Roads are an ancient technology. The British Ridgeway, for example, has been in use for 7,000 years. Roads led to wheels about 6,000 years ago, and wheels brought chariots, carts, wagons and pavement — a whole transportation revolution. It was a revolution that may have spread from mining communities in the Ural Mountains. In any case, not a lot happened until another mining revolution came along.
Railroads were hardly a breakthrough. In 1758, the Middleton Railway was the first railway recognized by Parliament in Britain. It was a privately financed wagonway using horse-drawn coal wagons. It was the coal that brought on the next wave of technological change. Around 1799, Middleton began to replace wooden tracks with iron rails. Coal made smelting iron cheap, cheap iron made mining coal cheaper, and together they made the steam engine. In 1812, the Middleton Railway became the first commercial railway to successfully use steam locomotives.
It took thousands of years to get from horse-drawn wagons to steam trains, but less than a century to get to another transportation revolution – one that depended on another mining revolution. The gasoline engine appeared in 1876 and the diesel engine in 1890. The first semi-trailer in 1881 was towed by a steam tractor, but petroleum engines soon took over. Faster vehicles demanded faster roads, so in 1901 Edgar Purnell Hooley invented tarmac, the first cousin of modern asphalt concrete.
The 20th century has been the century of roads – so much so that when we imagine opening a new mine, the first question is about road access. Without transport there are no mines. Lack of transport was the deal breaker for Ontario’s Ring of Fire, an enormous chromite deposit surrounded by other potential mines in roadless Northern Ontario.
But the early 20th century saw another transport revolution begin to abandon roads. By the beginning of the 21st century, air travel was cheaper, faster and safer than land transport. For many trips, humans were abandoning surface transport. Fly-in fly-out mines became common, but for commodities other than diamonds and gold, roads were still considered to be necessary.
That isn’t true anymore. Sir John Isaac Thornycroft patented an early design for an air cushion ship in the 1870s. By the 1960s, hovercraft were carrying passengers across the English Channel, and in the 1970s hoverbarges began carrying heavy loads offroad. A hoverbarge is just a barge with an air cushion system. It can float like a standard marine barge, but it can also traverse sandbars, shallow water, deep water, ice, ice rubble/chunks and land with almost no environmental impact. For mining in remote areas of Canada’s north it could be the invention that takes road construction out of mine planning.
Hoverbarges are low tech. They use standard industrial diesel engines that can be maintained by ordinary mechanics. They are made of steel that a college-trained welder can fix. They don’t need docks, roads or airstrips. The Centre of Excellence for Mining Innovation (CEMI) at Laurentian University is proposing the use of hoverbarges to develop the Ring of Fire.
CEMI CEO Doug Morrison makes a compelling case that developing the Ring of Fire with hoverbarges is the way to go. With hoverbarges, development doesn’t have to wait for a road, greatly reducing the up-front capital cost. Bridges aren’t necessary. Environmental impacts are minimal. Additional mines are cheap to service. The annual cost of a hoverbarge system servicing mines and communities is a fraction of the cost of providing all season roads.
So why is the oldest land transport technology likely to be the technology of choice for politicians? It might be because there is no Elon Musk for the mining transportation industry in Ontario.
Any entrepreneur with a line of credit can order a modular hoverbarge kit from Hovertrans Solutions in Singapore. Hovertrans has been building the barges since the 1970s. This is a well-tested technology. Any entrepreneur with vision can start planning for the next round of mining developments in the north. The technology is just waiting for a businessman or woman with a disruptive business model to make the next transportation revolution.
