http://www.thestar.com/specialsections/ospe/article/1076861--ring-of-fire-engineering-potential-burns-bright

But there's a problem: the site is a vast subarctic muskeg bog in the remote James Bay Lowlands, 500 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay. For thousands of square kilometres, the terrain is difficult to walk on, let alone haul thousands of tonnes of heavy ore-with one lucky exception.

Railway expansion

A series of sand ridges that once ran along the shore of a postglacial lake follows the most direct route into the region near McFaulds Lake. They could become the foundation of a road and eventually a railway for a multi-generational mining play that's often touted as rivalling the Sudbury Basin.

"Some people say this is proof that God is a mining engineer because he put a chromite deposit up there, and then he laid out a road for us," says Moe Lavigne, a vice-president at KWG Resources, whose executive offices are in Toronto. The junior mining company is a minority partner in one of the chromite deposits, and its subsidiary holds the rights to the proposed rail route.

Despite the daunting terrain-the muskeg sits on top of a layer of wet clay, making construction even more difficult-engineers generally agree the problems of mining in the area can be overcome, as they have been elsewhere in Canada. The biggest challenge will be building the infrastructure that will provide a toehold in the wilderness, and doing it economically.

"If this project was located in an area that was more accessible-where infrastructure was available and so on-it would be relatively easy," notes Feroz Ashraf. "But we never choose where to find these ores." Ashraf is executive vice-president of global mining and metallurgy at SNC-Lavalin Group, which is leading the engineering studies for two mining companies.

The area was named Ring of Fire by a mining executive-and Johnny Cash fan-who was struck by the semicircular formation of the deposits. The big prize is the rich deposits of chromite, the only ones in North America. Chromite-an ore that is processed into ferrochrome, a key component in stainless steel-now comes mostly from South Africa, Kazakhstan and Finland.

Cliffs Natural Resources in Cleveland, Ohio, is the biggest player in the Ring of Fire, holding all of one big chromite deposit and most of another in which KWG is the partner. Cliffs, which is planning to be in production by 2015, forecasts that its mines could last decades.

Besides chromite, nickel and copper, the region also has deposits of zinc, platinum, palladium, vanadium and titanium. Toronto-based Noront Resources is developing a major nickel deposit.

Despite Cliffs' ambitious schedule, a great deal of work needs to be done before anything comes out of the ground. Platoons of engineers are still working on early studies of the terrain and identifying technical problems. They will have to complete environmental studies to obtain mining permits. Mining and engineering companies have begun consultations to involve and reach agreements with the Aboriginal communities on traditional lands where development will take place.

SNC-Lavalin's Ashraf estimates that 60 to 70 per cent of the cost of the development will be infrastructure: electricity; roads, bridges and airstrips; heavy equipment; housing, food and water supplies for hundreds of employees. "The logistics and moving things around is going to be the biggest challenge-planning and sequencing it," he says. But this is far from the only challenge, and the engineers are looking at some interesting solutions.

Nels Ojard, a vice-president with consulting engineers Krech Ojard & Associates of Duluth, Minn., has been conducting early feasibility studies of the proposed railway. He points out that it has been 50 years since a line of comparable length has been contemplated in North America. It would be a $2-billion undertaking, running 340 kilometres north from the CN rail line near the town of Nakina. More than half the route is through lowlands and it will require 53 bridges over land and water, including the Albany and Attawapiskat rivers.

The ridges capable of supporting heavy loads will be key to the railway's feasibility. "The ridge is maybe half a kilometre wide," says Ojard. "To the east, it could be 600 kilometres of all bog; to the west, probably another 200 or 300 kilometres of all bog. This string [of sand deposits] is very appropriately placed."

Noront, for its part, is looking at a pipeline that would carry nickel concentrate 80 kilometres across the wetlands to a point where it could be trucked to a rail connection at the town of Pickle Lake. The company is planning an underground mine and hopes to minimize a costly footprint on the muskeg by also building its ore-processing plant in the same underground complex.

Cliffs would use open-pit mining for the first 10 or 15 years, and then switch to underground operations. Meanwhile, international consulting engineers Golder Associates is studying, among other things, the soil, rock and water at the Cliffs site.

According to Darrin Johnson, a geotechnical engineer at Golder, his firm will be working out how to build rock pads over muskeg to support access roads and equipment, how to prevent surface water from draining into the pit, and how best to store not only tailings but also the muskeg and clay that will be dug out and then put back in the pit.

Other companies will have to figure out how to supply electricity from diesel generators or extensions of existing grids. Either way, it will be costly, says Dean Millar, a professor of engineering at Laurentian University in Sudbury. According to Millar, the university's not-for-profit MIRARCO (Mining Innovation Rehabilitation and Applied Research Corporation) has found that using wind or photovoltaic energy could, by one measure, reduce energy operating costs by 10 per cent.

The big power user, however, would be the smelter, where arc furnaces would produce a final product. Cliffs says that will require a large, reliable and low-cost supply of about 300 megawatts of electricity, enough to supply a city of 300,000 people. The site of any smelter has not been determined.

Engineering firm Hatch is engaged in early work on the smelter project for Cliffs. Jim Gallagher, Hatch's director of mining and mineral processing for North America, said the smelter would be on a scale comparable to the large nickel smelters in Sudbury.

None of it will be easy-or cheap-but as Lavigne describes the hurdles at the mine sites, "It's just engineering. It's all doable."

Ring of Fire

The potential

Mineral production on the scale of Sudbury, Timmins, Kirkland Lake and Red Lake, all of which have spanned a century of output. Economic impact across the province.

The isolation

Two hours by air from Thunder Bay.

The people

Matawa Tribal Council communities are most directly affected, including five communities in the Far North and four along potential access routes. Environmental effects could extend to the Attawapiskat and Fort Albany First Nations.

The play

Thirty-five companies hold claims covering 5,000 square kilometres—roughly the size of Prince Edward Island. Most discoveries have been made in a much smaller area—roughly 12 to 20 square kilometres.

Source: Ministry of Northern Development, Mines and Forestry; Cliffs Natural Resources Inc