Victor faces challenge of deep mining

The announcement by Inco (TSE) of a major nickel-copper find at Victor in northern Ontario raises a couple of big questions. At 8,000-8,500 ft. below surface in the highly stressed rocks of the Sudbury basin, how is the ore going to be mined? And is it minable?

These are questions that will be posed to more and more Canadian companies as time forces mining to go ever deeper for ore.

What is the solution? What is being done now?

To bring a semblance of order and sense of direction to the industry’s research and development (R & D) efforts, the Mining Association of Canada (MAC) sponsored The Mining Industry Technology Council of Canada (MITEC) in 1987.

MITEC set out to act as a broker between those who had ideas worth developing and companies that were prepared to finance them. It brought the universities into the picture and did what was necessary to minimize wasteful duplication of research efforts.

Duplication could arise when independent companies raced toward finding improvements in the same technological area. As often as not, overlapping research was carried out unwittingly, but this is less likely to happen with today’s freer flow of information.

According to a recent MITEC survey, the projected R & D expenditure for 1990 was $152.8 million, equivalent to about 1% of gross sales. Close to 90% of this sum was raised by industry; most of the balance was funded by the federal government.

As might be expected, the lion’s share was put up by a handful of large integrated companies. About 90% of the country’s remaining companies did not make any R & D commitments. Part of MITEC’s job is to persuade the smaller operators to contribute as members of joint ventures. Substantial research funds can be created in this manner without inflicting financial hardship on any one company.

And where is the bulk of mining research money being spent? About 70% goes into processing research, with a significant proportion dedicated to the massive and mandated interest in preservation of the environment. The balance (30%) goes to mining R & D.

In the mining industry, there are two broad avenues of research. One concentrates on immediate needs, those technologies that should be implemented as soon as possible to keep abreast of rising labor costs, the cost of compliance with new regulations and higher taxes. In other words, it is in the front line. Its purpose is to keep the industry healthy, to allow it to combat the inexorable rise in the cost of production.

The second avenue is the lifeline of the industry’s long term future — the Victor problem. How do we mine safely and economically at depth? How can we be rid of the drill-blast cycle that hobbles today’s mining? If the research process could be characterized as an automobile, the first avenue of attack would be an effort to design longer-life tires, develop more efficient fuels and make a safer mode of transportation. The purpose of the second avenue would be to create a whole new engine.

Elsewhere in the mining world, the equivalents of MITEC have been long at work with results to show. Thus, practically every pound of coal in the Western World comes from continuous mining systems and the cyclical, undercut and blast system has long since gone.

Even in hard rock (at least hard rock for the coal miner), most openings are driven by roadheaders. In Britain alone, 300 miles of drift and tunnel are driven each year without explosives.

For other examples of research at work, the South African gold miner is now capable of working at depths of 12,000 ft. with 14,500 ft. planned in the very near future. The same South Africans are also within sight of developing a continuous miner for their hard, brittle gold reefs.

Only a small part of this offshore technology can be transferred to Canada, where mining conditions are different. Nevertheless, the vital intellectual energy and the resources are already here, and what is more, there’s the will and the drive to use them.

Deep mining under high stress, the problem that Victor represents, will be resolved.