North Bay-based mine builders Cementation Canada have picked up some land in the city’s Gateway Industrial Park with an eye on future expansion.
The 6.5-acre property is adjacent to the company’s existing shop on Legault Street where its raise boring and shaft sinking equipment is stored.
Company president Roy Slack said it gives them some options should they decide to consolidate operations or expand their existing shop at that location which opened in 2007.
“We’re looking at the possibility of pulling everything together in North Bay,” said Slack. “That’s why it was important to secure land beside the shop.”
Cementation stores all of its mobile equipment – “basically anything with wheels” – at its Thompson, Man. location.
“With one shop in North Bay and another in Thompson, we’re a bit spread out,” said Slack.
The Thompson warehouse worked fine in the past, but it’s too small and the northern Manitoba location isn’t ideal.
The company picked up the industrial park property for $41,425, but Slack said it was no sweetheart deal from the city when you glance at the rocky outcrops.
“It’s not build-ready. The money we’ll need to spend to make that land useable is fairly expensive.”
A significant amount of drilling and blasting will be necessary to make the land suitable for an expanded operation.
With all of the best land in the Gateway Industrial Park now occupied and the Seymour Street Industrial Park sold out years ago, some manufacturers and suppliers are migrating up to the new business park at Jack Garland Airport.
Slack said they looked around the city, but when factoring in the cost per acre of buildready property versus the site preparation needed with this land, the investment was about the same. It also means less disruption to the business.
“We did a pretty exhaustive analysis and came to the conclusion that to expand our existing facilities would be in our best interest.”
Slack said they’ve done some preliminary plans and layout of the property, but they’ve not yet gone to the next stage of detailed engineering for a new facility.
While activity in the global mining sector is slow, the property acquisition was made for the future.
Despite the upheaval in the mineral commodities market, Slack said this past fiscal year was “one of our busiest years ever.”
The company is working on projects across Canada and internationally with a mixture of new mines, expansions and redevelopments of old mines.
Among Cementation’s stable of projects are Vale’s new Totten Mine in Sudbury, Au-Rico Gold’s Young-Davidson Mine in Matachewan and Goldcorp’s Hoyle Pond Mine in Timmins.
The company is also active in development in the Northwest Territories, New Brunswick, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona and Michigan.
“We see 2014 as a year where things will start to pick up again. We all know mining and we know there’s going to be an upturn, we just don’t know when.”
