The Road to Muskeg Valley
Take a former gold miner, a limestone outcrop in the heart of the oilsands and a soaring demand for industrial minerals and what do you get? Alberta's largest hard-rock mining project, that's what
by Will Gibson
Given the relative proximity to the Fort McKay First Nation, about three kilometres east of the quarry site, Rowe has worked hard to woo and win his neighbours. That includes hiring Noramac Ventures Ltd., jointly owned by the band and Edmonton-based North American Construction Group, to prepare the quarry site. In October, Birch Mountain announced a similar partnership with the Fort McKay First Nation to form a marketing company that will sell both the quarry’s aggregate and the quicklime.
Rowe also hopes to eventually staff the quarry and plant with band members, but he will have to compete with his customers. “We’ll have to be competitive with the oilsands plants in terms of salaries, but it makes sense to us to staff a large percentage of our operating workforce from Fort McKay.”
Birch Mountain had also accrued no small amount of good will with its neighbours by moving the quicklime plant from its original site, when its archaeological survey — one of the conditions of the project’s environmental impact assessment — uncovered an important find. “Our consultants found some very significant historical usage described it as one of the most significant sites in Alberta, so we went to the provincial government,” said Rowe, who has also kept band members apprised through by hosting a series of open houses in the region to discuss the findings with elders. “We delineated the site, so that it will be undisturbed by any development now or in the future.”
All in all, however, Rowe prefers his new head-aches of placating neighbours, wooing workers and assuaging regulators to Birch Mountain’s challenges as a mining startup. When the company went public in 1995, it was a typical mining junior exploring for precious metals on properties in Alberta, Yukon, B.C., Manitoba and Indonesia while trolling for capital in Calgary. That business model lasted until 1998 (a year after the mid-1990s gold rush imploded along with Calgary’s Bre-X Minerals), when Rowe turned the company’s efforts towards finding and extracting nanoparticulate transition metals — tiny slivers of gold, silver and other precious metals discovered in rock desposits by electron microscopes — for commercial production.
Birch Mountain’s R&D period was marked by an increasingly strained relationship between the company and the Canadian Venture Exchange (now the TSX Venture Exchange), which halted and then suspended trading of Birch Mountain shares in June 2000 after the company issued a news release that stated it had discovered a new form of naturally occurring metals in the gold and platinum group on its Athabasca Prairie Gold property in northeastern Alberta.
After Birch Mountain agreed to an independent audit into the new release’s claims, the exchange again suspended trading in Birch Mountain shares (ticker symbol BMD) in February 2001 after the auditor, Associated Mining Consultants Ltd. of Calgary, concluded “there is little precious metal in the BMD samples of Athabasca rocks and that the sporadic positive results reported are due to interferences, contamination or other known reasons.” The auditor’s conclusions and exchange’s suspension angered Birch Mountain, which appealed the decision to the Alberta Securities Commission. After more than 13 months of legal wrangling in various forums, the TSX Venture Exchange reinstated Birch Mountain’s shares for trading on March 11, 2002. At the time, Birch Mountain announced it would establish separate operating divisions for mineral technology and mineral exploration.
While Birch Mountain’s high-tech division has continued its work in extracting precious metal nanoparticulates, Rowe changed his tack towards finding something to generate more immediate cash flow. Rowe’s previous company, Brougham Geoquest, had developed a patented airborne technology to find gravel deposits. Given the booming region’s voracious appetite for -concrete, Rowe began hunting for a suitable feedstock on his company’s properties in northeastern Alberta, where Birch Mountain held mineral rights for almost one million acres of land, an area roughly two-thirds the size of Banff National Park. However, most limestone in the region is buried about 100 metres below the region’s rolling forests and muskeg as a bed underneath the layer of oilsands.
“We needed to find a location where there was limestone at the surface,” said Rowe, an engineer who spent most of his career in oil and gas exploration.
They found that outcropping of limestone aggregate near the Muskeg River, opposite Fort MacKay. Moreover, the material passed the test with the mixers. “Our stuff makes concrete about 20% stronger,” Rowe said. The outcropping also doesn’t contain any oilsands deposits, although Birch Mountain has signed co-development agreements with the major oilsands companies that allow them to develop their overlapping mineral interests, lying one on top of the other beneath the boreal forest. “These agreements provide a framework for co-operation,” Rowe explained. “Basically, we stay out of each other’s way while we develop our resources.”
While providing a framework for peaceful co-existence, Birch Mountain’s agreements with First Nations and energy concerns should also help appease the NRCB when Birch Mountain brings forward the Hammerstone Project for approval in the coming months. It will also not hurt to have Almdal, a majordomo within Alberta’s Progressive Conservative party, working on the company’s behalf. However, it is unlikely a plant making a product used to treat industrial-processed water and sulphur emissions from smokestacks will encounter much in the way of opposition. In fact, any project that helps the alchemists who turn clumps of oil-soaked dirt into sweet crude probably won’t be too difficult to sell in the provincial capital. Or anywhere else in Alberta for that matter. “Birch Mountain has products that will definitely interest oilsands companies,” said industry spokesman Glennon. “We’re looking forward to seeing them go forward.”
Which means that the streets of Fort McMurray still won’t be paved with glitter and gold. But there will be less potholes jarring those flashy rims.
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