The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.
For the web’s largest database of articles on the Ring of Fire mining camp, please go to: Ontario’s Ring of Fire Mineral Discovery
The fact Sudbury is a global mining centre is one of the compelling reasons Cliffs Natural Resources should build a chromite processing plant and the 400 to 500 jobs it would create in the city.
That’s the pitch Mayor Marianne Matichuk and city staff will make when they meet with Cliffs officials on Monday. “Cliffs is looking at places to establish its smelting operation,” Matichuk said in a release Friday. “To me, there is only one place; here in Greater Sudbury.
“If Cliffs decides to build in Ontario, we want Greater Sudbury to be the only choice for them.”
Earlier this year, Cliffs, a Cleveland-based mining company, looked at different places for the ferrochrome production facility and announced a Sudbury location, Moose Mountain, north of Capreol, as the benchmark site.
It doesn’t mean the facility will be built there, Cliffs said. Instead, it would use the Moose Mountain location to test the feasibility of a chromite plant.
The smelter would refine ore and concentrate into ferrochrome metal in enclosed electric arc furnaces. At full capacity, the ferrochrome production facility would produce 1,500 tonnes of ferrochrome per day.
It would also create up to 500 jobs.
According to media reports, in all, Cliffs expects to employ as many as 950 people during construction and 1,300 once the operation is in full gear – 300 to 500 at the mine; 200 to 300 for the transportation system needed to move people, ore, machinery and supplies; and 400 to 500 at a plant where chromite will be processed into ferrochrome, used for shiny components of cars and appliances, and for lining steel-making furnaces.
Cliffs, however, has warned the Ontario’s high electricity prices could make building a plant anywhere in Ontario a problem.
In 2010, Cliffs acquired the largest known chromite deposit in North America, located in so-called Ring of Fire area of northwestern Ontario. Ore would be shipped from the chromite deposit to the plant.
For the rest of this article, please go to the Sudbury Star website: http://www.thesudburystar.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3310387