New industry for Timmins: Texas company building liquid sulphur dioxide plan in Timmins.

• Author: Kelly, Lindsay
• Position: Mining

A new industry coming to Timmins will expand the area's mining service and supply sector expertise, while creating employment for locals.

In early October, Texas-headquartered Calabrian Corp. announced it would build a liquid sulphur dioxide (S02) production plant in Timmins to serve the mining, paper, and water treatment sectors.

Construction was to begin in late October, and production is expected to start by the fourth quarter of 2016. The new plant will require 20 employees.

Calabrian's CEO, Randy Owens, said the company was considering four different municipalities before settling on Timmins. All the sites being considered were located within close proximity to the gold mines and many were brownfield sites.

But what cemented Timmins as the community of choice were the benefits that came out of a collaboration with the City of Timmins and the Timmins Economic Development Corp. (TEDC).

Owens said the city helped offset some of the site preparatory costs, while the Ontario Northland Transportation Commission (ONTC) agreed to provide rail access to the facility, a key logistical requirement for the company.

"It really made it more or less equal in cost to a brownfield site that we were looking at because of the retrofitting that we would have to do," Owens said. "So, at the end of the day, it came down to just the eagerness, the speed, and the helpfulness that the City of Timmins exhibited, and it just made this feel like the place that we should locate this new facility." The new site is located across from a Goldcorp mine. The Timmins branch of Bestech has been hired as the project engineering firm.

In gold mining, cyanide is commonly used to leach gold from the ore, but following the process, the cyanide then needs to be destroyed, Owens explained. S02 is used to eliminate the cyanide in a manner that doesn't harm the environment. Calabrian uses a proprietary process called...