By IAN ROSS
It takes brains to produce the kind of futuristic technology needed to mine ore at extreme depths.
So why not develop an institute that nurtures and cultivates industry talent on a national level?
Dr. Peter Kaiser, the founding director of Sudbury’s fledgling Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation (CEMI), thinks Canada is at a competitive disadvantage without a global mining strategy like the Brazilians and Swedes. And there’s no training ground to take tech-savvy miners and make entrepreneurs out of them.
As Sudbury residents discovered in 2005-2006 when Inco and Falconbridge were taken over by foreign owners in a consolidation frenzy, there’s plenty of ambitious and deep-pocketed multi-nationals ready to scoop up valuable Canadian assets.
“We believe the sign of other companies taking our resources is the signal that we have to establish a think-tank (mining’s version of the Fraser Institute) on mineral resource competitiveness and prosperity because we’re not retaining enough value in this country.”
On the managerial level, very knowledgeable Canadians are being replaced by incoming foreign managers who are learning skills and are “translating it to the world.”
“The people being sidelined have the knowledge to capitalize in academics and in practice.”
Some kind of entrepreneurial leadership training is required to create Canada’s future business leaders, he says.
The rapid growth of Sudbury-grown mid-tier miner FNX is proof positive that a company with the managerial and exploration smarts can thrive by identifying small mineable pockets in a well-established mining camp. “What can we learn from the FNX success?” says Kaiser.
Creating that training academy is one element for CEMI that Kaiser hopes will resonate with Ottawa bureaucrats this fall.
CEMI is locked in a fierce competition in what he calls a “a high-stakes gamble” to tap into a $165 million federal funding pool to create 11 Centres of Excellence in Commercialization and Research across Canada.
Federal finance minister Jim Flaherty pledged his government’s commitment to Canada’s Centre of Excellence in Commercialization and Research in last spring’s budget.
Whether Sudbury can bring home a good chunk of that money depends on how well their eventual sales pitch goes over in Ottawa this fall.
In mid-August, Kaiser and his staff were finalizing a carefully crafted Letter of Intent to the government for what’s being called the ‘Canadian Centre for Prosperity from Mineral Resources.’
“If you don’t get through the letter of intent you don’t have to worry about the rest,” Kaiser says, laughing. “It’s a major gamble because we’re going against huge competitors.”
They’ll know by late September if they’ve passed the pre-screening process and if they’re in the race for the cash.
The CEMI team is up against 30 applicants specializing in areas such as health, information technology, communications, environment, even mining; all being backed by heavyweight private partners.
Kaiser estimates his institute has a “one in three chance” of making it to the final proposals stage by the late October. A final decision comes at year’s end.
As a cornerstone project of Sudbury’s mining cluster strategy, the intent is to create a world class centre for industry to contract out research.
Bringing the $30-million institute to full fruition is heavily dependent on private and public collaborations.
Sudbury’s two major miners, CVRD Inco and Xstrata Nickel, are playing a major role in shaping the research and technology agenda of deep mining, mine process engineering, environment, exploration and telerobotics and automation.
Both companies serve on CEMI’s directorship and each contributed $5 million out of the total $18-million investment raised since 2005.
Kaiser , a Laurentian University mining engineering professor and rock mechanics expert, has been busy assembling his team since his appointment last March.
Rather than create new bricks and mortar, he describes CEMI as a “network institute.”
His group hopes to rope in partners including the University of Toronto’s Lassonde Institute for Engineering Geoscience, the Institute of Competitiveness and Prosperity, and researchers from Laurentian, Cambrian College, Queen’s and University of British Columbia.
Though headquartered on the Laurentian campus, CEMI exists as a separate corporation, but it stands to be a major hands-on learning institute and offer future employment opportunities for mine engineering students with many applied research field projects at Sudbury mine sites.
Already there’s deep mining research work underway at CVRD Inco’s Creighton Mine and Xstrata Nickel focusing on improving productivity, risk management, and rapid mine planning and optimization with specialized software.
Kaiser says there’s geomechanical stability and seismic hazard issues to be researched when development moves to greater depths to ensure the infrastructure is stable and productivity is not slowed.
Finding new ways to reduce energy is a must since blasting, breaking and grinding rock to extract minerals requires huge amounts of power.
Kaiser says the entire CEMI research program is expected to generate hundreds of hours of annual research, roughly translating to about 50 new technical and scientific research positions in Sudbury and Northern Ontario.
