Getting the R&D Ball Rolling

Increasing co-operative R&D with our universities is probably the best way for Canada to attain global excellence in mining technology.

Over its long history, Canadian funding for research and development in mining technology resembles a football team stumbling over itself. The reason is that the government and the industry, the chief players on the team, have been unable to decide who should carry the ball the most. Unfortunately the results of this poor teamwork are starting to show as the industry comes face to face with some pretty formidable international competition.

Nevertheless the industry seems finally to be organizing itself in the hope that Canada can soon start to make yards with that ball.

When Canada’s mining industry was young, the federal government carried out most of the R&D work. The current federal government now wants the industry to carry out and fund most of that work. In effect, the government is thrusting the ball back into the arms of the private sector (and not just in the mining industry). Federal Science and Technology Minister Frank Oberle says Ottawa can no longer afford to pay 40% of the industry’s research, which is considered by the U.S. government as a subsidy. It’s uncertain, however, whether the industry has the ability to take over R&D. Many mining people would no doubt agree that the industry knows best and can respond better to the market than the government can.

The Canadian Geoscience Council, a central voice for 12 professional geoscience associations in Canada, is also concerned about the funding situation for mining R&D. It commissioned the Centre for Resource Studies in Kingston, Ont., to conduct a study to determine how much the government actually spends on R&D and how much it receives in revenues from the industry in the form of taxes. The study will cost $75,000 and is expected to take a year to complete. In a preliminary report, Margot Wojciechowski, who is co-ordinating the research, says that although the mining industry accounts for about 41% of the value added to the Canadian economy, it receives only about 29% of the R&D funding dished out by Ottawa.”

In June, 1986, Energy Mines and Resources in Ottawa announced who would receive $1.4 million in research grants distributed under its 15-year-old Research Agreements Program. A paltry $240,000 will be thinly spread over 14 research centres throughout the country to support 23 mining-related research projects. (This money goes to projects concerned with actual mining of ore, not to purely geological research programs).

The Canada Centre for Mineral and Energy Technology (canmet) is contributing an additional $150,000, which accounts for 25% of this federal agency’s budget. But, as Wojciechowski points out, most of this money is directed towards mineral processing with very little going to actual mining research. The notable exception is canmet’s Coal Research Centre in Devon, Alta. Some 12 professionals are engaged here in mining R&D work bugeted at $600,000 a year. Their work is organized co-operatively with universities and the industry and is related mostly to the evaluation, enhancement and application of open- pit mining technologies which have a direct and tangible bearing on production costs.

The objective of R&D is to develop new technologies that will help companies cut back on production costs. But when funds are spread as thinly as they have been, the result is that virtually no new technologies have been developed to the stage of commercialization. The fact that research people (students, professors, scientists, etcetera) are scattered across the county doesn’t help matters. It’s generally believed that a university needs 10 or 12 professional researchers in order for a marketable product or concept to be developed. But not a single mining school in Canada has met this criterion. The University of Alberta came the closest, in 1985, with seven staff members.

The aim of the federal government’s funding programs “is to increase the transfer of new technology from government laboratories to individual mining companies,” says G. D. Pearce, a co-ordinator at emr. It hopes to accomplish this by contracting out research work to the industry and universities. However, Dr Anthony Beswick, executive director of the Centre in Mining and Mineral Exploration Research (cimmer), at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ont., disagrees: “There simply are not enough first-class people in the Canadian mining industry to facilitate technology transfer,” he says. “We don’t have the horses to pull it off.” One physics professor at Laurentian, for example, has spent the past 15 years trying to convince the industry to build a $70,000 prototype of a machine that uses ultrasonic energy for drilling hard rock. He has not been successful.

Aggressive support of university programs through grants aimed at improving the quality of faculty and graduate student output is one way to achieve long-term national objectives, Beswick says. Today provincial research councils take a sizeable chunk of the federal grants. Notable recipients of such work are the Ontario Research Foundation, the Mineral Research Centre of Quebec and the Alberta Research Council. Over the years all have made contributions to the R&D effort in mining. The other source of federal money for mining R&D is the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (nserc). But funds from this source are equally meager when compared to other sectors of the economy, much to the chagrin of the country’s mine engineering researchers.

According to Dr T. S. Golosinski, professor of Mining Engineering at the Dept. of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Alberta, “there is not even a single mining engineering specialist involved in the review of the nserc research grant applications.” Any mining-related applications,” he continues, “are being reviewed by mechanical, civil or industrial engineering committees, the result being that these applications are given last priority.” Not only are most researchers unfamiliar with mining; the people controlling the purse strings don’t seem to know mining either.

For an industry that traditionally trains its engineers to save rather than invest money, accepting the responsibility of R&D funding isn’t easy. Since most mines are owned and operated by small companies, unable by themselves to support extensive research projects, some mining people argue that government-sponsored research is still essential for keeping our mines abreast of changing technologies.

Michael Bapty, of Bapty Research in Kimberley, B.C., thinks the mining industry itself should shoulder a larger part of the burden. “It’s a matter of rethinking priorities,” he says. “Mining executives have little trouble committing tens of millions of dollars to exploration which has an initial probability of success of one-in-500 or less,” he says. “But they balk at the idea of committing hundreds of thousands of dollars to research at an operation which exists at huge cumulative expense and for which the probability of success is probably one-in-10. The mining industry has not paid attention to the infrastructure required to do formal research to maintain competitiveness.” Laurentian University’s Beswick agrees: “Information exchange is a good start to addressing the problem of tech transfer, but the process has to be institutionalized.”

The number of mining companies in Canada making significant contributions to mining R&D can be counted on the thumb of one hand. Knowing where to put R&D funds so they will do the most good for the industry is not a single-company problem though. It is a national one.

Probably as a direct result of this line of reasoning, the Mining Association of Canada (mac) is organizing large-scale co-ordinated programs to upgrade R&D in the mining sector. It plans to establish centres of research excellence throughout the country. These centres, according to mac president Walter Curlook, would be places such as Laurentian University in Sudbury, McGill University, in Montre
al and the University of Toronto. Here, mining companies could put their money into specialized areas of mining technology such as automation, robotics, rock mechanics and mineral exploration.

The Ontario Mining Association (oma) plans to establish a $150-million research directorate which will be appointing a research manager and a board of directors to manage all the mining research labs in Ontario. It hopes to have the directorate up and running this year. “We think this should be a model for the Mining Association of Canada,” says oma Executive Director Patrick Reid. A research report commissioned by the oma in 1985 says there are 11 universities in Canada doing some kind of mining R&D work. But despite the amount of research going on, few new students are being drawn into mining programs. At Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., for example, the number of undergraduate mining engineers has fallen sharply to seven this year from 42 in 1984.

Many reasons for that decline have been suggested. One is the possibility that the mining industry suffers from an acutely poor public image. “Changing the image of the mining industry in the eyes of the public is the most important way to attract undergraduates to the nation’s mining schools,” says Gillis Barbery of Laval University. His colleague at McGill University, Prof Malcom Scoble, agrees. “Mining is still perceived as a traditionally low-technology industry.” Scoble says. “While youngsters are flooding into electrical and computer engineering, they are only trickling into mining engineering programs, despite the still-high starting salaries and reasonable availability of jobs. So much national emphasis has been placed on the need to develop high technology for economic survival, yet the application of this technology to the basic resource industries has, until recently, received little attention.”

Promoting mining as a high-technology industry hasn’t been easy. But a trend in this direction may be reflected in the dramatic growth of the post-graduate population at McGill. There are now 40 masters of science and doctoral graduate students in the university’s mining department. A similar trend is evident in other mine engineering departments across the country.

McGill students are doing co-operative research with Noranda, Campbell Red Lake Mines, Sigma Mines, Kiena Gold Mines, Dome Mines, Brunswick Mining & Smelting, Lac Minerals, Denison Mines, Lac D’Amiante du Quebec, Cape Breton Development Corp., Hudson Bay Mining & Smelting and the Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan. McGill is the first university in Canada to take up the challenge of the application of advances in automation to the mining industry. The university is seeking a professor in mine automation around whom they hope to develop a research group in advanced mining systems and control — perhaps as part of the mac’s centre-of-excellence program. McGill, along with Ecole Polytechnique, has also made the first steps towards a more institutionalized forum for mining R&D and the transfer of technology to the industry. They have formed a link to develop strong co-operative research in mining automation and robotics.