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As Dominic Fragomeni recalls it, his firm’s big idea for the Ring of Fire just came from a willingness to try something new.
“Innovation comes from people sitting back and thinking about what’s possible given their experience and background,” the director of XPS Consulting & Testwork Services said in an interview.
“That’s basically how these ideas were hatched. Our guys have 30-plus years of experience in metallurgical engineering and have tested a lot of different concepts in their day.”
Northern Ontario’s remote “Ring of Fire,”a huge mineral belt named after the Johnny Cash song, is the most exciting new mining opportunity the province has seen in decades. Rough estimates suggest the region could hold $60-billion worth of minerals, with chromite being the most important.
But moving the project to development has been a very slow and arduous task, as stakeholders have struggled to find solutions around key challenges like infrastructure.
One of biggest obstacles is power supply. Processing chromium ore is extremely energy-intensive, requiring a whopping four megawatts per tonne of ore. To support the Ring of Fire, there were plans to build a 300-megawatt smelter near Sudbury. That is enough electricity to power a city of roughly 300,000 people.
That level of power usage is a big problem in Ontario because of the province’s exorbitant electricity rates. As such, power costs are a central issue for any mining company trying to determine if an investment in the Ring of Fire makes economic sense.
That is where Sudbury-based XPS comes in. The metallurgical consulting firm, which is a standalone unit of Glencore PLC, got to work on a test pilot furnace for a chromite smelter about three years ago, working with Cliffs Natural Resources Inc. and KWG Resources Inc., which remains its key partner.
For the rest of this article, click here: http://business.financialpost.com/2014/09/16/ring-of-fire-development-plans-spurred-by-ontarios-outrageous-energy-prices/?__lsa=d4e3-e53b