Thank you very much.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to this group today. My name is Brent Sleep. I'm the chair of the civil and mineral engineering programs at the University of Toronto, and I'm also the director of the Lassonde Institute of Mining at the University of Toronto.
The University of Toronto has a long history of research and education in mining engineering. Mining engineering was one of the first programs started in the engineering faculty at the University of Toronto. Currently, the University of Toronto hosts the undergraduate Lassonde mineral engineering program and the Lassonde Institute of Mining.
The Lassonde mineral engineering program graduates about 30 mining engineers per year at the undergraduate level. They get a Bachelor of Applied Science in mineral engineering. These students go on to careers ranging from exploration to mine operation to positions on Bay Street in the finance industry.
As everyone is aware, I'm sure, there has been a big change or downturn in the mining industry. In the 2008-09 time period, our students who were graduating were getting multiple job offers at great salaries. Currently, things are a little bit tougher, but our students are still slowly managing to find jobs in the mining industry.
The Lassonde mineral engineering program, as I mentioned, is an undergraduate program. The Lassonde Institute of Mining is a research institute centred at U of T. The researchers in the Lassonde Institute come from across the university, especially from the civil engineering, materials science and engineering, and chemical engineering programs, as well as the earth sciences department at the University of Toronto.
The research ranges from exploration to extraction, mineral progressing, and metallurgy. There are currently 18 professors across those departments at U of T and 69 graduate students who are associated with the Lassonde Institute of Mining. The institute was established in 2000 with financial support from Dr. Pierre Lassonde and is housed in the Goldcorp Mining Innovation Suite at the University of Toronto. For the institute, we have an advisory board of senior leaders from the mining industry in Canada. The vision of the Lassonde Institute of Mining is to develop transformative sustainable solutions for the mining industry. The institute researchers and graduate students work closely with the mining industry to ensure the effective transfer of research to industry.
The research is supported by funding from the mining industry and, typically, matching funding from organizations such as the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. We also recently have had support from Genome Canada. This support is really critical to the researchers and the students who are working in the mining research area at the University of Toronto.
Just to give you a bit of background, I can highlight a few of the recent mining projects that we're involved in at the University of Toronto. These projects are focused on improving the environmental and financial sustainability of mining through a reduction of waste produced, better management of tailings, reduction of energy usage, and optimization of the mining process.
There's a long tradition at the University of Toronto of work in the area of mine safety. We've had a couple of spinoff companies from the department that have developed internationally recognized software for the development of mines, particularly in guiding the excavation processes, and we have also done a lot of research in the areas of improving ground support, such as developing methods to identify where unstable conditions exist in order to reduce the danger of rock bursts, and those sorts of geomechanics-related types of research.
We currently have research programs that are looking into the application of unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs or drones, in mining. This is a collaboration between researchers in the Lassonde Institute and researchers at the University of Toronto institute for aerospace science, and we're particularly looking at new applications in surface mining.
One of those applications relates to characterization of the rock faces in surface mining to identify unstable conditions and also to guide the development process of a surface mine. The other is to look at fragmentation analysis by flying drones over the rock piles as they're broken down to assess the particle size distribution. This project is currently funded through the University of Toronto Centre for Aerial Robotics Research and Education. We're in discussion with various parties in the mining industry to try to get further funding and support from mining companies both in terms of funding and in terms of access to sites to test out the new technologies.
Another project is focused on improving ore characterization to reduce energy consumption in comminution, which is essentially grinding rocks. It's estimated that about 30% to 40% of energy consumption in the mining industry is for comminution and that about 2% of global electricity consumption may be related to comminution processes. From current estimates in the research, there's a potential for 30% to 40% reductions in that comminution energy with the development of new technologies and the optimization of existing processes.
In particular, there's a great need to optimize the blasting processes. We currently have a project focused on relating the rock geo-metallurgical and mechanical properties to energy needs in comminution. With this better rock characterization, there could be better optimization of the comminution process.
Another overarching research project we're working on is mine-to-mill optimization using new sensors and data analytics to optimize the mining process from the mine to the mill. Mining companies collect large amounts of data, but there's often not great communication between different divisions within the mining company. They're sometimes using different databases and not making the best use of the data to optimize the entire mining chain. We're looking at situations where we can use real-time information on ore characteristics, for example, to feed forward from the mine to the mill to optimize the processes in the mill. We working with a major consulting company in developing these applications of big data and data analytics to the mining process.
We also have people who have been working on cemented paste backfill. This involves backfilling mine slopes with mine waste mixed with cement to produce geotechnical stabilization and also to reduce the amount of waste that has to be disposed of on the surface. This has been a seven- or eight-year project supported by a major mining company. The focus really is on improving the understanding of the properties of the paste backfill.
A senior professor who recently joined our department is a world expert in the area of geomicrobiology. This professor is working on mine tailings management, both in the hardrock mining industry as well as in the oil sands industry, particularly looking at the applications of recent developments in genomics to better characterize the microbial processes in mine tailings, which really drive the whole chemistry of mine tailings.
With respect to the big data applications, on October 27 we're hosting the Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform. They're holding a forum on smart computing for mining, which will have about 50 participants, half from industry and half from academia.
Government support of research, innovation, and development of more sustainable mining techniques is critical for the university and for the academic profession. Government programs support not only fundamental and applied research but also the training of the next generation of leaders in the Canadian mining industry.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today.