< Previouswww.canadianminingmagazine.com 11 FEATURE IN 1928, THE HOLLINGER Mine fire claimed the lives of 39 miners in Timmins, Ontario. Neither the mine, the town, or even the province had the expertise or the resources to respond to save the miners’ lives or adequately fight the fire. Mine rescue teams from Pittsburgh had to be called in to extinguish the fire, while recovery operations were left to local mine management. In response to this tragic fire, the resulting provincial royal commission recommended the creation of an Ontario Mine Rescue organization under the Department of Mines. In 2019, Ontario Mine Rescue celebrated its 90th anniversary. Under the authority of the Occupational Health and Safety Act and headquartered in Sudbury, Ontario, the organization staffs, equips, and maintains a network of mine rescue stations across the province that ensure mines within a specified geographic area have adequate emergency response capability. Ontario Mine Rescue has evolved over the years, since lessons learned from mine rescue operations have provided valuable insight for future endeavours. For example, the 1947 East Malartic Mine fire in Quebec marked a major turning point for Ontario Mine Rescue. Teams from Timmins, Kirkland Lake, and Sudbury responded to the call, the first and only time Ontario Mine Rescue teams responded to an out- of-province emergency. While working together, it became evident each district had different training and maintenance standards. As a result, the position of Senior Mine Rescue Officer was created to ensure province-wide standards in mine rescue training and equipment maintenance were established and maintained. In 1965, a fire at the McIntyre Mine in Timmins forced the organization to make another change. The underground distance rescue teams had to travel to reach the fire was so great that the By Kaitlin Vitt, Canadian Mining Magazine Staff Writer Friendly Competition Readies Mine Rescue Teams An Ontario Mine Rescue competition participant from the Tahoe Canada mine rescue team.12 Follow us on Facebook for current mining news. two-hour McCaa breathing apparatus was not sufficient to allow them time to fight the fire. So, in 1966, after investigating and testing different apparatuses, the Dräger BG174 was purchased to allow for a four-hour capability. The BG174 proved a workhorse for almost 40 years before it was replaced by the BG4. Ontario Mine Rescue took on added responsibility in 1984 after four miners were trapped and killed in a rock burst at Falconbridge No. 5 Shaft near Sudbury. It was recommended that the organization’s mandate be expanded to conduct training in and respond to non- fire emergencies. Training on non-fire rescue equipment began shortly after. In January 2001, responsibility for Ontario Mine Rescue was transferred to the Mines and Aggregates Safety and Health Association, now a part of Workplace Safety North. The program was modernized with state-of-the- art equipment, including the Dräger BG4 self- contained breathing apparatus. Standardized competency-based training programs were developed to ensure consistent delivery of information to mine rescue teams across the province. The team from Goldcorp’s Musselwhite mine. Boliden Tara Mines, a guest competitor team from Ireland, at the 2018 competition.www.canadianminingmagazine.com 13 Another important part of Ontario Mine Rescue’s history is the creation of the Provincial Mine Rescue Competition in 1950. The inspiration for the event came a few years prior, when two mine rescue teams from Inco Ltd.’s Frood Mine and one from Inco’s Creighton Mine performed mine rescue tasks in an open field in Sudbury with fences for drift walls. They did so under the watchful eye of Percy Smith, Ontario Mine Rescue’s Senior Mine Rescue Officer at the time. Which team won is now unknown, but the event was successful enough that in 1950 Smith started the Provincial Mine Rescue Competition, at first limited to mines in the Porcupine camp. Within four years, four districts entered teams, and in 1954 Falconbridge Nickel Mines Ltd. became the first mine from outside the camp to win. By 1961, about 45 teams entered district competitions to select eight provincial finalists. Originally, winning teams from districts were brought together to compete, but costs became a barrier. Instead, a team of judges began travelling to each district to visit the competing mines. To keep things fair, only the judges knew the specifics of the competition. The first competitions didn’t include a knowledge test, like today, but there was a bench test and a field task to be completed under oxygen. For example, one field test was that a team had to travel through a fire door, take a CO test, and return within a limited amount of time. The secrecy of the competition ended in 1979, and once again teams went back to gathering in one place for “The Big Day,” where all district winning teams travelled to a single site to compete. Timmins District hosted the first Mine rescuers wear a two-hour McCaa breathing apparatus during a 1929 training session in Timmins.A mine rescue participant tests an inhalation valve on a McCaa breathing apparatus in 1961. re-united Provincial Mine Rescue Competition, where teams faced the same problems in the same location. Judges still kept the competition details secret, and mine rescue teams, once they had worked through the problem, were asked to do likewise. The next year in Thunder Bay, Linda Bell became the first woman to compete at a provincial competition as a member of the championship-winning Umex Inc.’s Thierry Mine. For the first time – and to date, the only time – the provincial competition ended in a tie in 1998, when mine rescuers from Barrick Gold Corp.’s Holt-McDermott Mine and Falconbridge’s Onaping and Craig Mines had to share bragging rights. The provincial competition moved underground for the first time in 2004 at NORCAT’s Fecunis Adit Mine near Onaping, adding a higher level of realism. The competition is now held underground with video feeds for spectators, with cautions not to share information on social media. Today, 70 years after the first provincial competition, Ontario Mine Rescue holds nine competitions annually – eight district and one provincial – to address specific learning objectives and to ensure that mine rescuers 14 Follow us on Facebook for current mining news. Highly trained rescuers use high-tech tools in mine rescue today. A competitor from K+S Windsor Salt Ojibway Mine uses a tablet computer during the 2019 Ontario Mine Rescue Provincial Competition in Red Lake. The 2019 event was won by K+S Windsor Salt. across the province are trained to the same high standards. Thanks to the evolution of the competition, and the evolution of the organization, mine rescue in Ontario has progressed, and similar progress has occurred internationally over the years. Mine rescue organizations from various nations have expanded their expertise in emergency preparedness and response capability. A half-dozen nations began to formalize a relationship with the first International Mines Rescue Competition (IMRC) in 1999 hosted by the United States. The founding conference of the International Mines Rescue Body (IMRB) was held in 2001 in Poland. Ontario Mine Rescue, whose former general manager Alex Gryska serves as the first secretary treasurer of the IMRB, played a leadership role both in Canada and internationally, a role the organization continues to undertake. Ontario Mine Rescue hosted more than 200 delegates from 20 nations at the sixth IMRB conference in Niagara Falls and Sudbury in 2013. Four years later, OMR hosted 20 international teams from 11 nations and seven Canadian teams from four provinces at the IMRC in Sudbury. Since its creation in 1929, Ontario Mine Rescue has established a reputation for high standards in training, equipment, and emergency response, as well as in the development of safe, effective mine rescue practices. The organization has served as a role model for the establishment of training and safety programs for mine rescue organizations across the country and internationally. M KAITLIN VITT IS AN EDITOR AT MATRIX GROUP PUBLISHING INC. WHO WRITES FOR CANADIAN MINING MAGAZINE. www.canadianminingmagazine.com 1516 Follow us on Facebook for current mining news.www.canadianminingmagazine.com 17 FEATURE RENEWABLE POWER HAS COME of age in the mining industry. The switch to renewables is underway, as solar, wind, and energy storage technologies have advanced and hit the economic “sweet spot” that makes them not just interesting to the mining industries but also positively advantageous. Power supply is a significant cost in mining operations, with costs dependent on various factors such as the existing electricity infrastructure, if any, at a site, the remoteness of locations, road infrastructure, and the distance from ports from where fuel can be sourced. The economics of localized renewable power plants has improved, not just because solar and wind technologies are more advanced and cheaper, but because energy storage, chiefly in the form of battery technology, has reduced considerably and, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), is set to reduce further, falling from $477/kWh to $243/kWh by the end of the decade. The choice of going for a fully renewable system or a hybrid one depends very much on the site: a new mine with an abundance of solar or wind resources would lend itself to a 100 per cent renewable power supply, whereas a mine midway through its anticipated life in a less accommodating climate might be suited to a hybrid system to ensure a reliable and cost- effective power supply for the remainder of its life. Choices for mine operators are also framed by wider societal issues, legislation, and a world increasingly moving in the direction of embracing shorter and more robust targets on carbon dioxide emissions. When it comes to brass tacks, the costs of going renewable are coming down in a predictable fashion, whereas the traditional fossil- fuel-based power supply faces unpredictable fuel and transport costs coupled with legislative uncertainty. This has meant that at the recent Energy and Mines World Congress in Toronto in December last year, the hot topics were solar, wind, and energy storage systems. Wärtsilä is one of the companies that is a frontrunner in this area, having both the technical experience in terms of all the constituent parts in mining power supply – gensets, energy management system, energy storage – as well as experience gained from microgrid and mining projects around the world. Wärtsilä recently won a contract to provide an energy storage solution and management system to the Fekola gold mine in a remote region of Mali, Africa. The mine owner, B2Gold, is extending the life of the mine and expanding production. The mining company is building a 30-MW solar power plant to provide extra power to the mine, which is off-grid and currently runs entirely on heavy fuel oil. Wärtsilä has been contracted to design and engineer a 17-MW/15-MWh energy storage system based on the company’s GEMS energy management solution. One of the benefits of an energy storage system is that it converts an intermittent source of power, such as solar or wind, into a predictable one. Not only does this allow the use of renewable resources to be maximized, but also it allows a reduction in the spinning reserve – the amount of overproduction of electricity by the generators that is needed to ensure the power supply is maintained in case of a generator going down or a dip in solar By Risto Paldanius, Wärtsilä Energy Business Reshaping Power to Meet Mining’s Goals18 Follow us on Facebook for current mining news. production. In this way, having a renewable battery removes the uncertainty of solar and wind and allows the conventional part of the hybrid plant to run more efficiently. It also removes the “instability penalty” of using intermittent renewable resources. The solar power plus the Wärtsilä system is expected to reduce the mine’s processing costs by seven per cent and reduce carbon emissions by about 39,000 pounds each year. The heart of the system, or, more accurately, the “head,” is the energy management system, GEMS, which optimizes all the various elements of the hybrid power plant, minute by minute, to ensure that the right amount of power is delivered while maximizing the system’s renewable output. GEMS will ensure the lowest levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) for the mine, while at the same time securing grid stability and maximizing uptime. The addition of an energy storage system – the battery and GEMS – to a hybrid plant is so efficient that the system usually pays for itself within two or three years. GEMS stands for Greensmith Energy Management System, and the name references a specialist company that was welcomed to the Wärtsilä fold some two years ago, with a product that completed perfectly the portfolio of the company’s products. GEMS technology optimizes the performance of the engines, renewable power source, energy storage system, and the rest of the power plant by performing load forecasting, operation scheduling, real-time equipment control, as well as integrating external information, such as weather data, into its calculations. GEMS also has machine- learning capability, so it can continually optimize performance in light of the ongoing data received. The optimized running of the power plant gives measurable reductions in costs, in terms of fuel, reduced maintenance costs, and longer plant life. Wärtsilä has a strong track record in these types of projects: it recently used its GEMS technology for a grid project covering the whole island of Bonaire, formerly part of the Netherlands Antilles in the Caribbean. The Wärtsilä Modular Block is a pre-fabricated, modularly configurated and expandable enclosure containing high- efficiency medium-speed engine technology with load-taking capabilities. Wärtsilä’s GridSolv energy storage solution optimizes storage technology and software integration.www.canadianminingmagazine.com 19 Again, it was a question of maximizing the renewable component of the island’s power supply, integrating a new battery into the system, and managing heavy fuel oil and diesel engines, along with wind resources. The project allowed the island to increase the percentage of the renewable component of its power supply to 33 per cent from 20 per cent, with a commensurate reduction in fossil-fuel-based supply. Another Wärtsilä innovation for mines is the Wärtsilä Modular Block, a pre-fabricated, modularly configurated and expandable enclosure containing high-efficiency medium- speed engine technology with fast-starting and excellent load-taking capabilities. Wärtsilä announced an order for a Gold Mine in Mali, Africa, in June 2019. The order was the first one signed under the cooperation agreement between Wärtsilä and U.K. mobile power provider Aggreko. Resolute Mining’s Syama off-grid gold mine will have four Wärtsilä Modular Block enclosures, each containing one medium-speed Wärtsilä 32 engine, providing a total of 40 MW of energy. The blocks will replace the existing diesel generators currently powering the mine. The new solution will create substantial monthly savings in fuel costs, and their fast-starting and load- following capabilities will allow the integration of renewables into the mine’s energy system. The agreement with Aggreko includes an option to add a fifth unit to the power plant. The Modular Block offers mine owners the possibility to quickly install, dismantle or relocate their own compact power plant. It is a flexible option for mine owners to scale their state-of-the- art power generation up or down depending on their needs and to transfer generation capacity to other sites. The solution is becoming progressively available worldwide, and, with this first order in Africa, Wärtsilä is confident that its Modular Block solution is one that mine owners will deem interesting for mines in regions where the technology is appropriate. Beyond renewables, Wärtsilä has other carbon-reducing solutions that minimize costs and maximize the efficiency of power plants, such as combined heat and power (CHP) schemes in cold climates, or where there is a need for heat energy. Last year, it delivered a 28-MW CHP plant to the Meliadine Gold Mine project in Canada, owned by Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd. As the mine had a requirement for heating, both in the mine itself and in the associated buildings, the dual-fuel engines – running on light fuel oil but able to switch to natural gas in the future – are used as a heat source. Hot exhaust gases, which are normally wasted, were used for heating, increasing the efficiency of the system enormously – in a conventional system, this waste heat accounts for some 50 per cent of the energy of the fuel. The mine owner is now looking at the possibility of integrating wind power at the site. Efficiency and reliability of power and heating are essential when working in remote Arctic regions, as not only the operation of the mine but also the survival of the workers is dependent on faultless supply. In all scenarios, mining companies choose power supply systems that bring the right balance of cost-efficiency and reliability. With decarbonization and renewable energy entering into the equation, mining companies can now comfortably make the switch knowing that the new technologies on offer will not hit the bottom line but actually increase the cost efficiency and reliability of their operations. M RISTO PALDANIUS IS THE DIRECTOR OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, ENERGY STORAGE & OPTIMISATION FOR WÄRTSILÄ ENERGY BUSINESS. HE BRINGS OVER 20 YEARS OF ENERGY AND POWER GENERATION EXPERIENCE TO WÄRTSILÄ. Next >