent convention of the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum began with a 2-day symposium on the country’s iron ore industry, which has been growing despite intense competition.
Ranked as the world’s ninth-largest producer, Canada is a relatively small player in the iron-ore sector: since 1988, when Algoma closed its mines near Wawa, Ont., activity has been more or less limited to the Labrador Trough region.
Speakers representing the Canadian producers described how the industry boosted pellet production 14% to 30.7 million tonnes in 2002, a figure that’s expected to be matched this year.
Still, producers worry when they look south: the U.S. blast furnace-based steel industry is downsizing and has withdrawn from several long-term arrangements with Canadian and U.S. iron-ore producers. As a result, benchmark prices for Canadian pellets fell 6% in 2002.
Canadian producers are responding by trying to capture a larger share of pellet sales that feed the booming Chinese steel industry. Chinese iron ore demand rocketed 57% between 2000 and 2002 to 110 million tonnes.
Speakers at the convention touched on various industry-wide trends, one of which is greater co-operation between Canadians and South Africans in the area of shaft-sinking and hoisting.
Over the past decade, Canadian miners have gone deeper and deeper to gain access to orebodies, which has placed a strain on their technical expertise. Enter the South Africans, who have decades of experience sinking some of the deepest shafts in the world, regularly exceeding 2 km in a single lift. (In Canada there are about 100 shafts in total, whereas in South Africa there are around 150 that exceed 1,500 metres in depth.)
Several speakers stressed that control systems are key to operating deep shafts and that these systems must be improved constantly to ensure smooth acceleration and braking. These improvements have resulted in an increasingly smaller stress range for the rope, which in turns makes it possible to use a thinner rope. This practice can slash the capital cost of a new shaft by $9-10 million and reduce the work schedule by 5-6 weeks. Recent regulatory changes have allowed slim, South African-style ropes to be adopted in Quebec, and Ontario will soon follow suit.
Presenters from Cementation Skanska’s South African and Canadian offices provided an overview of the history of shaft-sinking.
Cementation Skanska has 11 shaft-sinking projects on the go, including Falconbridge’s Kidd Deepening project in Ontario and Placer Dome’s South Deep project in South Africa, and it has just been awarded the contract to sink a 2,180-metre shaft at
The five Canadian mines with the deepest shafts are Creighton (2,078 metres) in Sudbury, Ont., LaRonde (1,760 metres) in Rouyn-Noranda, Que., Dome (1,675 metres) in Timmins, Ont., Golden Giant (1,448 metres) in Marathon, Ont., and Williams (1,302 metres) in Hemlo, Ont.
The convention was abuzz with talk about various powerful computer systems that are allowing for better exploration, mine design, operations and maintenance planning.
For instance, Nuna Logistics and Immersive Technologies showed off an elaborate truck simulator that allows for the low-cost training of drivers in a three-dimensional open-pit mining setting with pneumatic feedback.
To aid in the development of information technology for mining,
Representatives of several major mining companies explained how they are creating elaborate intranet systems to improve co-ordination between head office and workers at far-flung operations. They agreed that success depends on standardizing the input of data across all operations.
“Our [intranet system] is going to bring a lot of change to Placer Dome, and we’re going to be stronger because of it,” said that company’s executive vice-president, George Pirie.
Delegates got a taste of the future with a series of talks on the use of hydrogen fuel cells in underground applications. While there are currently only prototypes of fuel cell-powered mining equipment, the technology promises to reduce the amount of underground air and noise pollution, while providing quicker turnaround times for charging than with battery technology. However, there are concerns about the hazards of bringing large amounts of hydrogen underground.
Among the leaders in fuel cell research in mining is the international consortium Fuelcell Propulsion Institute, which is in a partnership with Natural Resources Canada (NRCan).
Marc Betournay, senior scientist at the Mining and Mineral Science Laboratories of the Canada Centre for Mineral & Energy Technology, a division of NRCan, told delegates how he tested the world’s first fuel cell mine vehicle, a production locomotive, in mines in Quebec and Ontario: “It’s as tough as a battery-operated locomotive, and there are none of the weight constraints that are holding back fuel cell use in the auto industry.”
New regulations
It has been more than two years since the creation of National Instrument 43-101, which details standards for disclosure for mineral projects.
William Roscoe of Roscoe Postle Associates said “all of the new standards, while on the surface more onerous than before, raise the bar for quality and credibility of sampling, assaying, databases, resource estimation and reporting.”
In March 2002, after three years of study, the CIM Council adopted the CIMVal standards and guidelines for valuation of mineral properties, and the institute expects these standards and guidelines to be upgraded to regulation status before year-end. (More information on CIMVal is available at www.cim.org.)
Maureen Jensen described how her employer, Market Regulations Services, was recently formed from the market-regulation departments of the Toronto Stock Exchange and the TSX Venture Exchange. MRS maintains offices in Toronto and Vancouver.
She said that in the current market environment “investors don’t believe they have a chance” against unscrupulous public companies but that corporate governance changes, now under way, will help restore investors’ trust.
Canada’s biggest mining companies made presentations that focussed on technical aspects of their operations.
Howard Stockford, executive vice-president of
As for the advanced Duck Pond polymetallic project in Newfoundland, Stockford said Aur would likely make an announcement soon and that the company hopes to receive provincial government help with infrastructure. “We don’t see Duck Pond as a growth project, but more as a way of maintaining our Canadian production rates.”
Aur has a $4-million exploration budget this year, and is exploring mostly for volcanogenic massive sulphide targets in Quebec, Manitoba and Chile.
Senior Vice-President Rejean Gourde said Cambior would continue to explore around its Omai mine in Guyana: “Even if we have 2.5 years left of mining, there are still good exploration opportunities in Guyana,” he said, and went on to describe several prospects as “promising.”
Mark Rantapaa of
, combined with smaller and more closely spaced holes, has resulted in finer material. The results are easier excavation and an increase in autoclave throughput of least 5 tonnes per hour.
Gary Halverson, manager of the Porcupine joint venture, said the Porcupine deal required “lots and lots of lawyers” but that the integration of the two companies’ workforces was proceeding well.
Greg Hall, general manager of exploration with Placer Dome’s exploration division in Perth, recounted the arrival of the world’s five largest gold mining companies in Australia: Newmont Mining at Golden Mile; AngloGold at Sunrise; Barrick Gold at Golden Mile; Gold Fields at St. Ives; and Placer at Kanowna Belle.
He said all these acquisitions require new discoveries to unlock their full value and that the most-promising exploration techniques are gravity surveys, trace-element lithochemistry, airborne electromagnetic surveying, regional mapping and seismic reflection studies.
Michel Gilbert, general manager of
The uranium producers were in a bullish mood, with prices gaining new strength over the past two years and supply shortages looming in the future.
Tim Gitzel, senior vice-president of
Cogema is also co-owner, with
Down the road, Cogema and Cameco will develop the Cigar Lake deposit, which is the second highest-grading uranium deposit after McArthur River. The earliest possible startup date is in 2006.
One Cameco spokesman provided a case study of how the company used its experience with aboriginal employees and contractors in northern Saskatchewan to deal with similar situations at its Central Asian projects.
A group of talks on China’s mining potential displayed the same breathless optimism apparent at the convention of the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada, held in Toronto in March. However, Derek Baas, a political risk analyst with Export Development Canada, cautioned that the “robust economic and investment-climate predictions are premised on relative social stability” and that that stability is not guaranteed.
John Paterson, president of
Mineralization at Southwestern Gold’s Boka gold project in Yunnan province likely extends for 5 km in length, he said, and the company may need to dig a 5-km-long tunnel to carry out more detailed drilling.
Presenters from Canada’s oil patch focused on the oil sands projects in northern Alberta. A recurring theme was that in spite of great technical advances, the sector remains plagued by high development and production costs, which have recently delayed a couple of projects.
The federal government’s ratification of the Kyoto accord in December 2002 has created further uncertainty in the oil patch.
According to John Dillon, vice-president policy and legal counsel for the Canadian Council of Chief Executive Officers, a “business-as-usual” approach in Canada would result in emissions of 810 million tonnes of greenhouse gases annually by 2010, whereas Canada’s Kyoto target is 570 million tonnes by that time.
“We’re talking about a 30% reduction in emissions in a very short time,” said Dillon. “I’m skeptical that the government has a coherent plan. There’s virtually no appetite in this country for higher energy prices and taxes, and the cost of failure could be significant transfers to Russia and the Ukraine, funded by Canadian taxpayers.”
Michael Agnew of
In the 1980s and early 1990s, the large accumulations of material were unacceptable to regulators, prompting Suncor to develop its “consolidated tailings” technology, which mitigates problems with dispersed clays by adding gypsum and fresh sand.
Suncor’s tailings will eventually end up 40-75 metres deep and be capped with a 5-metre-thick sand layer and 5-metre-high hummocks.
The convention featured special talks on titanium and vanadium geology, processing and mineral developments, with Bernard Lapointe, president of
Lapointe said the industry needs either to find massive deposits of rutile or else develop ways of extracting titanium metal directly from ilmenite.
Analyst Martin Murenbeeld of Victoria, B.C.-based M. Murenbeeld & Associates closed the CIM sessions with a review of the impact of central bank gold sales on the Canadian gold mining industry.
He said that between 1990 and 2001, Canadian gold miners lost a total of about $1 billion from all central bank sales. The Bank of Canada’s gold sales during that period cost the industry $140 million in lost revenue, and the Bank’s gold sales between its inception and 2001 has cost Canada’s gold industry $240 million.
In all, there were about 170 exhibitors in the trade show and 900 delegates.
Although the talks were well-attended, traffic was fairly light in the trade show.
During the convention, Aur Resources’ Howard Stockford became the CIM’s 96th president, replacing Soheil Asgarpour. The position has a one-year term. Next in line for the presidency is Warren Holmes, who spends the next year as president-elect. Holmes retired as a senior officer of
The CIM’s top full-time employee, Executive Director Yvan Jacques, plans to retire this year, and a replacement has not yet been named.
The next CIM convention will be held in Edmonton, Alta., from May 9 to 12, 2004.
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