NEWS FROM THE FIELD : MINING

AITC finding new ways to engage students

Moose Jaw Today – Agriculture in the Classroom (AITC) is hardly taking a break this year because of COVID-19, as the non-profit organization has a number of new programs up its sleeve to help bring agriculture to classrooms across Saskatchewan.

As an organization, AITC is dedicated to connecting students and teachers with the many facets of the agriculture industry, usually through hands-on, in-person programming like farm tours, interactive events, classroom presentations and the annual Food Farm program every spring.

But this year, the organization is focusing on reworking its educational materials for teachers to implement themselves in their classrooms, thanks to the pandemic and public health restrictions.
A lot of the organization’s programming has moved online, with resources and activities available to teachers and homeschooling parents. But AITC is still working to provide more than just online lessons, as the organization finds interactive methods are the best way to demonstrate agriculture in action.

Programming is focusing on a more individual nature, like the Little Green Thumbs and Little Green Sprouts programs that are continuing this year, and activity kits for students that avoid group work.
It was important for AITC to adapt programming for this year, so they could continue exposing young students to the different aspects of agriculture and the industry.

“Lots of students will say, ‘Oh, I want to be an engineer,’ and they can be an engineer in agriculture. They can be a lawyer and work in the field. If they’re interested in biology, there is a tremendous opportunity to work right here in Saskatchewan and be on the forefront of some cutting-edge technology,” said AITC executive director Sarah Shymko. “So, we’re hoping that with our inquiry-based and hands-on resources, we’re helping kids to become critical thinkers and view agriculture through a positive lens.”

Local contractors encouraged to expand skill set

Meadow Lake Now – An Alberta-based company has been working on a 21-kilometre stretch across Highway 4 south heading toward Glaslyn.

Ministry of Highways and Infrastructure spokesperson Steve Shaheen said there are not many local companies who are skilled with seal coat application and is encouraging local contractors to get involved.
“At the present time, there are no Saskatchewan contractors that can do engineering seal work. However, priority Saskatchewan has been set up by SaskBuilds to help with the development with Saskatchewan suppliers,” Shaheen said. “Their efforts might encourage a local company to get into this line of work.”

The Ministry uses the best-value procurement model for construction contracts which considers safety, price, experience among other factors.

The seal coat project underway is being constructed by West-Can, an Alberta-based company with some Saskatchewan roots. While the provincial government recognizes the need to support Saskatchewan-based contractors and employers in the reopening of Saskatchewan, the ministry recently updated its procurement to include a community benefit Saskatchewan section.

Environmental engineer wins Nutana riding

CTV News – Saskatchewan NDP’s Erika Ritchie, P.Eng., was elected in the Saskatoon Nutana riding.

Ritchie received 61 per cent of the vote and defeated Saskatchewan Party candidate Kyle Mazer and Green Party candidate Albert Chubak.
Ritchie is an environmental engineer and sustainability business consultant with E.S. Ritchie Consulting. She has worked to prioritize environmental protection and sustainability in resource development.
Ritchie received a Bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and a Master’s degree in environmental engineering from the University of Saskatchewan.

New Holland Agriculture goes green with solar panels at Saskatoon facility

CTV News – A Saskatoon-based agriculture company is now home to 1,000 new solar panels.

CNH Industrial partnered with the Saskatchewan Environmental Society (SES) Solar Co-operative to get the array of solar panels.
More than a year in the making, the panels will yield 400 kilowatts of power for the New Holland Agriculture facility. The solar panels will produce enough energy to power 70 households.

The panels were installed by MiEnergy and took one month to complete. The panels were a step in the company looking to go greener.
CNH Industrial says they are working towards reducing their carbon footprint and installing solar panels was a good start.
The panels purchased for Solar Co-op’s newest project will reside on the New Holland Agriculture site producing renewable energy for their operations and generating a return for SES Solar Coop shareholders through lease payments.

CNH Industrial says that for the 25 years they have these panels leased, they will offset eight per cent of their total energy consumption off grid with non-renewable energy sources.

Potash produced in environmentally friendly way

Mining.com – A Saskatchewan company developed a new, environmentally friendlier mechanism to produce potash without generating salt tailings and requiring no surface brine ponds.
According to Saskatoon-based Gensource Potash, the absence of tailings eliminates decommissioning risks, while not having ponds removes the single largest negative environmental impact of conventional potash mining.

The extraction method Gensource created injects a hot salt (NaCl) brine into horizontal caverns in the ore body, which selectively dissolves potash, (KCl) leaving salt in place. The KCI-rich brine is then processed (KCI ‘drops out’ through cooling crystallization) and the NaCl brine is reheated and re-circulated back to the cavern to repeat the process.

The process is carried out by a series of independent production facilities that are a fraction the size of a traditional potash project and can produce between 250,000 – 300,000 t/year of the fertilizer.
Set to be installed at the Tugaske project, which is within the company’s Vanguard Area in south-central Saskatchewan, the modules are said to use 75 per cent less water per tonne of potash than conventional solution mining methods. They also have the ability to use brackish water sources, which reduces freshwater usage even further.
Gensource also reported that power at Tugaske is self-generated using natural gas, not coal, which avoids up to 24,500 tonnes/year CO2e of emissions.

Explorers targeting Sask’s diversified mineral prospects

Resource World – Saskatchewan is the largest exporter of agri-food products in Canada. However, it is also notable for hosting a variety of mineral resources and even heat for a new geothermal plant.
Saskatchewan has approximately half of the world’s potash reserves and eight per cent of the world’s recoverable uranium reserves. The Athabasca basin of northern Saskatchewan has the world’s highest-grade uranium mines. Its 2019 production of 18 million pounds of U3O8 are being used in Canada and globally to generate some 306 billion kilowatt hours of electricity which is equivalent to powering about 28 million homes with an almost zero carbon footprint – and there is a great deal of uranium yet to be discovered and to mine.

It is actually astounding how much electricity nuclear power generates. The largest offshore windfarm in the world (Walney in Irish Sea) generates less than two Mw per square kilometre. The largest nuclear power plant in world (Kashiwazaki-Kariwa in Japan) generates 1,955 Mw per square kilometre.

Global demand for electricity is expected to grow 76 per cent by 2030, plus the increasing power usage through charging electric vehicles. The world is going to need a great deal of uranium as there are 442 current operable reactors, 54 reactors under construction, 439 reactors ordered, planned and proposed which could lead to a uranium shortage.
In addition, Saskatchewan has deposits of gold (La Ronge Gold Belt), coal, diamonds, platinum, palladium, rare earth elements, copper, zinc, nickel, sodium and potassium sulphates and mineralized brines. Saskatchewan mineral sales totalled $7.3 billion in 2019.

Mining companies directly contributed approximately $1.8 billion in provincial, federal and municipal taxes to government in 2017 while providing more than 30,000 jobs.

It has been estimated that between 2008 and 2028 the Saskatchewan mineral industry will invest over $50 billion in expansions and new mines.

Protecting Saskatchewan lakes from contamination

University of Saskatchewan – Using the Canadian Light Source synchrotron, a University of Saskatchewan-led research team developed a method for monitoring uranium contaminants in mine tailings using samples from McClean Lake.

Numerous researchers have studied the chemistry of nickel, arsenic, selenium and molybdenum in Orano Canada’s tailings management facility at McClean Lake, but to date little was known about residual uranium. One of the challenges has been the extremely low concentrations of the element left after processing at Orano’s ore mill, which began operating in 1997.
Now researchers at USask and Orano Canada have developed a method for determining precisely where uranium is located in the McClean Lake tailings and its chemical form. The findings were published in the Journal of Spectroscopy and Related Phenomena.
Orano and other mining companies take the novel methodology this team has developed and tailor it to answer questions they have about the impact of their operations.

The researchers used a technique called X-ray microprobe which involves focusing a beam of light on the sample to “excite” the chemical elements that are present. When they are stimulated by the energy in the light, the elements emit X-ray fluorescence (XRF) signals that can then be captured in an image similar to a heat map, showing where they are situated.

USask chemistry researcher Arthur Situm, lead author on the team’s recently published paper, says a challenge their team had to overcome is that XRF signals emitted by potassium overlap with those given off by uranium — making it difficult to pinpoint the exact location of the uranium in a sample.

The team had a breakthrough when they identified the precise energy that excites the uranium in the McLean Lake tailings sample without also exciting the potassium, which is present in far greater concentrations.

Using a technique called XANES at the CLS, the team was subsequently able to confirm that their method accurately identified the location of uranium in the tailings. The researchers also used XANES to determine the chemical form of the uranium, a first for the McClean Lake facility.

Sask banks on abandoned well cleanup

National Observer – Saskatchewan is putting more money into fixing abandoned oil wells, a move it says will boost economic recovery by getting oil and gas sector workers back on the job.

The government will allocate $100 million in federal funding for eligible oil and gas operators who collaborate with Saskatchewan-based companies in the first stage of its plan to retire wells and facilities that are no longer viable. To date, the province has approved $34 million worth of work packages for abandonment and reclamation work on inactive wells and other facilities.

The funding represents phase one of Saskatchewan’s Accelerated Site Closure Program (ASCP), which launched in May, with the first approved projects announced in July.

The government said the Saskatchewan Resource Council (SRC), along with SaskBuilds, is providing procurement expertise to ensure Saskatchewan-based service companies are used.

As many as 8,000 inactive wells and facilities are expected to be abandoned and reclaimed over the life of the program, which is expected to support some 2,100 full-time equivalent jobs.
There are currently 11 operators and more than 100 service companies involved in the approved work packages, which are evenly distributed across the province’s four major oil-producing regions.

Canadian Light Source synchrotron working towards upgrade to ‘2.0’

CBC Saskatchewan – Toby Bond says it’s a common misconception that the massive machine where he works in Saskatoon could create a black hole, but he’s not denying the night shift at the particle-accelerator facility can feel like being in a science fiction movie.
“It’s a strange place to be overnight,” said Bond, an industrial scientist at the Canadian Light Source synchrotron in Saskatoon. “If you happen to doze off and wake up, you kind of feel like you woke up on a spaceship and that you were, you know, abducted in the middle of the night or something.”

More than 3,000 experiments have been completed at the facility. It has been used to examine the effects of acid rain on spider’s silk, to find the cause of missing teeth in a Bronze Age skull, to see inside the rib of a tyrannosaurus rex and look at the chemistry of soil. It has also helped scientists develop various methods of cancer treatments.
It helps researchers look inside objects at a level of detail not possible using a traditional X-ray or high-powered microscope.
At the end of each beamline, which branches off a stop-sign shaped ring used to produce the light, there is a place to put the object that is being examined.

“If you walk across the beamlines and talk to all the people who are using them on any given night, you’ll run into a physicist, a chemist, a biologist, medical researcher and engineer, a geologist,” said Bond.
Fifteen years after it opened, a plan for the next incarnation of the facility — CLS 2.0 — is nearing completion. The executive team has been working on the plan since 2016.

The new beam will be 700 times brighter and more coherent than the current facility. It has not been decided if the upgrade would replace the existing facility or build on it.

There are about 40 synchrotrons operating in the world of varying power and ability. The Canadian Light Source synchrotron, which opened in 2005, is a “third generation” facility in terms of technology.

SaskTel, USask collaborate to support innovation

University of Saskatchewan – SaskTel and the University of Saskatchewan (USask) are partnering to launch a living laboratory at the university’s Livestock and Forage Centre of Excellence (LFCE) to test, develop and demonstrate world-class agricultural technologies.
Through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), SaskTel and USask will focus on smart farming research and innovation to accelerate transformation in Saskatchewan’s agriculture industry. Smart farming involves collecting and analyzing big data so that producers can make informed and sustainable farm management decisions that improve productivity.

This initiative — driven by engineering, agriculture and computer science researchers — will focus on conducting research, improving education around Smart Farming and testing and validating new ag-tech ideas and solutions.

The LFCE would be the first research Smart Farm in Canada focused on maximizing efficiency in livestock operations through the latest Internet of Things-based technology in an interconnected wireless environment.

Terry Fonstad, Ph.D, P.Eng, FEC, associate dean research and partnerships with the USask College of Engineering, said the MOU underscores the commitment LFCE has made to livestock producer groups to serve as a powerhouse for innovative research and teaching that will improve livestock production in Canada and around the world.
“The MOU brings together new knowledge and applied research at USask in areas of strength in engineering, agriculture and computer science with the infrastructure and expertise at SaskTel to advance agriculture,” Fonstad said.

Engineering grad student recognized globally for academic and humanitarian accomplishments

University of Regina – A University of Regina postgraduate has been recognized as one of the world’s best electronic engineering students by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE) Power & Energy Society (PES).

Usman Munawar, a masters of electronic systems engineering student in the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Sciences, recently was awarded a 2020 IEEE PES Outstanding Student Scholarship. From a global pool of more than 10,000 student members, Munawar was one of the five recipients of the scholarship and the only student from Canada.

Originally from Pakistan, Munawar completed his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus and worked as a Senior Research Officer/Adjunct Lecturer at the KICS University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore.

When deciding where to complete his masters, Munawar was drawn to Regina based on the research interest he shared with the U of R’s Dr. Zhanle Wang. He was impressed by the reputation of the U of R’s electronic systems engineering program.

Since arriving at the U of R, Munawar has become president of the Engineering Graduate Students’ Association, earned a 4.0 grade point average, received a MITACS Research Training award, had 12 journal and conference publications and has travelled around the world to present technical talks and research. He also volunteers with the University of Regina Faculty Association as a sessional committee member and has organized 10 technical engineering activities around campus.
Through IEEE, Munawar has completed humanitarian work including a Smart Village project in Nepal, helping to bring electricity to off-the-grid communities. He has also given back in his native Pakistan, setting up a smart computer lab for K-12 students.

USask welcomes newest Schulich Leaders

Yorkton This Week – Arliss Sidloski, a graduate of Weyburn Comprehensive High School, is among the University of Saskatchewan (USask) recipients of the Schulich Leader Scholarship.

Sidloski, 18, is a recipient of the $100,000 Schulich Leader Scholarship. Sidloski entered the College of Engineering this fall.
Sidloski was selected for her outstanding academic achievements in science and her community work to support children with special needs. In 2019, she helped start an all-abilities soccer program and was captain of her high school soccer, basketball and cross-country teams.
Sidloski said she’s excited to learn about the different aspects of engineering in the coming years, and this summer, joined the University of Saskatchewan Space Team to design and prepare a cube-satellite for orbital launch in late 2021. It will be Saskatchewan’s first satellite in space.

“It is humbling to be honoured with the prestigious Schulich Leader Scholarship and join the community of other high achieving award recipients,” said Sidloski. “I am filled with gratitude that Mr. Schulich and his foundation have provided me with this opportunity.”
Through the Schulich Foundation, these entrance scholarships are awarded to 100 high school graduates this year, enrolling in a science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) undergraduate program at 20 partner universities in Canada, including USask.

“Schulich Leader Scholarships are the premiere STEM scholarship program in Canada and the world,” said Schulich. “With their university expenses covered, they can focus their time on their studies, research projects, extracurriculars, and entrepreneurial ventures. They are the next generation of entrepreneurial-minded technology innovators.”

Engineering made-in-Saskatchewan solutions

University of Saskatchewan – When a shift begins in a potash mine, the first man to enter the massive underground room where work is taking place does something that might seem strange to the average person.

He bangs the roof with a long iron bar. And listens.

The sound that returns to his ears tells him something crucial to the safety of his team: Either the roof is safe, or it is not.
“If you hit any hollow parts, it’s very easy to hear,” explains Craig Funk, B.Eng, M.Sc, director of geo-services and land for Nutrien, the international mining and agricultural products giant. “You can tell right away; it’s a very definitive sound.

“What happens at that point is the person sounding will mark the area and we will deal with it by scaling the rock down or putting in rock bolts. This tool has probably been around since mining began. It’s one of the oldest tools out there.”
While it’s unlikely potash mines would ever do without this simple but highly effective tool, Nutrien wondered if a digitized version could be created.

Enter Travis Wiens, M.Sc., Ph.D., P.Eng., associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Saskatchewan. With financial support from the International Mineral Innovation Institute (IMII), he has started a research project to find a solution.
“We had a student who went underground and essentially took a scaling bar, a two-to-three-metre iron bar and he banged it off the roof and recorded the sound,” Wiens said. “He did that 3,000 times at five different mine sites. We have a large library of these recordings, and at the same time, there was an experienced miner there who told him whether it was a stable roof or an unstable roof. So, we have a large library of recordings that have been labelled as safe or potentially unsafe.”

“We put (that data) into some machine learning algorithms and asked (them) to try to predict whether the roof would be safe or unsafe or unknown. We’re in the research stage right now; the product development will come next.”

Funk says the digitized sounding bar “could be very helpful, say, in robotic situations. We have travel ways underground that have been there for 30 years. We have to regularly inspect those. The roofs could be 18, 20 feet high and difficult for a person to sound.
“There’s a variety of applications. The sky’s the limit. You could incorporate it onto machines; as the machine is moving along, it’s sounding.”

It’s just one project Wiens has undertaken for Nutrien, and it demonstrates the collaborative approach to innovation he’s taking with the mining industry.