Cliffs holds open house on chromite project

Cliffs Natural Resources hosted an open house Nov. 14 to discuss its mining project and its implications to northern Ontario.
“It’s very exciting,” said John Susin, a Pic Mobert band member employed with Opportunity Thunder Bay. “I know there are some people who are up in arms over the environmental aspects of a ferrochrome processor, let alone the open pit mine, but I put my support 100 per cent behind the First Nation communities who want a Joint Review Panel.”
An environmental study of the Cliffs Chromite Project recently got under way, however, First Nations in the region near the proposed mine site are calling for a more comprehensive assessment of the project.
Cliffs is proposing four components to the project, which includes a mine site and an ore processing facility to be located in the Ring of Fire region, an area located about 500 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay. Other components include a ferrochrome production facility at a yet to be determined location, and a transportation system for moving equipment, materials and people to and from the mine site.
If the project does go through, Susin wants the ferrochrome processing plant to be located in northwestern Ontario to provide employment opportunities for people in the region.
“Whether it’s (located) in Nakina, Geraldton, Nipigon or in Thunder Bay, it belongs here, not in Sudbury,” Susin said. “We’re pulling the resources out of our back yard; those resources need to be processed here. We need the jobs just as much as they do and as a matter of fact, we need the jobs more so. We lost seven mills, right in the region.”
Susin attended the open house, hosted by Cliffs and its project consultants to provide information and answer questions about the project.
Bill Boor, senior vice president of Global Ferroalloys at Cliffs, said a decision has not been made about where to put the ferrochrome processing facility, even though Capreol, a community located near Sudbury on the Canadian National railway, was identified in February as the base case.
“We wanted to get an example out to people that this is the kind of place that has all the elements for the technical requirements for the facility, but it’s not the decision,” Boor said. “We’re still working towards a decision. There are a number of places throughout Ontario and in other provinces that we are looking at, because we can locate that furnace operation (ferrochrome processing facility) in a lot of different places on the existing infrastructure.”
The open house was also designed to gather community feedback on the Cliffs Chromite Project.
“For the early parts of this mining operation it will be an open pit,” Boor said. “We haven’t explored as extensively at lower and lower depths, and I think the potential is there that some day down the road we would transition to underground mining.”
Boor said the company has an aggressive plan to get the project rolling.
“The existing schedule, and it’s aggressive but doable, is to get permits in the latter part of 2013,” he said. “From there it’s about a two-year construction period to get the mine operating. That puts us in the late part of 2015.”
Boor said construction would employ about 350-500 people for the mine site, another 200-300 for the transportation corridor and about 350-450 for the ferrochrome processing facility.
“There are a lot of jobs, given the sparse population up through that area, so I actually think we are going to try to get started as soon as possible on training,” Boor said. “We don’t have a target, but I think we should be able to employ quite a few of the people out of those communities.”
Boor said Cliffs has been operating mines throughout North America for 164 years, noting the Cliffs Chromite Project will be a long project, likely to be in operation for more than 80 years.
“Our attitude is we are going to be there for a long time, so we are going to do it right from an environmental perspective,” Boor said.
He said Cliffs has been doing baseline studies for more than a year to get a better understanding of the water systems, wildlife, noise, light and other aspects of the environment in the area.