 Yeah, my name is Eric Weidenhammer. I'm interviewing Chris Twig-Malsy, and I may as well just begin. So maybe we'll just start as we did before with your name and age. Okay, it's Chris Twig-Malsy. Where were you born? I was born in Borbley in the UK. That's a suburb of London, essentially. What did your parents do? My mother was a University lecturer in the history of drama, and my father and stepfather were both journalists. So it's kind of a literary background. What did you do as a child to pass the time? Depending on the phase, I guess I was always very much into sports. And did a lot about our activities, as one could in London, living close to the big camps to keep as I did. And I did a lot of things played with the condo a lot. It's still around, amazingly, you know, but it's the same thing, mechanical toy. But in the carriages, you've got some machines to go up and down, and it's good for kids. Dexterity as well as encouraging building stuff. So you had near the interest in engineering, would you consider that? No, not really. My engineering interest came by accident much later, when I was applying for the scholarship for Oxford and Cambridge in high school, doing the classical maths, physics and chemistry, and they just introduced an engineering exam rather than just classical courses. And it looked a lot more interesting to me than certainly chemistry. So that's what I chose to do and was accepted in the engineering school at Cambridge. So about your early education, where did you go to school and what classes did you enjoy when you were there? I went to a local prep school in North London and went to a boarding school down in the West Country called London. But it was a very solid school and had some very rigorous teaching, particularly around mathematics and physics. And I really enjoyed the physics. I found it fascinating. Of course, with strong training in math, one could really get into it quite seriously. So what did you choose to study aeronautical engineering at Cambridge? Well, the way the Cambridge system works is the first degree of is called a mechanical sciences triposon. It's pretty broad across all the disciplines in engineering. And then part two, which is I chose to take, you've got very specialized options. And I'd always loved aeroplanes and no brainer to me. That plus is a very small group of us that took part two. There were only six of us in that year. So we really got some pretty interesting attention. Was there a relationship between your education, aeronautical engineering, your later specialization in fluid mechanics? Well, they were really one and the same. The course was actually aerodynamics and aeronautics. So the aerodynamics is fluid mechanics by any other name. It's a special, a second order, but the underlying equations are all the same. Fluid mechanics really was what I did when I came. So how and when did you become interested in metallurgy? That's kind of an accident. The fluid mechanics and some of the things I did, actually on contract, while I was a graduate student here at the university, were for a company called Hatch. I guess at that time they were expanding and looking for young people for them in vigas. So I was hired into Hatch, really not knowing very much about what I did. I wound up initially doing a lot of work in dispersion, waddling. They just built a super stack up at Inco. So several of the coppers multis were looking at building super stacks and there was all kinds of gas cleaning and patina environmental work being done on the gas side in particular. So I spent several years in that end of business. And that was attached to metallurgy and over the years I started getting into the flow of liquid metals. He transferred inside the processes. So I sort of came into metallurgy backwards, but don't ask me about chemistry. I have no idea. How did you find your education at the University of Toronto? It was extremely good. It was very, very rigorous. Some coursework was pretty tough. But the quality of people we had around us, and this was in the Department of Mechanical Engineering in those days, was absolutely outstanding. I certainly could never fault the education they drove into me. And they got me out of here at four years, which wrote the PhD in those days was pretty good. I would love to float singing around for seven. Can you describe how you first came to Hatch? Do you remember your first day on the job? I came to Hatch as I indicated earlier through doing some consulting for them. But also one of the principles of Hatch at the time was next to a neighbor to my supervisor, Doug Bates, who in fact brought me from Cambridge. So that got me at the interview, which I think is probably the one. In terms of my first day, it was rather sober. I was introduced to my ultimate supervisor, my name called John Good, who was a brilliant engineer. And he looked at me thoughtfully across the table and he said, Chris, your transcript is pretty good, but for now on I want a hundred percent. Of course, I was a little blind. And he said with good news is there's a whole team of us here to help you get there. So it was a memorable moment. I remember it. This was fully five years later. Can you describe what the company was like when you first joined? When I first joined, it was 300 people. Everybody knew everybody. It was like a big family in many ways. When I stopped working full time, we were somewhere around 11,000, which is a pretty big expansion of a period. And I think one of the things that changes is when you go from small to big, you get into a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of systems. And you have to have it. I mean, I'm not going to argue about that at all. But it's a pretty dramatic change in how you do stuff, how you get access to people and the other knowledge that's around you. And of course, we went global as well, which meant that there were all kinds of strengths within the company that I didn't even know existed and it's not as easy to find. So how has research done at an engineering company just compared to what's done at a university or a government lab? I can only speak for how we do it at Hatch, if I do. But basically, we can solve the engineering field that we inhabit. We have a lot of people working in the plants, so we're aware of the real problems and the real challenges that they're facing. So that's our starting point with a real problem, not with something that we dream of. Then the next step is internally, if somebody comes up with a solution, a potential solution, we will spend a bit of money doing a proof of concept just to make sure that the approach that's been thought about makes sense. Can we spend our money on it? Sometimes you'll get a lot of money, some support from NSERC or something. But that's really second. The key then is we have enough confidence in what we're doing to go back to our clients and saying, are you willing to develop this with us? And some say yes, some say no. But if we have a whole lot of clients say no, then we know it's not a good idea. If all we need is one to say yes, and then not only do you develop a project for them, there's also a problem for them, but you have a full scale demonstration that you can show other people as well, which in a field like metallurgy, which is highly capital intensive, you have a huge race to be second. People are very reluctant to take the risk unfortunately of developing something themselves. So to be able to take people to a full scale operating facility to demonstrate the technology is hugely important. So it's the model of reviewers, I'd say, pretty well for 50 years. So what's your relationship to the research that's done in the university or in government labs? Is a lot of the pure research that you then apply come from elsewhere? Yes, although when Jerry Hatch founded the company, one of his mentors was Bridging McGann because he was a PhD researcher who then went into operations and realized that the skills the operators needed to solve the problems came in as much from research as they did from anything else. And the engineering was just interpreting one to support the other. So Hatch evolved in really interesting ways at one point, and I'm not sure where we are as I sit here today, but some years ago we had 300 PhDs in the company which is more than many engineering departments, which meant that we were able to interpret what's going on, but also to use fundamentals to develop our own approaches to things. And going back to your original question, yes, we're very close to certain government labs. We use the commercial labs to do actual testing and test work for us. We've often used university facilities for test work, but that doesn't work so well sometimes because there are different time scales in universities sometimes. But we do support chairs at several universities across the country, and the ones I'm aware of is we speak here in Canada, in McMaster, Toronto, and there may well be one in Queens, I forget, but the key is that we believe very strongly in the fact that you and the students that come out from the crops don't necessarily come to us, but they're in the business and that's pretty good. Plus we do get sponsored research done, and they come in. Are certain industries more accepting or open to innovation than others, say ferrous versus nonferrous or industries in different countries? Nonferrous is much more open to innovation than ferrous because the ferrous industry is pretty well supported technologically by the suppliers, not by the nonferrous industry. Every plant is different. They're all custom plants. As a result, there's much higher engineering content, and as a result, you get a different caliber of metallurgic in terms of material science, you'll probably find more strength in the steel industry specific to which kind of methods you talk about. What point did Hatch begin working overseas? In the late 60s, Falkenbridge looked at developing a large lathright deposit, and so we essentially went overseas to the Dominican Republic under Falkenbridge's wing. And that project lasted through to the mid-70s, at which point a Quebec entertainer was developing a large smelting complex in South Africa. So in a similar vein, we then went to South Africa on their way. So those were the two sort of big steps out. But based on the experience we had, we were then pretty comfortable working in South Africa in particular, but one thing led to another, and by 1995, I guess, we were pretty low-global. Did you notice important differences between the Canadian word culture and the culture at other mining engineering companies overseas? Yes, but it depends where overseas. I would say Canada, US, UK, Australia, South Africa. Anywhere that sort of came under the British way of engineering did things pretty much the same way. When you go into Russia, Kazakhstan, Chile, Peru, Brazil, China, all countries I've worked in, they tend to be much more top-down. And so there is much more effort to please the boss than there is to necessarily come up with the right answer. That can cause a lot of difficulty sometimes. I'm over-generalizing, but my experience has been working in those cultures. It takes a different kind of understanding what's going on. So your impression of it as a sort of Anglo-Saxon engineering tradition that's particularly decentralized? It develops responsibilities to the interiors. When you do your arithmetic and come up with an answer, that's what the answer is. I guess it is an Anglo-Saxon approach to put that. In your earlier interview, you mentioned some of the challenges of working in the Russian steel industry in the early 90s, which is of course a very interesting period. Can you describe some of the circumstances and challenges? Well, there are two different kinds of challenges. One I call infrastructure logistics, and the other is culture. The logistics one was just getting around with very hard. I mean, airplanes run out of fuel, and you run until they figured out how to get some fuel. Hotels in some towns didn't exist. I mean, we went into some towns for structuring steel mills, where the only accommodation was the changing rooms and football stadium. Excuse me. That's okay, but I developed a strategy about I would only take in teams of individuals who either like camping or I knew did not wind because winders were not welcome. So this is kind of the logistics infrastructure side. The culture side was a little different in that they were a planned economy. Money, profit, motive had absolutely nothing to do with anything they did. So one of the places where we were working in the Central Euros had the floor plates in the melt shop made of 9-inch stainless steel slabs. And so they were financing themselves by taking out the floor. I mean, that's quite different. The other thing that's quite different was that they had no idea why you needed a profit. And so we used to spend the evenings over hopefully be a bit unfortunate sometimes, explaining why you actually had to have a profit and an operation if you wanted to grow in the process. And quite honestly, a lot of them just never got it. After working with them three or four years, they still really weren't comfy with the idea of making profit. So they were very deep comfort rights. And in fact, at the time, we said there's going to be a generation of fairness changes. And we're more than a generation later now and it still has a change in the majority of the country. Technologically, where were the Soviet operations when you arrived? They were really interesting to me. Some of the steel mills, and I think that's in particular, had both all the most modern Western gear because they were making plates for the military and this kind of stuff. So they had the money to do it. The plants we were working in the Europe were doing some really interesting metallurgical stuff that was totally impractical in the Western sense because of the cost of the fortune. But they were, for one thing, for the cellar gas, they were making a stainless steel-lined carbon steel plate by actually pouring the stainless core into a carbon pipe and then the field mill punching the thing out into a stainless steel plate. They're brilliant, but totally impossible to do in the West. At that time, I mean, we could do something, we've got the money to do it. It worked. Just need stuff. How has the role of metallurgical engineering companies changed over time? Well, of course, if you go back 50 years, there really weren't any metallurgical engineering companies. You had what I'd call the wraparound companies who did the... the major equipment supplies, mostly out of the States and Germany, supplied huge equipment packages with the supplies, farmers, and co-coverns all as a package. And the local companies here in Canada, whether it's for a go at a time or others, would do the wraparound engineering for piping this, but nothing to do with the metallurgy. The metallurgy would either be done by the supplier or by the owner. Now, in some areas, in uranium as one, there were a few one-man bands who were doing metallurgical consulting, but they were very small groups. Mine was A.H. Ross, for example. But then we go through a couple of cycles, and the big manufacturing companies, particularly in the States, essentially went out of business. So you wind up then with a wasteland with a lot of unemployed engineers from the metallurgical sector, and they started aggregating. Another downturn, when I first joined, A.H. Ross had a huge engineering group, 400 channels of substatural wind, and we had a substatural wind. Stelco had a very big wind. DeFasco had a very big wind. And I mean, we're talking several hundreds or thousands. By the time we've been through the 80s downturn or the 90s downturn, they were all gone. And all those good, well-trained engineers had generally formed into consulting groups. So you now had a stand-alone metallurgical group. Now, of course, the truth, the metallurgical group was mostly simple, some black paint and structural, all the other stuff. The metallurgical component is fairly small, but really there was a complete change in the industry. So where we are now, where essentially the owners have very little strength, manufacturers now have very little strength. And what strength is left is in the engineering companies, and as we speak, they too are being decimated. So the next wave when we turn up, I don't know if people in Canada and the states are doing that. When you go overseas, there are other problems as well. So overall, this transition from research and development of the mining companies to engineering companies resulted in more or less a deficit of research and development and metallurgy? We've got two different things. We've got the research and development about the engineering. I've just been talking about the engineering. The R&D was kind of one of the early casualties, but we're now seeing a different squeeze on the R&D because pretty well all our major metallurgical companies, with the exception of a couple of companies in tech, are owned by farmers. So when the squeeze comes, a head office in Brazil or in Geneva or wherever you were stealing, wherever it happens to be, we've got squeeze to look here in Canada because political things and all the rest of it probably tax things. I don't know. And maybe we are high-cost. I don't think so. Generally. One way or another, being a branch plant economy, as we've become, is not a good thing. You describe the process of commissioning a plant and some of the challenges that are involved? Processes. Really, when you come to commissioning, it's a culmination of design activity and procurement activity and construction activity. And for a design engineer, it's always a hugely satisfied time to be actually in the field and making stuff good. But really, it's a culmination of a planning exercise, a detailed planning. Starting back in the early design phase, it's like, how are you going to start this thing up? What do you need first? You need power. You need water. You need sewage. You need places for people to change, all that kind of stuff, before you start anything on it. So a very detailed planning goes into this before you get going. Once you get going, typically you start with equipment. It's taking the right way around. It's connected properly. It's at level. It's at the line with everything else. So that's kind of mechanical stuff and the basic safety checks. And then as you start integrating the equipment into systems, really the paramount thing is always safety because there's so many things can go wrong. If you're planning this off and you start something up, you start building material into a bin, it gets closed or whatever. The opportunities for things to go wrong are real and constant. So you wind up with extremely complex tagging and lock-out systems and very detailed procedures. And it's all around making sure, A, that you start with this logical, B, that you've got resources. You need where you need it, when you need it, and ultimately, to keep it safe. And then once everything mechanically is running in and integrated, checked out the instrumentation and the redouts giving meaningful numbers of things, then you can start feeding live feeders. That gets to be very exciting. Do you think of any memorable instances of plans that you've commissioned? Going back over the years, they're all exciting because it's your baby. You've designed that. You've done the line work. You've done test work at some scale. Now you're pushing buttons and waiting for things to happen. So it's really exciting. But I think it's the difficult ones you tend to remember. It's a fun thing to work with. The operator is what it is. It's actually when you turn over the operators at that stage. You're more visor on the stage. You tend to publish. But when the thing is working properly, that first billet comes out of that billet cluster machine. That's just a wonderful moment. And we'll hit up that with the irony. That's the name of the game. But it's a team activity. Start-up commission for any system is a very complex team activity. And so when it works, it's a team cell. Can you describe your career at Edge? Yeah. I started in design. I was doing fairly specialized stuff learning fluid mechanics, air dispersion over, static calculations. I got into environmental permitting. I guess I developed an acoustic school. As a result of that, over the first 10 years, I just started developing my own client base, which in a consulting environment is kind of one of the key elements to moving forward. Unless you want to be a project manager or something. So after a while, I guess by about 20 years into the game, I became Vice President of business development, which involved obviously. And then I guess about 1991 or about 1996. The board sat beginning of January and had a discussion around what we were going to do with you. And because of my business development, I remained interested in the affairs of this. I really tried. At that time, all the dream works were all over the world. So I said to our chairman, you know, all the dream works are chilling. And if you drill, you find stuff. Everywhere else nobody's drilling now, you can find anything. So one of my children, he looked at me and said, yes, Chris, why aren't you chilling? So I went to Chile as an operating room to start up and gave up on the corporate. And it was really an interesting time. And I'm very proud of the way Chile supported for us to go from a machine to a bunch of other folks. You share it with a secretary and you share it with almost everyone's telephone. And I guess ten years later we had 1200 people. So it was a real success story. Now I can't take credit for all of it, obviously. But so in the scenes, getting the perception of what Hatch was all about into the mining classes is really so chilling. And from Chile, I started to simply see the rule. And then for family reasons, actually, I decided I couldn't. The thing that I was asked to do was to build a technologies business unit in Hatch where we would sell proprietary technologies, which includes things like the stock of Quoibox and a range of other things that we developed. So for the next couple of years I was doing that, putting together a global group selling proprietary technologies rather than engineering services. That was a very interesting period. And during that period, we bought BHP Engineering from BHP. And one of the things that they had was a small engineering group up in Shanghai that was delivering turnkey ships. Like bubble buildings to sell steel into China. And when we built them that particular unit wasn't doing very well. So I was asked to go and see what we could do. Well, since then, the last 12 years that's what I've been doing. I mean, I've been building a business in China which actually has been very successful. And that's what I've continued to do after I'm officially in the organization. You mentioned in passing your early work on fluid mechanics and smokestacks. Do you have an opinion on the super stack period when they were putting those up? Well, it all comes back to what is the driving force and the driving force for environmental cleaning quite appropriately in the early 70s was regulation. All kinds of messes all over the country. More in the US and of course the EPA led the charge of developing science-based regulations. And their choice of regulation was basically in terms of product for them. For whatever reason Ontario decided to go with ground level concentration and so the logical way to get ground level concentration down is to build a super stack. And that in INCO's analysis I guess was the most cost effective way of meeting the regulations. It's led to some very interesting metallurgical improvements and things to actually I think the super stack is probably totally redundant now because the SO2 emissions are probably 5% of what they were in the early 70s. But that was the right solution of the time for that particular situation. Can you describe some of your some of your patents? Patents, okay. Well, one of them was a way to produce those trioxide from interesting by the time well, there was a point at which half the world's oxygen trioxide was produced through that's why would anybody produce oxygen trioxide. In fact, we're all familiar with Green London which is CCA called Copper Osset. That's where the oxygen went. And at the time again the EPA had moved the CCA and the Creosote were both pretty ugly materials but they were both equally dangerous safe in use. The thing that's since transpired across is if you burn a lot of CCA in your fireplace what you left was oxygen trioxide dust which is not good. But basically that particular technology of making a powder oxygen trioxide was superseded I would guess mostly about 15-20 years ago with auto-claiming to fix the oxygen trioxide or if it were very awesome. And that's a much more appropriate way to do it because you're now fixing it for geological time rather than the oxide approach using the CCA. And it did go into other things. It's still used in finding glass for example. So there are legitimate uses for us. That was from and another patent was for silencing a Tuiya puncher to pierce with converters. Basically bottom blowing the converter and the way they do it is they push well the Tuiyas plug up because they're into the quick metal ball of it. So the traditional way in a pierce was you ram the rock through the back of the Tuiya to open the Tuiya itself. But to do that you go through a ball valve and of course as you're going through the valve of compressed air comes out. It's terrible to ask. So we came up with a gizmo that essentially the silencer slipped down the rod that we used to punch so that it sealed against the back of the Tuiya block and prevented the air coming out. Of course the same compressed air produced in these. It was used in one or two places on gas pick punches for one. But it really didn't catch on. A couple of other patents were used in sort of one-off situation because they were developed for one-off circumstance. They were fun. They all came out with a specific product. So the Tuiya technology that was a health and safety improvement was it? It was probably a noise about anything. Were you involved in the development of the refractory cooling technology or is that before you got there? No, that was. It was basically Jerry Hatcher and Bert Lozman. He said Bert Lozman was a mentor was he? He was one of several I had over the function to have over the years. And basically it started with the inspiration of Jerry Hatcher. So I didn't have a lot of interaction with him as a young engineer. But Bert Lozman was my immediate supervisor and followed closely by Emil Menegar who was the son of one of the founders of the AM in SNC. But Emil and Bert between them taught me the value of doing fundamental analyzing problems and looking at alternative ways of solving problems just going with the first one that comes to mind. So from a technical point of view they were both hugely valuable. And valuable in terms of sticking to your guns if you get an answer that says right of right left of left well that's the way it is and it's up to the client to say okay I understand that's the way it is but I choose to go this way. Then you say okay fine that's your choice. But you don't bend your answer to the client. And that integrity was drilled into us very early by Bert. That's been a founding principle behind the growth of Hatch in many ways being recognized. You describe how computer technology has affected the domain of metallurgy and particularly your work on fluid mechanics for videos. There's two different parts to that question. In metallurgy there have been huge developments in databases particularly around thermodynamics a lot of the work done by people like Art Pelton Chris Bale and they've done great work in bringing together huge huge amount of empirical data into useful forms of design books and a lot of good work has been done in Europe as well. So there are several various strong databases that would be impossible without manipulating the framework. And flowing out of that there are some various strong modeling capabilities whether it's medicine or has been others that draw on those databases which saved a huge amount a huge amount of approximations and hopefully resulted in better overall. On the fluid mechanics side in the early days Fluent I guess was the first program that really got used extensively and interestingly enough I was an experimental fluid mechanics guy did a model and the people who are using computers were bringing these printouts of flows and you're looking and saying it's not your boundary conditions, tip it it will go in the field and measure it and convince me because it's very easy to fall into the trap if the bottle is right and in the early days it wasn't always and you get into endless loops which would give you they've improved the capability the combustion the multi fluid systems the solid fluid gas mixtures is amazing but in some areas they still will only give you guidance as to what is right often come back to does it look like because ultimately you know where your stuff is going to settle but it's a matter of if you can demonstrate that model and use the model it's sort of very useful but not 100% of the answer I was curious about the fact database how's the information gathered over time for that system you'd have to check with something like that but basically it's hard work I mean a lot of people do a lot of experimental work over a lot of periods a lot of periods and it has to be digitized into a consistent format fit within the framework that's searchable in their system and I guess that's the strength of the fact I understand that Hatch is a sensor division I was wondering how sensor technology has changed metallurgical operations over time I wouldn't say we have a sensor division we have a control and automation where we rely on sensors applied by elevating people to give us an electrical signal although interest in enough sensors are actually the weak point in the whole control of the metallurgical field because it's a very very rigorous application high temperatures high pressures, high acidity and physical abuse abrasion corrosion so sensors have a very hard time analysis but having said that yes we do have a big control automation division and you know they're getting into AI and they're getting into big data analysis it's very much the direction of the future that the way mimes are going now is with RFID tags on everybody and everything being tracked in such your life systems in the mines so up 1500 miles away you can track exactly what's going on in real time and that's made a huge difference where it's been applied in productivity How is that affected what the operator does over the time that you've been in the industry is that you have a different caliber of operator that can be quite different in fact if you're moving into the remote mining they're sitting in a desk like this and they're watching screens and pushing notes and when you think of what Rio Tinto and VHP have done they are running a fleet of autonomous trucks in western Australia 1500 miles from the control center and trucks are loading trains and the trains have no drivers and they're running down to the port it's a different game but on the other hand those are the heavyweight majors they've got huge capital budgets and they've got huge operations so it is a different state but what starts planning it by then 20 years it's going to be throughout the industry with any luck two drivers really one safety if you have nobody in the mine it's a lot safer than having somebody down now maintenance you'll obviously have to have people around for maintenance but if you can bring the equipment up remotely do it up on surface that's it now we just didn't know how Hatch acquired the coil box from Stelco and what it did with it and sort of generally the role Hatch has in selling technology okay so coil box is a very good example in the early 90s Stelco was growing so we bought directly from them a company called Steltec which was their vehicle for selling proprietary technology that they had developed over a long time and within that there was a coil box something called a macro-archer which macro-archer is a quality thing the hinge ladle is an energy conservation thing but the and there were two or three other things but the the key thing is they came with technology license with the package, with the people who could support it and we bought them in as a group at that point they had sold roughly 30 of the coil boxes around the world over the previous 15 years and in the subsequent 25 years we've sold another 50 give or take now the business model has changed a little over the years because Pat's problem things but the original business model was that Steltec licensed the coil box technology to all the major mill builders and so we would collect license fee we would do training of fee and maintenance fees and the mill builders would actually sell it and store it subsequently we have actually got into supplying directly we found it more flexible and we began to work with the mill builders that will continue to work with us others have just taken what they've learned over the years because the patents were not doing themselves but we've continued to improve the coil box over the years and the most obvious things in the early days you had a mandrel sitting in the middle and you'd coil a steel bar transfer a power around the mandrel well over the years we actually came up with a mechanism so you don't need a mandrel it's the manufacturing operation but otherwise the improvements of the time have been around ease of maintenance and more importantly we found is that when you take a mill down for maintenance typically you work two or three days, you know, longer than that change out a coil box or do some major work in a coil box it's a couple of weeks so we've actually changed how we do things so you can do an incremental upgrade in several pieces over time and those are the kinds of things that we've kept tweaking tweaking tweaking to keep keep knocking keep in the game the rule we fulfilled now has changed the occasions supply but not often it's much more now maintenance upgrading, auditing run conferences for coil box users with an exchange information for finance and operations so that's how we've done and that's the last 25 years that's when you began your career this was the period when legislation was starting to come to play can you describe how that process is affected by your work at Hatch well as I indicated earlier a lot of my early work was driven by environmental legislation around air pollution control and noise control beyond that I guess environmental impact assessments were also driven by legislation but beyond that really the whole evolution of the metallurgical industry over the last 25 years has been driven initially by environment but more recently by probability but the great strength we've had at Hatch is that because we've got a core of process engineers you could fix both simultaneously you could change the process to reduce the environmental issues as well as increase the productivity and that's where things like the vertical furnaces come where you intensify the processes and where our order to have technology again, intensify the process you discussed your work with the CanMet Clean Mining Initiative advisory board CanMet established a clean mining initiative probably seven or eight years ago as a way of bundling a whole bunch of the work they were doing in the minerals of the barteries around clean mining which means different things to different people and covers a whole bunch of stuff but clean up clean up, reclaiming tailings better energies underground hybrid equipment will range good initiatives around reducing the environmental problem of mining operations more mining and metallurgy and as an activity they established an external advisory base advisory group and we were in the industry we had a couple of NGOs we had a couple of universities we had SBTC so it was a fairly broad based advisory group that just if you like was a sanity check on what they were doing we didn't get into details of all the programs but we looked at the distribution of what they were doing we told them about other stuff that was going on and the distribution would be well well well it hadn't really connected with so it was strictly an advisory that wasn't a line of function in any sense and I guess the clean team mining initiative as such has kind of gone down as far as I know they've switched a lot of funding into their railroad functions are there any particularly dysfunctional that you've worked on with I've never worked in dysfunctional certainly worked with dysfunctional clients now that's not quite true with dysfunctional project teams what are some of the major challenges that you face in your work there are two different kinds one is technology responses so incredibly fast but it's really really hard to keep particularly if you're interested the other challenge really is just around fundamentals I haven't really been in the fundamental business for the part of the business side so you lose touch with the fundamentals although you keep an instinct that stuff doesn't look right it probably isn't but the other thing I find very hard is keeping track of who is who in the zoo companies keep changing by selling and switching and contracting so the only way I can keep track of anything these days is the original maintenance of the mine if it's the Dickinson mine I'm not sure if Placer runs it if Goldcore runs it but I know of the Dickinson mine where it is and what they used to do and what they would do so keep you track of who's who and who is where Google helps what's the most difficult project that you've worked on? I think the most difficult project I've worked on was we were we were trying to make steel powder for the parts matter of fact for some reason it had been done at some scale by other people but we were trying to do it at a scale that was about seven times the size of anybody else in the world all the time and there had been several failures in Europe in particular people weren't able to get this to work and we did a pilot the pilot of course was difficult because you know you're pouring liquid steel in fact couldn't have it but steel we used liquid iron of course we then had to compensate for the differences and you know we wanted the thing to run for half a heat because of the metal supply we could only run for three minutes so we had to try to compensate and the test work was relatively successful we made quality work it was expected and the longer things behaved the way they were expected but then once we got into the full scale production we found we were building huge stalactites of steel inside the fluid mechanics didn't indicate why it was happening the way the jets were going and we figured out eventually that it was the slopping in the tank at the bottom of the water partly responsible so it took us several different attempts and long nights that was technically a really hard it was well beyond any and politically testing in full scale was both expensive and dangerous but we got there and now they make a fine product what's your fondest memory that relates to your work my fondest memory is really around people I've been fortunate enough to work with some wonderful people all over the world and it's interesting how you can go into some really unpleasant cultures and still find working with some really special people you know I would say it doesn't matter what country I've been there's always been really special people so most of my fondest memories are around that and interesting enough one little thing that really made me feel proud was when I came into the office one day in Chile and somebody addressed me as Don Cress and instead to me that was a mark of respect I didn't expect and I was really very pleased with that so she said a little things you tell us about your role in Metzoc in CIM okay well that's been a long time when I was a young engineer I was approached out of the blue to join the Montferres part of the committee of Metzoc and their role basically was once in a little nice conference sorry that's imposing within the culture I worked with them for some years and by 89.90 I was actually organizing became chairman of the group and as chairman of the group you sit on the board so that one thing led to another and about three or four years later I became president and we had some very successful conferences and then I stepped on them it was Canada's turn to host the couple series of conferences which typically was rotated every four years between Chile and the U.S. it was rotated to Chile and the U.S. and had been put together by Carlos Diaz and Trotmag and it had been in my world so because I was Metzoc was the partner it wasn't CIM so I was asked if I would chair this thing on behalf of the public in 89.90 we had a very successful conference and that to celebrate we didn't and I wound up sitting next to the president of CIM we'd seen this as a conference so he asked me to get involved with CIM itself so I did and I guess that one thing leads to another and I guess by 2010 I became president which was a hugely varied I guess overall I've probably done 10 years now on the council of CIM I lost four or five years responsible for the whole site of CIM which is fine really fantastic and again coming back to the kinds of people you meet the volunteers about this How present or absent were women in your workplace? In the early days they were not really absent these days these days I would say half of our young engineers are women I'm speaking passionately I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's pretty much the same in our senior ranks it's not Are there any social problems in your line of work alcohol, drug abuse sorts of things? Not the time I'm aware of a professional organization tends to be a pretty straight place I'm sure provided they did the job they got the support they needed and some survived and some didn't the professional volume is a little different from the manner of testing it you've already mentioned some of your mentors is there anything more you'd like to say about that? opening up it's very important to have somebody you can talk to about get some way of achieving what you're trying to do and it can't be your line manager it doesn't have to be inside the company in fact that's one of the things I found self-satisfying over the last few years is that I've essentially got two generations personally, whether usefully or not only they can tell you but I find it rewarding to think you're helping them out What are the most important lessons you've learned over your career? Two, really and maybe this is a functional consultant but I don't think so one has to listen particularly if you're in a role where you're expected to be a program solver you can't come with a presuppose a lot of folks do a lot of management consultants have a template and this is so you've always wanted the other thing I think is to show respect everybody we deal with is likely doing their best in the second step they don't have the skills they need they don't have the training they should have had they could have had some kind of disaster at home so irrespective of how our behavior can be or how we can off the work treat them with respect you get in life What are you proudest of in life? I would say my family 45 years, very happy 4 kids, 5 grandkids maybe 6 and they're a wonderful bunch and I'm very proud of them on the professional side I'm very proud of the way Hatch is grown and obviously I can't take normal we've been impressed but it was an incredible team that Hatch threw in the growth period led by Ron Norrell as well of course Jerry Hatch set the foundation of high-ethics high technical competence and Ron really maintained that and Kurt Strobel when he came in after Ron also worked hard to maintain and he had a really hard period because growth was explosive through the early 2000s and when you have explosive growth you're bringing in people from all over the world and they come with all kinds of baggage and all kinds of other companies ways of doing things you don't have a lot of time to try and reorient and those Ron and Kurt really worked hard at that so being part of a team that has propagated that way of seeing the world I think is a lot of memory What do you believe to be your biggest contribution to the field of metallurgy? The field of metallurgy? Nothing to helping build a company as I've described by the team that I worked with because we were transformed from essentially a regional group in North America to a global group and personally I guess I'm proud of really outstanding individuals who are still in high-hired and worked for me for many years and actually some of the outstanding individuals who work for other people who I hired in the train Green Apostles Do you mind answering a few more questions? No I'd be really interested to hear about your experience in China and your views on the the growing plays of China in mining and metallurgy Well, China is a unique history as we sit now they currently produce half the world steel so obviously they are completely not that pretty near half the world's copper and gold sink pretty near half the world's loom and of course they are 95% of the rare earths and they are 80% plus of the world's tungsten so they are without a doubt controlling the world for communist rank-up opportunistic capitalist uplifts surprisingly and they will continue to do it because they're continuing to grow I mean they've moved 400-500 million people to the cities they plan on moving another 300 when you're building cities they're using a lot of steel a lot of copper a lot of all the things minerals produce so the metallurgical business is going to be driven by their evolution whether we like it or not both America and China will grow Europe will grow one or two percent of the lucky world Africa may start to grow too and if they do that's going to put even more pressure on things and interesting though because of the downturn when we know the plants to supply that are being built because of the timeline it takes it takes 20 years to go from discovery to the operating room all the health businesses are set to go anyhow having said that our journey in China has been really interesting for farms building stuff inside China but we did Rio Genesis first plant in China we did Andrew Americans first mine in China which was a huge part and we've built for farms we set up a procurement out there for capital goods for our projects because we have to and that's been very successful we do emanate consulting in China and from clients both looking in and looking out we do a lot of market studies of people trying to figure out what's happening in China we work for the Chinese invested outside China whether it's potash and Saskatchewan whether they're in Australia Highways in Australia so we work on that dimension as well and more recently we started doing well we've always shipped technology packages into China particularly the core boxes I was talking about earlier we've probably got I would guess 50 of them in China and then more recently we've started doing major projects for the Chinese inside China because we have our own class A design license in the metallurgical business that allows us to scale anywhere in China and in metallurgy we're the only farm to consult so it's been an interesting journey for 12 years I've been involved and I think it's going to be an interesting journey over the next 12 years and I expect a lot of that to be quite substantial Are Chinese companies starting to enter the field of engineering process development to the extent that they compete with Hatch? They are definitely in the field and some fields are already ahead of the worst in blast furnaces for example they operate much higher intensity blast furnaces at a larger scale than anybody so there's not much we can learn there but on the other hand we have been able to take Hatch technology when measuring in-situ the depth of blast furnace lining while the blast furnace is operating so we are working for those same blast furnaces with technology about in lead there's been no process development in 5 years and they have been doing the same process other metals, I mean rare earth for example they are the world leaders McNeeson their decades behind in fact we're building now that plant was one that we moved from Beckencore here in Canada and it was built 30 years ago so I mean they're still somewhere behind that is aluminum, they're catching up to the west I mean they bought a lot of western technology they copied some technology and they're slowly creeping up once because they have incredible analytical technologies and a lot of the problem-solving and something like a potliner comes back to your capacity to analyze what's actually going on in the pot we've got far more far more focused on that kind of stuff than the whole of the whisper together so they'll catch us it's it'll be a few years do you support the idea of a golden age within Canadian metallurgy that has come to an end with the decline of research and development or does that seem too pessimistic to you no I think that's possibly real but there are several drivers depending on how you classify the golden age Canada was always doing interesting stuff go back to the founding of the international nickel in 1905 where they were doing the smelting of nickel developing carbonyl doing all kinds of stuff over a long period of time in the States and the uranium processing and pigeon processing and these things developed here so it was a long history so whether you want to start the golden period back then or in the 50s and 60s and the 70s certainly in the 50s, 60s, 70s we were beneficiaries of several things when England went in the toilet Britain went in the toilet we got a really strong way of very high quality academics whether it was Alex McLean number two or three came to U of T several and then that was followed very closely by Pinochet Zappeva and Chile and we got a wave of Chilean academic or chemical engineering and then we're talking colleges several others they all can't see the people with us call us that often whether it's Alphonse or Grau or QIT it all has to stop this for a second so the one thing was these waves of immigrants followed then by the 68 we got the checks and now they brought more what I call re-entry in the 70s constructions what's the methodological came from the Polish upheavits in the 50s we've been beneficiaries of European education we got quite a few draft judges and there's the Vietnam War as well and then so that was if you like fueling what you might be called I guess if we're going to characterize it as a period that ended I think the ending came with the various downturns that started to flush out the in-house of immigrants and then more recently the foreign ownership that has absolutely dominated the book as I said earlier we've only got a couple of gold companies and tech are the only not and they would put their R&D money typically where they see it as most effective with us real much to put their money in Australia Validates to put their money in Brazil and I'm not sure why they put their money in their private traders so the prominence of folks like Ipsco still do have government code where the line pipe but you know this is a material science thing rather than a core process and of course there's lots of material universities around nanomaterial from that point of view I don't really see that as part of the process because you're precipitating these things up whether you want it to be material science metallurgy and heavy funding it's good but something is going to make primary materials and stop the effects of stuff with highly purified materials I'm going to ask about that on the academic side there's certainly been a shift from metallurgy towards material science do you think that represents some more profound shift in what people are making things out of the composite materials and nanomaterials and the sorts of things yes there are a lot of interesting activities about nanomaterials and composite materials for good reason it's perceived as a whole growth area for downstream manufacturing and also underpin technologies for all kinds of exotic sensors in particular microfluidics all these evolving disciplines that are at a micro scale I'm afraid I grew up on a macro scale so a lot of it is rather beyond me that the the key thing I keep coming back to is if you want highly purified metals to do you good stuff with something that's going to make it overall in the metals and industry has a pace of innovation slowed in recent years very much so because two things I guess one is the fact that the R&D is not being driven in the same way the second is that there's a value of death in the innovation phases if you look at what innovation is all about you've got research turning money into ideas innovations turning ideas into money they're both long term projects turning the innovation step can be 15 to 20 years in our business and the key thing is that if you've got a 15 to 20 year time frame before you get an idea to a commercial application and I don't care if it's a gas cleaning technology or it's a new way of making nickel or if it's a genome technology by the time you've gone through lab tests, pilot tests demonstration tests and all the things that happen in between it's a 15 to 20 year process how do you reconcile that with the 3 to 5 years that VC funds won't get their money out and then how do you reconcile that with the three months quarterly reporting of public company and that's really hard the other thing that's really hard is the fact that we're a very capital intensive business people like to see what they're getting into so this is rush risk and that means you've got to have somebody willing to take the risk first time on and so they've got to have 42 with the courage you've got to have a champion inside a company that's going to fight come to the nail over a long period of time because you're going to have changes of ownership, you're going to have all kinds of team changes every time you go from one phase to another to another you've got a different team so one way or another getting something done all the way through to commercial application is hard that's why at this point the only people that seem to have stuck to their guns continue to do it on PHP to a lesser extent because they're going to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to have to a lesser extent alcohol because you've got to have a long time frame to learn and you've got to have the balance sheet to do it so that to me is one of the big problems we're facing the thing I'd like to see and I don't know why this hasn't happened is that we've got the flow through shares as a way of raising money in the mining sector in the exploration sector which has about the same success rate as in the innovation sector why we can't have flow through shares in the innovation slice of the piece I don't notice a message that I keep telling to anybody that will listen that getting tax changes is a special challenge you mentioned that Hatch followed Falcon Bridge into the Dominican Republic that was Latter-Eyed Orisburg for Nickel I'm curious what this shift on the part of the mining industry is in the lower grade or is over time have you experienced that can you explain it the easy way to explain it is the easy stuff to be found good stuff but the partly in Nickel in particular that's actually the way the reserves stack up there's very little sulphide Nickel that is economically extractable and so the swing has been to Latter-Eyed are the really rich Latter-Eyed Latter-Eyed tends to be a surface deposit anyway so it's been pretty easy to find the rich ones and Latter-Eyed are all over the tropics and the well-known and very rich ones places like Cuba and New Caledonia but you then get into the whole issue of infrastructure costs political stability and other things that drive you into the lower grades on top of that technology allows you to get at the economic and this is developed pretty dramatically over the last you know H-Powell it's ups and downs electronephonic smelting of course Latter-Eyed is quite appropriate depending on the amount you see the sulphides that comes back to the actual so that's Nickel I don't know Iron ore is essentially a logistics cost you've got stuff you dig out of the ground and you ship it and you put it in the blast furnace Western Australia you know it comes out of half the grade so they've got to fix it so one way or another iron ore is just a logistics issue so copper they're typically in the oxides again but the waste dumps and the oxides are out there it's a time less so it does very much depend on that gold has only a low grade gold left if you find high grade you go for it so it depends on that and political circumstances in the country you find it anything else you'd like to add no except I think it's a very exciting project yeah I'm going to speak to Bear Blassman tomorrow under Mississauga what if you could go out and have a good stroke yeah well thank you