Canadian mining firms look to modern airships for transporting heavy equipment

The difficulty with getting heavy equipment to mining sites due to poor road conditions and unpredictable weather has some Canadian companies looking to the air.

At least two firms that provide transport to Canadian mining companies are in talks with U.K.-based Hybrid Air Vehicles to order the company’s state-of-the-art airships, which can carry up to 50 tonnes and which the company says are very safe and have little impact on the environment.

Just don’t call them Zeppelins.

Unlike those types of floating ships that hark back to a different era and whose popularity suffered immensely after the Hindenburg disaster in 1937, HAV says its airships are not the same.

For one thing, they’re filled with non-flammable helium, rather than hydrogen. The ships can transport people, cargo or a combination of the two in a large internal space in their payload modules.

Chris Daniels, HAV’s director of communications, declined to name the two Canadian companies, as discussions are ongoing.

He said his company’s airships are providing the $960-billion mining industry with new opportunities to make some sites that are rich in minerals, but located in isolated regions such as Canada’s Far North, commercially viable.

“In these areas, the cost of moving mining equipment is prohibitive, and you also have to build an airport or an ice road, but more than that, environmentally and ecologically speaking it would be difficult,” said Daniels.

“What we offer is an ecological-friendly option to make the stranded mines commercially viable without destroying the landscape.”

He said the airships are nearing the final stages of development, and will likely hit the market within the next two to three years. The model’s first flight test last year went very well, he added.

The price for an airship, which is 93 metres long, 45 metres wide and 30 metres tall, is about $100 million (U.S.) But Daniels said that is a steal when you consider that operational and maintenance costs are low.

“An airplane has a lot of moving parts and requires an airport to land, but ours, the bag is full of helium, and you’ve got more simpler engines and it burns less fuel,” he said. “You fill it with helium once, and that’s it.”

The introduction of airships as a better mode of transport comes as Ontario seeks federal help to develop transportation routes around the mineral-rich Ring of Fire.

Other companies are also hard at work on their own designs for airships, including Lockheed Martin and Worldwide Aeros Corp.

As the world’s helium supply dwindles, Daniels said HAV isn’t worried, adding “even if we had 100 vehicles, they would use less than 1 per cent of the world’s annual helium production.”

The United States has the world’s largest reserves of helium, followed by Qatar, Algeria and Russia, according to the Geological Survey.

Richard Dixon, executive director of the University of Alberta’s Centre for Applied Business Research in Energy and the Environment, said airships are a relatively new idea in mining, but one that would help protect the environment while reducing costs for companies.

“You’re reducing your footprint on the environment at the site,” he said, as there is less of a need to build infrastructure on top of the vegetation.

“By the time you’re out of there, there’s hardly any footprint left at all.”