Surprise questions & Graphite at Mining Alert AGM

Jeff Green | Aug 30, 2012

Photo:  Paul Gorman of Mega-Graphite speaks at the AGM

There were two topics of interests on the agenda of the Annual General Meeting of the Bedford Mining Alert (BMA) at the Glendower Hall on Westport Road last Saturday, August 25: the proposed regulations stemming from changes to the Ontario Mining Act, and the future prospects for the graphite claims in South Frontenac and Tay Valley.

But a third topic came to the fore at an unlikely juncture, just as the politicians in the room were bringing greetings from their councils. Councilor Greg Hallam from Tay Valley made the usual remarks, but South Frontenac Mayor Gary Davison had a bit of a bone to pick with Ontario Ministry of Northern Development and Mining (MNDM) officials in the room, both on his own and on his township’s behalf.

“I see on your map that my property on Canoe Lake, which consists of three lots my family purchased in 1997, has been staked,” Davison said to Roy Denomme, a senior manager – Mining Lands Division, with MNDM.

“That was a mistake; there is not much more that I can say. It will be corrected. There are 4.5 million parcels of land in Southern Ontario, and sometimes claims are registered in error, but that will be corrected,” Denomme replied.

“What about the property next to it?” Davison continued, “That one is owned by South Frontenac Township.”

“Also an error” said Denomme, “it will also be corrected.”

Due to changes in the Ontario Mining Act, the two parcels are no longer open for staking as mining properties. The changes came about in 2009, after years of lobbying by the Bedford Mining Alert, and other landowner groups.

The regulations that will be the guts of the new mining act for claims that pre-date the new regulations formed the bulk of the ministry’s presentation to the meeting, but first the audience heard from Paul Gorman, the President of Mega-Graphite, a company that has purchased the existing graphite claims in Bedford and the Burgess District of Tay Valley Township. Gorman described the claims as the Bedford-Burgess deposit.

It was these claims that initially formed the impetus for the establishment of the BMA almost 15 years ago, when a number of Bedford property owners noticed that staking, trenching, and blazing had been done on their properties.

They found out the hard way that they did not own the sub-surface rights to their properties and that the properties had been staked and claimed, giving the prospecting company various rights over the properties.

Paul Gorman presented himself as a different kind of mining prospector at the BMA meeting. His background is in merchant banking, and his interest in graphite is based on a set of graphite products for use in the lithium ion batteries, fuel cells, solar panels, and other industrial applications for the nuclear and other industries, as well as the potential applications for graphein, a substance of extraordinary strength and flexibility that is derived from graphite. While the process of separating out graphein has been elusive, recent research is making commercially produced graphein a distinct possibility in the near to mid-term.

“We are not looking to produce graphite for pencils and brake pads,” said Gorman.

All of Mega-Graphite's customer base is in Asia, Gorman said, and they have acquired an existing graphite mine in Uely, Australia, which they are bringing into production in order to serve that market.

“We acquired the Bedford-Burgess properties in order to show covenant to our customers, to demonstrate that we had the supply of graphite to fulfill any contracts we may enter into,” he said.

Over the next two years, Mega-Graphite plans to send small teams of geologists, likely Queen's students, to take rock samples of 5 kg or less from surface deposits on the Bedford and Burgess deposits. Those samples will be milled and studied to see what the commercial value of the graphite is. The entire program, including testing and milling, is going to cost the company about $500,000.

Gorman said the company would be contacting the property owners that will be affected before anyone enters their property to take samples.

In the long term, he said that if Mega-Graphite ever begins a commercial operation at the properties, which is at least 10 years away, it would involve removing rock to a plant in Kingston or Trenton for processing. There will be no processing on site, and he said the extraction would not involve more than minimal, portable equipment, “and about one truck each week traveling to Kingston and back.”

Regulations to put the details to the new Mining Act –

In 2009, the Mining Act in Ontario changed, for the better as far as property owners who do not own the subsurface rights to their properties were concerned. Until 2009, a number of property owners in Southern Ontario only learned that they do not own the subsurface rights to their property when they saw stakes, uprooted trees and trenches on lands they thought they held clean title to. Property owners such as Mary and Don Louks and Peter Greisbach, in the Bedford region, Marty Cadieux near Westport, and Gloria and Frank Morrison in North Frontenac, all became activists who pushed for reform of the Ontario Mining Act after finding signs of staking on land they did not know were open to staking.

As of 2009, all subsurface rights have been frozen in Southern Ontario, which includes all lands south of the French and Mattawa rivers. Only if a surface rights owner requests that their land be opened up for staking will the MNDM open that land up.

However, any existing mining claims as of the act coming into effect, such as the Bedford-Burgess claims, as well as some Wollastonite claims in the region and some uranium claims in North Frontenac and Lanark Highlands, remained in place. As long as those claims are maintained, they will remain active, and the new regulations deal with rules about how prospecting companies are to carry out exploration on those existing claim lands.

For one thing, there will now be an obligation for a prospecting or exploration company to provide 30 days notice to the surface rights holder before they can enter the property. There are also rules about sampling, and about repairs to the land after sampling has taken place.

The regulations were presented to the Bedford Mining Alert AGM by Jamie Fairchild, who is now a Mineral Exploration & Development Consultant at the ministry office in Sudbury.

Fairchild's name is familiar to some in the region. Before joining the ministry a couple of years ago, he worked as the project manager for one of the most contentious exploration projects in Frontenac County history, the Frontenac Ventures exploration project based at the former Robertsville mine in North Frontenac, which was the site of an occupation by the Ardoch and Shabot Obaadjiwan Algonquins in 2008.

“These regulations are designed to foster co-operation between landowners and exploration companies and provides the first set of regulations in Ontario history for smaller scale projects” said Fairchild

The new regulations will deal with the removal of kilograms of material and the trenching of metres of land, instead of the removal of tons of material and the trenching of kilometres of land.

In introducing the new regulations to exploration companies, the MNDM's website says, “Contact with surface rights holders should be made and maintained throughout the mining sequence, as they have a legal right to the land. In some cases, contacting surface rights holders is also a requirement under the Mining Act.” That sort of language that would not have been found on the website as recently as a few years ago.

The new regulations apply to all active claims, even those that pre-date the changes to the mining act.

With changes to the act as far as exploration on private land is concerned, the focus of mineral exploration in Southern Ontario will likely be on Crown land parcels, which although uncommon in South and Central Frontenac, make up the bulk of the land in North Frontenac, Addington Highlands and other townships north of Highway 7.

A portion of Crown Land in Eastern Ontario has been withdrawn from staking while the Algonquin Land Claim is being negotiated. Some of that land will likely be included as part of the land claim settlement, and those portions may be identified if and when an Agreement in Principle on the land claim is reached by the end of the year or early in 2013, perhaps freeing up more land for mining exploration.

Consultation with Aboriginal communities is one of the features of the proposed mining act regulations.

For details, go to mndm.gov.on.ca and navigate to Mines and Minerals and then Mining Act.