Discover Abitibi project back on track: Geophysical airborne survey results expected by year's end.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: Timmins: Special Report - Brief Article

After lying dormant for most of the winter months as a result of administrative problems, a collaborative mining industry effort in Timmins and Kirkland Lake to search for new mineral deposits has resumed.

The $10-million Discover Abitibi exploration project was not only introduced to search for new deposits of copper, lead, zinc, gold and possibly diamonds buried thousands of metres below the surface of the Canadian Shield in northeastern Ontario, but also to search for new economic development opportunities to keep the industry sustainable.

Discover Abitibi was launched last winter as a community- and industry-driven approach to applying geoscience technologies for mineral exploration and development opportunities in the geological wonder that is the Abitibi Greenstone belt between Timmins and Kirkland Lake.

The initiative is now alive and kicking after some project management reshuffling over the winter related to conflicts between the original management group and the government funding agencies FedNor and Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corp. - which had ground the process to a halt.

Though emphasis was made at the project's outset to utilize the latest in exploration equipment, Dan Gignac, Falconbridge's Kidd Creek mine manager and chairman of the project's management committee, says the project was not designed to be a scientific research and development field test for new technologies.

"The real focus, as far as I'm concerned, has got to be promoting economic development, not only spending money on exploration, but in areas that have the best chance of finding another ore body that we can turn into a mine and ultimately create spinoffs in direct employment and in the service sector," Gignac says.

"We don't want to do more science; we want to find ore bodies," says Gignac, in describing some of the management difficulties the industry and government players encountered.

Gignac says the core groups, which include prospectors, industry representatives and development officials, are dusting off and re-examining some of the dozen or so proposals put forward during planning sessions and preparing them to take forward to the funding agencies.

The lead funding agencies such as FedNor and the heritage fund are expected to pick up the bulk of the project's costs, while local stakeholders will contribute about 10 per cent through cash contributions and in-kind services.

In the course of their administrative "re-jig," as Gignac calls it, the...