THE EDITORIAL PAGE — The future of mining

It was quite a sight. At a console, set up in a hall at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, sat an Inco employee, his eyes fixed on a video monitor in front of him, his hands working the joy sticks of two load-haul-dump machines (better known as LHDs or scooptrams). The audience, there to attend “Toronto ’94,” the annual convention and exhibition of the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum (CIM), got a view of the Inco employee’s handiwork from a huge screen behind the scoop operator.

The viewing screen was required because the operator wasn’t controlling scoops that were anywhere near at hand. In fact, to witness firsthand the Inco worker’s tramming skills, CIM delegates would have had to trek more than 450 km north of the convention centre to Sudbury and then ride a cage 900 metres down into one of Inco’s nickel mines — for the man at the controls was running the machines via satellite!

Welcome to the future of mining.

For anybody who has been involved in mining in this country, the show put on by Inco was tinged with irony. This industry has for years been spurned by the powers that be. It has been viewed as a grimy industry in the dreadful resource sector (hewers of wood, drawers of water, and all that). Its second and more deadly sin was that it was regarded as a low-tech enterprise that Canadians should, or even must, learn to do without. Too many people in government, both public servants and politicians, bought that notion and likely still harbor such views. As a designated “sunset industry,” mining eventually realized that government didn’t fret over its future; nor did it devote time, energy, and money in nurturing the sector.

So what an utter delight it was to watch the Inco operator (one Gaetan Villeneuve) put through their paces not just one but two machines mucking on two different levels simultaneously — and all of it from a console hundreds of kilometres off-site. Imagine that. Those grubby old miners aren’t so thickheaded and backward as some people have thought. (CIM, Inco and its high-tech joint-venture partner Ainsworth Technologies should be commended for the demonstration.)

As conservative as this industry is, especially on the production side with its unyielding demands for a daily tonnage come hell or high water, it has had notable successes in the high-tech field.

Spurred on usually by cycles of depressed metals prices and rising production costs, or sometimes by true visionaries, the industry has been in the forefront of several breakthroughs.

One of the earliest, of course, came on the exploration side, with the development of ever-more sophisticated geophysical tools. Today, technology developed in Canada is used the world over. In fact, many Canadian-based geophysical companies are truly international in terms of operations. Underground, we’ve seen production drills that respond to computer commands for an entire round of drilling. The miner sets it up, presses a button and walks away for hours at a time. Continuous mining, with tunnel-borers and conveyor systems, is coming.

In the open pits, computerized haulage systems are the norm for the big operators. And trucks aren’t just getting bigger; they’re getting better, thanks to the computer chip.

In the new mills and even in old ones that have been upgraded, computerization is a fact of life.

While there are still many Canadian mines sticking to the tried-and-true methods of old (and, bless them, making money at it), this industry is not the technological wasteland it is often made out to be.