Six Decades of Potash Mining in Saskatchewan: Major Achievements + Some of the Challenges Ahead (Part 1: Underground Mining)
Arnfinn Prugger and Dave Mackintosh
Abstract:
Looking back on the past 60 years of potash mining history in Saskatchewan, we thought about some of the great challenges that workers had to overcome in order to make the potash industry in our province as successful as it is today. What are the major achievements attained by Saskatchewan potash engineering and technical staff over the past 60 years? You can make up your own list, but here is what we came up with:
In this presentation we will cover some of the history of each challenge, and discuss the solutions worked out for each difficulty. Note that we will focus only on underground mining challenges since this is our area of expertise – we will leave it to others to come up with a similar discussion of processing accomplishments that were realized over the past 60 years (i.e. “Part 2: Potash Processing”). We end the talk with a brief discussion of what we see as challenges ahead for the Saskatchewan potash industry; these are topics that we both wondered about, but never resolved, during our working lifetimes.
Author Biographies:
Arnfinn Prugger (Ph. D., P. Geo.) was born in Kirkenes Norway in 1957, emigrating to Canada with his parents in 1960 (where his father worked in the fledgling Saskatchewan potash industry), to spend his formative years in Saskatoon. Arnfinn’s first job in mining was in 1976 at the Cominco Vanscoy Potash Mine. He graduated with a B. Sc. in Geological Engineering (Geophysics) from Queen’s University in 1982, then pursued graduate studies at the University of Saskatchewan, completing his M. Sc. in 1985 and his Ph. D. in 1994. Arnfinn worked at PotashCorp (now Nutrien) from 1990 through 2018, ending his career as Vice President, Technical Services. Arnfinn was a Member of the Board of the Saskatchewan Potash Producers Association from 2012 through 2018, and he was a Board Member of Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile S. A. (SQM), a lithium and fertilizer producer, from 2015 through 2019 (serving as Chair of the SQM Safety, Health & Environment Committee for this entire time). He was a Canadian Institute of Mining (CIM) Distinguished Lecturer for the 2018 / 2019 academic year. Arnfinn currently serves as Independent Board Chair of the International Minerals Innovation Institute (IMII), and he is on the Board of Prairie Lithium Inc., a Saskatchewan based lithium production “startup” company.
Dave Mackintosh started as a rock mechanics technician at the newly opened Cominco, now Nutrien, Vanscoy Saskatchewan potash mine in 1969. Completing a BSc. in geology at the University of Saskatchewan in 1985, Dave continued as Chief Mine Engineer, then Senior Project Engineer at Cominco until 1996, when looking for new challenges, he formed ADM Consulting Limited. Since then, Dave has been fortunate to work on projects in Thailand, Argentina, Chile and Brazil, Britain, the Congo, the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. Dave has published numerous papers on potash rock mechanics and geology, and continues to mentor students as well as incumbent rock mechanics engineers at various mines. Dave is a life member and Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, a member of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Saskatchewan, the CIM Rock Engineering Society and the International Society of Rock Mechanics.
