Teck - Applied Research Technology

Tucked behind Teck Trail Operations, on the banks of the mighty Columbia lies a small, World War Two era building that plays a major role in Teck’s operations now and into the future. The Applied Research and Technology division, affectionately known as ART, in its most basic explanation, answers seemingly simple questions with in-depth, high technology, seriously cerebral answers and translates them into operational excellence. State of the ART indeed.

At its core, the business of mining may appear simple. Pull minerals and ore out of the ground, process it and ship to market. Even just scratching the surface and going slightly deeper however reveals questions that lead to more questions and an atmosphere of continual improvement and evolution in everything from environmental performance, maximizing every minute ounce of valuable resource on up to maximizing efficiency in all processes and design.

Take crushing and grinding rock for example. Certain minerals are desired, others are waste. Making sure you’re getting everything you want and leaving nothing behind, put into practice can mean millions of dollars in gained potential revenue. Utilizing high technology including X-Ray analysis and Electron Microscopy, technicians are continually working on characterizing ore from existing mines and new deposits  to optimize the processing.

“The idea of crushing and grinding is to get to the point that you have liberated those particles you want so you can reject what you don’t want,” explained Rob Stephens , Section Leader ot the Coal and Energy Group. “It sounds simple but understanding what that means and how you design the crushing and grinding system or doing plant surveys to understand how well we are doing at recovering what we want and rejecting what we don’t want and what that data can be used for is quite complex.”

From exploration and predicting the economics of potential deposits before extraction to new plant design, every aspect of Teck operations at some point gets examined, analyzed, studied, improved and rolled out through ART.

“A lot of the mine stuff is taking technology and optimizing what we have and understanding and turning data into information you can use to improve,” added Stephens. “We have a sea of data. How do we turn that into information we can work with and then even better, how do we turn that into knowledge we can act on? That’s the very core of what we do.”

Using advanced imaging data, the efficiency of how well truck beds are being loaded is being examined and methods to understand, improve and roll out the results is just one example of the type of research ART conducts. How much energy it takes to break certain rocks, may seem like a small issue, but if wrong could lead to hundreds of millions of dollars in money wasted through incorrect plant design. In short, answering the basic questions, and then re-answering them over and over, improving at each level is critical to the economics of the company.

Teck, through the ART division is also a big player in collaborative research within the industry. Supporting a number of NSERC (National Science and Research Council) industry chairs, universities and other research groups more and more the industry is working more closely together on raising the bar.

“Historically that work would have been work done by us and then the next company and the next company would have done basically the same thing and so on,” explained Stephens. “In terms of the test work we’re doing now, some of that was done at the universities and now we’re starting our proprietary work at a higher level in the project.”

Teck funds major projects using outside groups where the facilities or skills would be difficult to reproduce in-house. One example can be seen in a current project in the oil sands  where ART has three people in Edmonton running a multi-million dollar project piloting an alternative way of treating bitumen froth to produce a product that could be piped straight to refineries, bypassing upgraders

While unremarkable in its physical form, the ART building, originally constructed in 1941, with several major additions since, produces truly  remarkable results and houses perhaps the most highly educated and culturally diverse workforce in the region. Of the 52 employees , there are currently 17 PhD’s, 10 Master’s Degrees and 14 Bachelor’s degrees, the majority of the remaining employees having come out of technology programs such as NAIT (Northern Alberta Institute of Technology), SAIT (Southern Alberta Institute of Technology and BCIT(British Columbia Institute of Technology).

Challenges finding the skill sets they need domestically have also led to a multi-cultural face of the division. Currently employing at least one person from every continent on earth (Antarctica excluded), there is representation from Korea ,Australia, New Zealand, China, South Africa, Iran, Morocco, Poland, England, Mexico, Chile, and more.

From one small building, in the shadow of Teck Trail operations, right here in our backyard, the global mining community is being driven into a continually more efficient and productive industry.