 Okay, so we are at the Fairmont Hotel in Toronto. We are about to interview for a second time Carlos Diaz, the interviewer as usual will be William McCrae, and the date is August 25th, 2015. So Carlos, if you could just please state your full name. Okay, my full name is Carlos Diaz. And I am 83 years old, and I was born in Chile, and a very brief summary of my career would be as follows. As a young graduate from the School of Engineering, I was hired to become an assistant professor at the University of Chile in the field of high-temperature process metallurgy. I had the opportunity to do graduate work in this field at Columbia University first, and then at Imperial College, and I have to say that at that time, the faculty of physics and mathematics of the University of Chile, mainly engineering, was undergoing a major upgrading under the leadership of the rector of the university who happened to be a historian. That's very important to mention. And he thought that it was very important to make sure that the faculty was going to be able to develop the engineers that the country would need to leave the third world behind. So the people of my generation had the opportunity to write a very important chapter in the development of the faculty. When I was student at the University of Chile, there were probably not more than five full time academics in the entire faculty. And when I moved to Canada in 1975, there were probably 150 full time academics. She really saw the boom of academia. And the key thing, Wil, was that our involvement in what was going on was like a hundred percent. And my wife would tell me that the university had become like another for me. Spending too much time with the university, not enough with your wife. And the children. And the children. I practically didn't see my children growing. And I am happy that life gave me an opportunity to see this stage of development in my grandchildren. I'm very close to them now a days and I spend a lot of time with these young people. Anyways, I would say in very general terms, not children, a summary of a very important part of my life because I did work as an academic at the University of Chile for 20 to 23 years. And I was head, I actually was asked to form and I was the first head of the Department of Chemistry in the faculty. Then I was head of the Department of Mining and Extracting Metallurgy and for a few years I was the director of the School of Engineering. So when I came here, as I told Anna, my nap sack was loaded with history and my heart was bleeding because I was living behind a period of my life which has been my life. Yes, and something you had helped built as well. Right. Something you saw. Right. Right. Anyways, the second stage of my career was my work at INCO and I came to INCO, I had, well I came to Canada, I had no option because I was being targeted by the military regime down there so it wasn't good. And why Canada, did you have other options or why was it Canada? First, I contacted my two key professors abroad, Richard Sundinich, Richard Sundt, at the Imperial College and her Kellogg at Columbia University. And as a result of what they did, I did get an invitation to join INCO. They were former classmates, lab mates from the two universities working for INCO. The vice president of research and development at INCO was a former student of her Kellogg and he had a very good relationship with her, Dr. Charlie O'Neill. And the section head of pyrometallurgy at the INCO Research Lab had been very close to me at the Imperial College. We developed a very good relationship. So when they heard my name and they knew what was the situation in Chile, they said, come and I came with the entire family. But it sounds simple today but it wasn't that simple at that time. That easy. It wasn't that easy. So what was your first impression of Canada and of your job at INCO? Well, in one respect, I felt very comfortable because I knew a number of people and they did their utmost to make me feel at home. But on the other hand, I would strongly miss my Chilean activities, you know, and at home we would discuss this situation with my wife, the children, when we came here, we were already grown up children. Our oldest daughter was 17. Okay. She was ready for university? Yes. And the youngest was four. And because they went with us to the UK, when I did my PhD at the Imperial College, they went to school there. So their English was even better than mine, you know, so it was relatively easy for them to integrate to their new environment very rapidly. They made new friends. But in my case, the ghost of the past came to visit me quite frequently in the first period here in Canada. I would be in a meeting and look around and I would say, what am I doing here, you know? And as I said, this was a subject of conversation with my wife who incidentally had been in Chile, mostly a housewife, although later in life down there she entered university and she graduated in political sciences, so that she had never worked. So I would tell her, you are past in Chile, it's not like mine, despite the fact that she did participate in a number of activities relating to the university, but her work activities started here in Canada. The first thing she did was to enter Sheridan College and she said, I'm going to take social working and she graduated in two years and she started to work. So her life away from home started here. It was a different type of situation. Anyways, back to my second beginning. After two years in the process engineering group here in the Toronto office, which was located in one of those black towers of the TV bank, one day I was told, we need you at the lab. We have to replace the section head there of pyrometallurgy. This is going to be your new job. So I moved to the lab and then I was deeply involved in research. The pyrotechnic group was a big group. There were about 15 people in between research engineers or research scientists and technicians. We had quite a number of projects. It was busy but it was fun. For me, it was fun. So I never completely forgot about Chile. But I was fully satisfied with a new career in industrial research. At that time, we used to parcel out more fundamental work to universities. So I started to get in touch with Canadian universities. That was practically not exactly from coast to coast because in the east, there is not much going on in extractive metallurgy. But I had the opportunity to meet people from McGill, all of the entire universities and the University of British Columbia. We started a major project with the University of British Columbia. At that time, the key man there was Keith Brimacom, a fellow who had a fantastic academic career. He obtained the Order of Canada because of the work he was doing mainly for the steel industry. Keith had been at the Imperial College at the same time that I was there. So we had a relationship on top of which we could build up an even stronger relationship here. And at the University of Toronto, we started to do work with Jim Toguri first and then Tolstheim Utinger. And, you know, because of the paper yesterday that my relationship with Tolstheim was very profound. And I'm going to come back to that when we talk about the mentality. So this was a completely new world. And Dr. O'Neill gave me all the space and freedom that I would need to start new activities, not necessarily directly relating to the research work that we were doing in the pyroglue. And I started to talk to him about the possibility of developing stronger relations with the copper industry in Chile. He said, go ahead, go ahead. And that was how the copper conference started. Yes, you're known to be the founder of that. One of them. One of them. Yes. And this must have been after the regime was over. No, not necessarily will. No, I started to travel to Chile. I remember my first trip there, which was three years after we settled here in Canada. And the director of the group of process engineering, a beautiful man, Dan Kelly, told me, Carlos, if you don't feel comfortable, don't go. That maybe the single most important incentive was to see my mother with. I was going to ask your parents. Yes. My father died before we came to Canada. But in Chile, my mother, my brothers, I am the oldest in a family of five. Four boys, one girl. Poor mom. Yes. And so that was the single strongest incentive. But it was okay. It was okay. They went in, came out. No problems. No problems. No problems. They had forgotten about you? The government? I'm not too sure about that. But I was never deeply involved in politics, you know. And as I explained to Anna, as a university student, most of the students were center left or left, you know. And the two main groups were students who used to belong or sympathizers of Marxist, oriented, socialist parties. There was a very active Communist Party in Chile. And the other important group was the Christian leftist oriented students. And there were some important leaders in the country including one or two bishops who would support, you know, that kind of development. I was in that group. But anyways, I do remember a good friend, a mining engineer who came to visit us two days after the military coup. And before going into the university to study mining engineer, he had been in the Navy Academy and he had quit. And he told me, I know these people. I know these people. First it's going to be the Marxists. Then it's going to be just all of the members of political movements. And then it's going to be everybody who thinks independently. Academics. Yes, yes. So I guess I was probably because I never was too deeply involved in politics. But during the government of President Allende, I gave some consulting, honorary consulting to two ministers of mine who had been students of mine. And I also gave consulting to the vice president of operations of the state owned copper company in Chile, Codelco. And the other big sin was protecting some Argentinian academics who had run away from another military dictatorship in Argentina. And during the regime of General Ongania in Argentina, the police went into the faculty of sciences and just took all of these people, you know, out. They beat them and the director of the university, the same historian still, who started this expansion of my faculty, he immediately offered asylum to these academics. They came to Chile and in the late 60s, I guess the militaries were already a little bit upset with the presence of these people in Chile. And they finally accused a group of them of mingling into the political life of the university and they were expelled. They were expelled during the vacation period. And at that time I was director of the School of Engineering and with two colleagues from the faculty. We went to see the ministry of the interior. We went to see the president of the Christian Democratic Party. We went to see the ministry of education to advocate for these people, but they were expelled. But I always told friends and family probably at that time my name was entered into the book of badly behaved people, you know. Yes, yes, yes. So anyways, going back to the story that we're telling you about, I started to travel to Chile and we established a good relationship with the copper smelters in Chile. We started to talk about exchanging technology between Covellco and Inco. Incidentally, most of the people I was talking to had been my students at the time. All of this was very simple, you know, to organize. And just as an example, Inco at that time in the copper cliff smelter had two big problems. One was SO2 emissions and the other one was energy consumption. They were using the old reverberatory furnaces and at the El Temiente smelter in Chile. They had developed oxy fuel burners coming through the roof of the furnace and they had been successful in reducing the amount of energy required to smelt a ton of concentrate. Dramatically, they allowed us to use that technology in copper cliff. And for a number of years there were a couple of furnaces, river furnaces in copper cliff using oxy fuel burners mounted in the roof of the furnace. And even more, this technology was later used by Noranda at the Horn Smelter. So this is an important example, you know, of the kind of exchange that we had with Covellco. We wanted to sell them the Inco Flash Smelting Technology. But they had developed their own technology and they are still using their own so-called Teniente converter technology to do most of the smelting of copper concentrate. It's a problem they have, it's a problem they have because in the development of the copper industry in Chile they have neglected the smelters and little by little the amount of copper crossing the Pacific Ocean as concentrate rather than copper. Never mind, refined copper has been increasing and China today has a tremendous capacity to do smelting of copper concentrates. Personally I think it's not a good policy. But eventually the Chinese are going to say now we are in a very good position to tell them, look, we'll continue smelting the copper concentrates but the fees for smelting and refining will go up. Anyways, as I said, I think that that was an important aspect of the work that I did, a section head of pyrometallurgy not directly related to the research work that we were doing there. And another aspect which was not directly relating to that research work was the selling of the Incoflash smelting technology in the southwest of the USA. Big business there too? Yes, yes and we managed to sell that technology to do smelters and in one of them the Incoflash furnace still operating. So I guess that covers part two of my career but we are going to come back to that when we talk about mentoring. Just before we get into that, you did also, Yevon mentioned any of your work with U of T because you started working for the university as well, right? That's correct, I was going to go into it as part three. Yes, yes, despite the fact that my relationships with universities from UBC to McGill and the U of T and other universities had started while working full time at the Incoflash. Research lab, in a few opportunities I was invited to give lectures and I did that, it was a lot of fun to do that and get in touch with university students. So when I had to stop working for Incoflash, when I had to retire, I have to mention that at that time there was here in the province of Ontario mandatory retirement at age 65. So in 1997, my time was up. But no one in this business actually retires. But I continued consulting for Inco until very recently and we did a lot of work. Let me mention this as an example. For a long time, most of the research work, and I'm going to start talking about also the shrinking of research in-house research in industry. By discussing these examples, most of the work we did at the Inco lab was in support of expansion of nickel producing operations. When I joined Inco, the company had already commissioned the solar cosmonauter in Indonesia. So the nature of nickel production within Inco was changing because it had been mainly nickel from solid fired ores, which are amenable to concentration by milling. The ore in the salary basin, very round numbers consist of 1% nickel, 1% copper and some cobalt. The ratio of nickel to cobalt is about 30 and precious metals. But those ores are amenable to concentration by milling. So the ore was taken to the mill, crushed, ground floated and you would end up with a concentrate, which for a long time was increasing based on research that was going on at the Inco lab from about 6%, 7% nickel to 12%, 13%, even 15% nickel, which is quite a change because that means that the amount of energy that you need to melt one ton of concentrate per unit weight of nickel goes down quite dramatically. Now Inco was starting to produce nickel from laterites and laterites are not amenable. I do these for the second time. You talk with your hands, like me. Laterites are not amenable to concentration by milling, so you have to smell it. All of the ore that you take from the ground, a completely different game and the process that was used in Indonesia was a process that was entirely developed within the lab and the process, research stations that the company used to operate import coalmines. And I come now to the point of the amount of work that the company was doing in R&D. When I joined Inco, at the lab we were about 120 people in the various sections of R&D, right, analytical labs, the library, information services, and United. And there was about the same amount of people at what we used to call the research stations import coalmines, which were plants in which we would do pilot plant test work. So at the lab it was mainly bench scale. At the research stations was a much larger scale. We would work with tons of material, but we at the lab would be responsible for designing the pilot plant work which could be done at the research stations. At the research stations there would be very skillful operators to do the work. But we at the lab would be responsible for planning the work, making sure that the objectives of the work were accomplished. So it was very, very exciting will. We had a lot of toys to play with. That always helps. Right, right. So I would travel to Port Colborn every so often. And I do have stories about driving in the middle of a blizzard, for instance, because it's amazing that once you cross the Niagara Scarpent to the other side towards going to Lake Erie, the climate is very, very, very different. Yeah, it's a bit harsher. Yes, yes. Anyways, so it was a big group of people with fantastic facilities to do all of these work, as I said, relating to the expansion of the company's legal production and relating to, in the case of Canada, to doing or looking for alternatives to help the company to meet the government emission regulations. Which were more and more strict, you know, along the years. There was no time, you know, to move our brains to other areas. You would discuss technical things in the corridors of the building, in the washrooms. But that was our life. But it was different from the university in the sense that there was a clear end of the work day and family life, good start. So children were happier, my wife was much happier too. Well, all of that came to an end in 1997 when I retired. Why? Because of age. As I told you, I had to. Everybody had to retire at age 65. There was no alternative. But I continued working as a consultant. And among other things, I organized test work which took place in Chile. At the pilot plant that Kodelko had adjacent to the Churki-Kamate smelter, because one of the things Inko was interested in was in the possibility of doing continuous converting in the salary smelter. You know, one of the problems there, and I don't know how familiar are you with the process in corporate life. But you take the concentrate, you put the concentrate in the flash furnace. And you make a mat, you oxidize in the furnace most of the iron and the sulfur in the concentrate. The iron oxides form slag. And you concentrate the nickel, the copper, the cobalt and the precious metals in a mat. Which is still not final product. There is still iron, lots of sulfur in that material. So you take the mat to the converters. And in the converters you finish oxidizing the iron and part of the sulfur to make a nickel, copper, sulfur material, which then undergoes some other stages including milling to separate the nickel from the copper. But this converting is done in vessels which operate in cycles. It's not a continuous process. So the gas streams that you generate, you know, are not really the kind of gas streams that you need to quite feed an acid plant. Low concentration of the SO2 because in these converters there is a lot of infiltration of air and whatever. In continuous converting you would generate a continuous stream of gas with a higher concentration of SO2. It would be much easier to put that gas through an acid plant to make sulfuric acid and reduce the SO2 emissions. So continuous converting was like an important goal. And we did that work in Chile because, and I come back to the point of shrinking of in-house research. At that time the pilot plants in purple had been shut down. That happened before I retired. So there was already some movement in the direction, you know, that these kind of were represented. And expenditure which was not quite justified according to the leaders of the company. And that was the reason why we went to Chile to do that. But that gave me an opportunity to do an important piece of work on behalf of INCO after retirement. And at the same time, well, because I had more time available in my hands and based on conversations which I had maintained with former students down there I decided to spend longer times in Chile to reactivate my former department of mining and extractive metal. So we were able to get substantial financial support from the mining industry in Chile to establish industrial shares. We ended up with something like 10 shares in mining, mineral processing, extractive metal. Something that you would never see happening here in Canada. And we came to the question of industry support for academic activities in these fields in universities which I think are sine qua non. Because for the University of Toronto having mining or extractive metal. Okay, so after this interruption we're going to keep going with, you were just about to discuss the shrinking of industrial in-house research which also leads to shrinking also in the academic world. Right. Research in the academic world. So could you elaborate on that? Right. Well, the key point here when you look at the development of new technology and also the development of young people with the capability to do innovative work in the field of technology in industry is related to… So we were just about to start talking about the shrinking of industrial in-house research. Yes. And that also is the shrinking of research in the academic world. Maybe I should start by saying that in the last few years if I look at my former employer, INCO, today Vale and there was a loss for Canada in the sense that INCO was an important Canadian, truly Canadian mining industry acquired by a resilient, mainly iron ore producer that wanted to expand in the field of nickel. The new owner apparently thinks that what INCO had in terms of technology is the technology that they need to continue operating for the next few decades. And the last time, first with the recession that started in 2008 with this new situation we are living today the contraction of the Chinese economy that was the main consumer of basic materials. The mining industry here in Canada, in the hands of foreign owners they think that they have to reduce costs to the bone and there is no sense in spending more money in the development of technology that they don't need. That's the feeling. We saw the closure of the Noranda Research Center in Point Claire that happened in the early 2000s and maybe even a little earlier. And now the former INCO Research Lab here at Sheridan Park has been reduced to a core group of people. I understand that they are 30 and they call it the Valet Technology Excellence Center to assist the operations but there is no research work as such going on. No innovation. No innovation. And my personal feeling is that the people living in the industry today think that what they need is to just use the tools of industrial type of engineering to modify ways of operating and reducing people to go through these difficult times for the industry. The main problem is that they lose young people and in universities nobody good thing in getting into these fields because they don't see the possibility of having a good career opportunity. Well, less options now. Right. And there's probably less partnerships as well with universities. Absolutely. I can go back a will to the operation of this center for process, chemical and metallurgy that Professor McLean referred to on his presentation about the history of the Department of Material Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto. This was a joint industry university venture and the director of the center, Rolly Wernerman from the mid-80s to, I would say 1997 and later myself, we would play the role of Rolly Wood, putting our hands in the pockets of industry, raising funds to finance research projects and handing these money to professors who would compete by presenting research projects to the board of directors of the CCPM. So the director would do loving with industry, trying to get more industry members sitting at the table. But it was a little bit of a struggle. When the center started, the steel industry, Dofasco, Stelco were important players but they had already quit at the time that I took over from Rolly as director of the center. The main players were INCO, Falconbridge, Hatch, the engineering effort. We had some other minor players but basically we would raise about $100,000 per year to distribute among professors working mainly in the Ontario universities. So of course the U of T was an important one, Queens, Wealth, and Waterloo would be the key universities presenting the projects. There would be an annual competition. There were two very important things. First, we had an agreement with NSERC. So the projects that we would support would get additional money from NSERC, $1 for $1. And the second agreement was with the university itself because they would not charge to those projects university overhead. So $1 coming from industry would be multiplied by a factor of three practically. And most of that money was used to support Ph.D. students. So it was a very, very successful way of supporting mineral processing extracted metallurgy in university. But in the mid of the first decade of the current century, or millennium if you want, in which case, still mid decade, we started to see that our industrial partners were having second thoughts about continuing their support of this center. And by 2010, we had to fall the tent. It's ironic too because initially most of what R&D would do is in the long run, often cut costs, come up with brand new technologies to save money, time. That's true. But the thinking is that the technology which is already available is good enough. Like anything, it's good enough for a while, but not forever. I agree. We'll finish with the one last topic, which is the impact of mentoring in developing innovative professionals for the industry, whether it's in Canada or in Chile. Well, I think that that's a very, very important topic. And along with my academic, industrial, academic life, I have kept this need for mentoring very, very present in my mind. I'm going to give you examples from Chile and Canada in this particular regard. In the case of Chile, after I went back to Chile from Columbia University, we started to work on a much more stable relationship with Columbia University. And we ended up with a program in which we would send students who had completed three of the six-year engineering program at the University of Chile to Columbia to undertake a master's program under the supervision of one of the professors in the department of either mining or extractive metallurgy at Columbia. And we got money from the American companies operating in Chile to support that program. And we started to send two students per year to Columbia. We did that, I would say, for about six or seven years. And interestingly, the students, after completing their master's program at Columbia University, with the sole requisite of translating their master's thesis to Spanish, would automatically receive the diploma of mining or extractive metallurgical engineers from the University of Chile. And it was a very successful program. I had the responsibility of selecting the students. And most of them returned to Chile. There were maybe a couple who stayed in the USA. And they had excellent careers in industry. And they made very substantial contributions to the development of the copper industry in Chile as an anecdote. One of them took mining economics at Columbia. Went back to Chile. And he started to expand his interest in economics in general. And to my surprise, during the military regime he ended up in very important positions and finally as minister of finance. Under Pinochet. Under Pinochet, yes. Moreover, when Pinochet had to allow the political parties in Chile to operate freely and elections started to take place, in the first presidential election this fellow was the candidate of the supporters of Pinochet for the position of president. So in this particular case I wasn't too extremely happy. Very intelligent. Yes, yes. But that's an example in all of the programs which would represent interesting possibilities of mentoring people to finally end up as innovative professionals and that making important contributions to industry. There are a number of them who are still very active in Chile. Why not? I am still active here. They are younger than me, you know. They have no excuse. Exactly, exactly. Now here at INCO because of the space that I was given, you know, to operate within the company three of the members of the Pyro Metallurgy Group did their PhDs while I was section head of Pyro Metallurgy and they kept on working for INCO and let me see. In the three cases they did the research work, the experimental work necessary to write their PhD thesis in the labs and of course the topics were topics of interest for us. I am going to give you just one example. One of them, he worked on the supervision of a professor in the department of chemical engineering at McMaster, Professor Malcolm Bayer and he built up a plastic model of the INCO flash furnace to study the flow dynamics of mainly the gas streams within the furnace. The other two did their work under the supervision of professors at the U of T. One worked with Jim Toguri and he did fundamental work on the thermodynamic properties of the nickel mats and the other one did his PhD under the supervision of Thorstein Utigard and this work was also relating to possible new ways of operating the INCO furnace to decrease the nickel content in the slacks. They all succeeded. I think the company did well by allowing these people to continue developing while still working. I think that's another possibility of doing good mentoring work. And finally, both you've done academic and you've done industry and that's, in this line of work, it's... Attention please. The test concerning the small slacks is complete. Excuse me for all the equipment. Your attention please. The final line test is now complete. We apologize for the inconvenience that made a call. Thank you. Okay, so let me try again. Finally... There we go. So finally, in this line of work, there's often, or at least if you've interviewed, there's often the academic world and the industry world. You've done both. If you had to choose, looking back, is there one specific that you prefer that's closer to your heart than the other? Well, I think that what is closer to my heart is developing people, establishing with these people a good friendship and enjoying that later in life, seeing them succeed, making contributions, and I do have the tremendous benefit of enjoying their friendship. And you can do that at university or within industry, an industry with a mind which would let them understand that this is important for the benefit of the business success of them. Well, Carlos, yes. Muchas gracias. No hay de qué will. Is there anything you'd like to add? Well, the only thing I would like to add, is that I think that this project in which you are deeply involved, it's a fantastic project. It was time, and I have to thank another good friend, some Marcucen, you know, to have taken the leadership of finally doing it. I think that this is going to be a fantastic, I would say, deposit of experience which is going to be available to many generations. Absolutely. Well, thank you for your time. A pleasure.