August 25, 2011 – The Northern Centre for Advanced Technology Inc. (NORCAT), has been awarded the NASA Group Achievement Award for outstanding efforts in support of the 2010 International Lunar Surface Operations InSitu resource Utilization Field Test (ILSO-ISRU). Specifically this distinction is awarded in recognition of the quality of results and level of impact on NASA programs, effective management of cost and schedule, customer satisfaction, capacity for future contribution and the development of innovative approaches in responding to unforeseen crises.

In addition to technical contributions such as the drill and sample acquisition system for the NASA RESOLVE lunar water prospector testing and fuel cell system design for the lunar water utilization experiment, NORCAT’s role during this ILSO-ISRU field exercise was as overall field mission lead and coordinator. Read the rest of this entry »

Dick DeStefano is the Executive Director of Sudbury Area Mining Supply and Service Association (SAMSSA). destefan@isys.ca This column was originally published in the September, 2011 issue of Sudbury Mining Solutions Journal.

 
Building human capacity: the Vale solution – by Dick DeStefano (Sudbury Mining Solutions Journal- September, 2011)

The global mining industry will face a serious problem in the near future acquiring and developing the human potential required to maintain economic viability. We need to find solutions very quickly to solve the problem.

According to the Mining Industry Human Resource Council’s (MiHR) 2010 Canadian Mining Industry Employment and Hiring Forecast report, under the baseline scenario the Canadian mining industry will need to hire approximately 100,000 new workers by the end of 2020. This is the number of workers required to fill newly created positions and to meet replacement demand as workers retire or leave the mining industry.

Australia shows a similar trend, with skilled jobs in the mining industry doubling within the next 10 years to 215,000. In 2005, the U.S. Society of Mining Engineers reported that 58 per cent of industry workers were over the age of 50.

Northern College and other educational institutions in northeastern Ontario are making attempts through their academic programs to solve the problem. Read the rest of this entry »

The Sudbury Star, the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper. hcarmichael@thesudburystar.com

“There is no doubt we have one of the best mining supply and service sectors here today. … Having one of this level in our backyard gives us a significant advantage, especially when
circumstances require us to be nimble. … We will have a new copper strategy to respond
to increasing global demand in foreign countries. … Sudbury will play a pivotal role, including the Victor and Capre properties …” (Steve Wood – Vale Vice-president Mining and Milling North Atlantic Operations, August 9, 2011)

The turmoil in the markets in recent days and the debt crisis in the United States won’t derail Vale’s plans for its Greater Sudbury operations, a senior company official said Tuesday. “We are staying the course,” Steve Wood told members of the Sudbury Area Mining Supply & Service Association at the group’s monthly meeting Tuesday. “We have our vision to be the biggest and the best (global mining company) and these projects have built up well situationally, as well.

“We don’t see any changes.” Wood is Vale’s vice-president of mining and milling for its North Atlantic operations. A Greater Sudbury native, Wood provided a 20-minute update of the global mining company’s plans for its Greater Sudbury operations.

In a scrum with reporters following his presentation, Wood reiterated that the bad economic news won’t affect the company’s Greater Sudbury operations or planned projects. Read the rest of this entry »

Canadian Business Journal

The Greater Sudbury region is an important part of Northern Ontario. This picturesque area is abundant in resources–and revenue. The Greater Sudbury Development Corporation is an organization in place to help those important local businesses grow and prosper, as well as attract, assist, and retain other potential investors. Sudbury is known as a mining town, and is tipped to benefit even further from the up-and-coming global mining boom. As the mining sector flourishes, Sudbury is steadily diversifying its economy and building on its previous success. This issue, The Canadian Business Journal explores the successful developments that have occurred over the last few years in this Northern Ontario paradise.

Greater Sudbury is the largest city in Northern Ontario, and the region is a hub for industry, commerce, health services, transportation, retail, government services and education. With a valuable market of about 450,000 people within a 250 kilometre radius, Greater Sudbury boasts the highest retail sales per capita of census metropolitan areas in Ontario. It is also the most culturally diverse city in Northern Ontario, with bilingualism sitting impressively around 40 per cent.

Mining: the backbone of Sudbury

Mining, of course, is the major industry in Sudbury and numerous major mining companies have successful sites in Sudbury and have been incremental in the economic growth of the city. There are 18,000 people employed by the companies involved in the sector, across many areas including mine development and operations, engineering, construction, manufacturing, and environmental rehabilitation. Read the rest of this entry »

Daily Commercial News and Construction Record

Talk about construction and many people automatically think downtown and high-rise. But in fact it’s the polar opposite hundreds of kilometres north of Ontario’s industrial heartland, where some of the biggest projects go in the opposite direction, plunging close to three kilometres towards the Earth’s inner core.

It’s this environment that’s home to northern Ontario’s red-hot multi-billion-dollar mining and mining-construction sectors.

While revenues in Ontario from mining operations were pegged at roughly $10 billion last year, sales of related supplies and services rang in at $5.3 billion and could reach $6 billion this year, says Dick DeStefano, executive director of the Sudbury Area Mining Supply and Service Association (SAMSSA).

“The mining supply and service industry is being pushed fairly dramatically by a number of new explorations and expansions in northern Ontario,” DeStefano says.

Sales figures include actual supplies and services that don’t fit neatly into a construction umbrella, but the rise in activity is keeping construction-related firms busy building everything from roads and housing, to headframes and tunnels. Read the rest of this entry »

Dick DeStefano is the Executive Director of Sudbury Area Mining Supply and Service Association (SAMSSA). destefan@isys.ca This column was originally published in the June, 2011 issue of Sudbury Mining Solutions Journal.

In the past weeks and months, it has become evident that the mining sector is on a continuous upswing.  There is a general consensus that we are only at the midpoint of a super cycle in commodities and much needed mining products and services.

I was impressed during the recent Canadian federal election campaign to read and hear a much-awaited acknowledgement about the importance of Northern Ontario’s mining cluster from Michael Ignatieff, the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. Ignatieff said “One of the great things about Northern Ontario — you see it everywhere – is that this is a part of the world that has absolutely world-class expertise in mining technology, mining research and mining science. And we mustn’t lose that.”

It has been a bit of a struggle over the past few years to inform and motivate government agencies and others that there is a major cluster of innovative mining supply and service companies situated in Northern Ontario. This cluster consists of world leaders in producing goods and services that are innovative and adaptable to the increased demands for efficiencies required by mines to reduce costs and operating expenses. Read the rest of this entry »

The Sudbury Star, the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper. This article was published on May 18, 2011. cmulligan@thesudburystar.com

Cities like Greater Sudbury looking to benefit from the Ring of Fire should market their soft skills such as their knowledge base and skilled workforce, and not just “hard infrastructure” to companies developing the massive deposit.

Communities throughout Northern Ontario are looking to capitalize on development of the 5,120-square-kilometre deposit of chromite, nickel, copper, zinc, gold and kimberlite located about 500 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay.

The co-ordinator of the Ring of Fire Secretariat, Christine Kaszycki, spoke to members of the Greater Sudbury Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday about progress in developing the resource and how businesses might get involved.

Kaszycki, who heads the secretariat established by the Ministry of Northern Development, Mines and Forestry last year, presented a high-level overview of the status of the Ring of Fire development. Read the rest of this entry »

Engineering and Mining Journal is a monthly publication that highlights information about new mining equipment, technology, and techniques. This article was published February 10, 2011.

Offering mining equipment and services ranging from basic ‘big iron’ to high tech, companies in the Sudbury/North Bay/Timmins area are taking a hard look at export-market opportunities

Canada’s Northern Ontario, a region larger than France and Germany combined—representing about 90% of the land area of the entire province, but containing only a small fraction of its people—is geographically distant from most population centers but is solidly emplaced in the nexus of world-class mining districts that form the backbone of the global minerals industry.

The region’s Sudbury Basin is host to one of the world’s largest deposits of nickel and copper, and offers such favorable prospects for additional mineral wealth that it has attracted billions of investment dollars from both Canadian and international mining giants such as Brazil’s Vale (Vale Ltd., formerly Inco) and Switzerland’s Xstrata plc (Xstrata Nickel, formerly Falconbridge).

The dollars continue to flow in. The Ontario Mining Association reports that Vale plans to invest $3.4 billion in its Sudbury area operations, including $200 million to upgrade the Clarabelle mill, $360 million to bring the Totten mine into production and up to $2 billion on an Atmospheric Emissions Reduction (AER) project to cut sulphur dioxide emissions by 80%. Quadra FNX intends to spend $200 million on Sudbury area expansions and North American Palladium, north of Thunder Bay, is sinking $270 million into an expansion of the Lac des Iles mine. Read the rest of this entry »

The Sudbury Star, the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper. This article was published on April 20, 2011. cmulligan@thesudburystar.com

Steve Matusch remembers his first day as a student on placement at Inco’s now defunct copper refinery, when he was studying systems engineering at Waterloo University. From the time he was a boy playing with Lego blocks, Matusch had dreamed of a day when he would build real machinery.

He walked across the plant floor at the copper refinery to a huge and complicated copper-stripping machine manufactured in Sweden and thought: “wow, this is what I want to build.” Today, the company over which Matusch presides, Ionic Engineering Ltd., is the technology leader in producing equipment like that piece he admired years ago.

“It was a lot of fun how that happened, when you come from here and all of a sudden we beat the big boys at some things,” Matusch said Tuesday during a walkabout at Ionic’s headquarters on Mumford Road in the Walden Industrial Park. Read the rest of this entry »

Founded in 1995, BESTECH was created to address the need for system integration and industrial automation. By developing a very specialized skill set, BESTECH quickly gained recognition as a leader in industrial automation, engineering, software development and energy management. With over a decade of sustainable growth, BESTECH developed its strong industry expertise, by responding and developing innovative technologies that helps companies in mining, pulp and paper, forestry, oil and gas, manufacturing, municipal and commercial industries internationally enhance their productivity, profitability and safety . www.bestech.com

The mining industry world-wide has more than its fair share of challenges today–from stringent environmental and regulatory pressures to an urgent need to improve operational costs, productivity and safety, all while having to mine deeper than ever before.

Aware of these challenges, BESTECH, one of Canada’s leading providers of engineering, automation, software development and energy management services, has been developing a novel solution to address these challenges in mines for years. Their team of experts have perfected a multi-faceted solution called NRG1-ECO (Energy Consumption Optimization) that helps mining companies gain better control of their processes, energy usage, equipment, safety and energy costs. Read the rest of this entry »

Norm Tollinsky is editor of Sudbury Mining Solutions Journal, a magazine that showcases the mining expertise of North Bay, Timmins and Sudbury. This article is from the March, 2011 issue.

It’s no accident that 22,000 members of the global mining community take over Front Street in Toronto every year about this time. Ontario, the epicenter of the global mineral exploration business, is where the deals get done. It’s where money is raised and expertise is sought for discovering and mining the resources that are more in demand than ever as prosperity in the developing countries puts cash in the pockets of hundreds of millions of new consumers.

Downtown Toronto is where it all happens, but Ontario’s stature as an international centre of mining expertise begins with the province’s inexhaustible natural endowment of gold, diamonds, copper, nickel, zinc, platinum group metals and now, chromite. After a brief dip in mineral exploration caused by the global financial meltdown in 2008, Ontario is once again firing on all cylinders.

As reported in our cover story this issue, the province reported record-breaking mineral exploration expenditures of $825 million for 2010 and there is every indication that 2011 will be just as busy. All across Northern Ontario, from Detour Gold’s 14.9 million ounce Detour Lake project in the northeast to Osisko’s 6.7 million ounce Hammond Reef project in northwestern Ontario, we are seeing former producing mines returning to production, new resources being discovered, shafts being sunk or deepened and head frames rising from the earth. Read the rest of this entry »

Dick DeStefano is the Executive Director of Sudbury Area Mining Supply and Service Association (SAMSSA). destefan@isys.ca This column was originally published in the March, 2011 issue of Sudbury Mining Solutions Journal.

One of the most consistent questions from the SAMSSA membership is how do we build a truly viable and vital company that can meet all the needs and  demands of a global market. What model or dynamics works best and what is a waste of time and effort? A worthy question.

The list of options is somewhat endless and changes quite frequently as new models emanate from different economic conditions and research.  What works for one company is a waste of time for another depending on the attitude and resources available, but I believe that the most fundamental model is the generic structure that encompasses the strategic business plan.

The list of models presented here is not exhaustive but appear as the most applied.

Strategic planning is an organization’s process of defining the strategy or direction and making decisions and allocating resources to pursue this strategy utilizing its capital and people. You can use a SWOT or PEST or STEER analysis or even a supplementary but comprehensive model called EPISTEL (Environment, Political, Informatic, Social, Technological, and Economic & Legal) as the primary map for success. All strategic planning deals with at least one of three key questions: 1. What do we do? 2. For whom do we do it? 3. How do we excel? Read the rest of this entry »

Interrelated industries and institutions drive wealth creation

Clusters are a group of interrelated industries and institutions that drive wealth creation primarily through innovation and the export of goods and services. Clustered industries mutually reinforce and enhance
competitive advantage by acting as each other’s consumers, competitors, partners, suppliers and sources of research and development.

The Ontario Mineral Industry Cluster (OMIC) includes exploration companies, major mine operators, service and equipment suppliers, labour, training and education institutions, associations and other allied entities. Other well-known clusters include Hollywood, California’s Silicon Valley, Ottawa’s Silicon Valley North, the Netherlands’ cut flower industry and Houston’s oil and gas sector.

Over the last decade, clusters have attracted substantial attention from policy makers, legislatures, business leaders, academics, economic development practitioners and development agencies around the world.
Governments with widely differing ideologies in more than 30 countries and in the majority of U.S. states have adopted cluster-based economic development models. The cluster approach is also used by European governments, as well as governments in the Asia-Pacific region.

Why clusters work

Productivity and productive growth are the fundamental drivers of prosperity. Innovation is the key driver of productivity. Clusters drive innovation, economic growth and development.

Read the rest of this entry »

Established in 1980, Northern Ontario Business  provides Canadians and international investors with relevant, current and insightful editorial content and business news information about Ontario’s vibrant and resource-rich North. This article was posted on their website January 21, 2011.

More than $100 billion to be spent in Saskatchewan within the next decade

Northern Ontario companies stand to cash in on billons being spent in Saskatchewan on potash (above) and uranium mining over the next decade. More than $100 billion is expected to be invested in Saskatchewan over the next decade and some Northern Ontario businesses want a piece of the action.

Twenty-two businesses from across northeastern Ontario have united in a pan-Northern initiative under the auspices of Ontario’s North Economic Development Corporation (ONEDC), a non-profit corporation representing the five major Northern Ontario cities.

ONEDC (pronounced One DC), created to implement pan-Northern economic development initiatives, has been working with the support of the Ministry of Northern Development, Mines and Forestry (MNDMF) and in-market consultants to help facilitate business opportunities for Northern Ontario suppliers. Read the rest of this entry »

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper. This column was originally published in the Financial Post Magazine on December 1, 2009.

No. Of Companies: 70, R&D Jobs: 350, Production Jobs: 7,000

The Aluminium industry cluster in the Saguenay-Lac St. Jean region of Quebec, about 200 kilometres northeast of Quebec City, is a success story born of adversity. The first seeds were sown at a 1984 provincial economic summit when Alcan (now Rio Tinto Alcan, or RTA), a key employer and the region’s primary aluminium producer, announced plans for job cuts. New technology and the need to reduce costs left it no choice.

Rather than surrender, local entrepreneurs, civic leaders and Alcan itself hit upon a critical job-creation strategy — build upon Alcan’s massive presence and technical expertise by establishing companies to pursue value-added secondary and tertiary aluminium-related opportunities. Within two years, a $10-million venture capital fund had been established — with $5 million coming directly from Alcan — and the diversification had begun. Twenty-five years and several waves of private-sector, university and government-backed incentives and investments later, more than 70 spin-off companies, employing more than 7,000 workers — making everything from specialized heavy equipment to tubing and other fabricated products to world-class casting technologies for domestic and international markets — call the “Aluminium Valley” home.

While every firm is unique, the story of Mecfor Inc., based in Chicoutimi, is representative of the region’s evolution and the ways in which the cluster concept can foster success. Founded as a small forestry services firm in 1987 and later absorbed as an operating unit within a larger, local engineering and consulting firm, Mecfor took aim at the aluminium business in the late 1990s. Read the rest of this entry »