Thank you for the question. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about clusters and opportunity.
Certainly on the service and supply side, out of Thunder Bay and northwestern Ontario, the Thunder Bay Chamber of Commerce, the northwestern Ontario chamber, or NOACC, and the Thunder Bay Community Economic Development Commission have worked hard on the supply and service side for not just mineral exploration but the full mining cycle, I would say, or mining sequence—exploration, development, production, and closure—and have companies aligned under that particular set of opportunities, driven by specific projects, either the existing mines or the new mines that are breaking through.
There is also a strong cluster through Lakehead University and their Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Mining and Exploration. That centre has just been formed in the last three years. It is designed to look at opportunities. To give you one example in which I see innovation going and research through their engineering department—and this is one of dozens of examples, but let me just highlight the one—they're adapting forestry-based chemicals now to replace petroleum-based chemicals in a number of the mill flotation operations within certain aspects of circuits for North American Palladium and the Goldcorp Musselwhite mine as well.
That engineering department is pushing on that piece. They've also signed a strategic alliance with Queen's University to grow that particular hundred-year-old-plus school and roll it into opportunities in northwestern Ontario, to work in a collaborative sense around that piece of clustering.
I might also mention that one of the pieces we see—and this fits into the opportunities for indigenous communities in the business world in general—is having communities, including first nation communities, take advantage of the mining readiness strategy that Thunder Bay and Fort William First Nation are partners on, this particular piece that rolled out in 2013.
We live and breathe through that in a variety of themes, including cluster development, on a regular basis. That's our template, our model for moving forward. We're now seeing other jurisdictions, including Colombia, Ecuador, and other parts of northern Ontario modelling the same type of strategy. We're hearing this through consulting groups, etc. To me, it's the ultimate form of flattery. It's an opportunity to position oneself for a path forward.
I would also mention that we were very successful just in the last two months under the First Nations-Community Economic Development Initiative, CEDI, put out by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. We, the Fort William First Nation and Thunder Bay, were successful in a bid with a regional footprint into the northwest, as one of four of 82 paired applications for that program. We're now starting another three-year journey on that particular piece, which will fit nicely into our mining readiness strategy and give us a plan forward specific to industrial lands.
The focal point is 1,100 acres of industrial land called the railway lands, part of the first nations settlement that straddles the community of Thunder Bay and Fort William First Nation as an urban first nation community. That's the target area to develop industrial land. We already have six tenants on that particular site, on those 1,100 acres. That number is going to grow over the next three years as we become more strategic. We're very excited to work with FCM; we see this as a huge opportunity.
There are other specifics as well wherein we're seeing innovation. North American Palladium is using an example from northern Quebec—again this case example piece is powerful—to look at replacing propane, a significant cost. I'll remind the panel that about 35% to 38% of costs for an operating mine in Canada can be energy costs, and those can be for heating underground, typically with propane; they can be for electricity to run your mill, your crushing components, and your mine trucks, etc. It's a big price tag. If you can reduce some of that and use biomass to replace propane—and it has been done at the Hecla mine, Casa Berardi, in northern Quebec, and in northwestern Ontario. We're looking at it as well.
As well we're looking at opportunities around battery usage, another cluster piece that has come out of Sudbury, a very mature sector of various research groups. From that cluster we're learning in northwestern Ontario as well about the opportunity to use battery power to replace diesel underground, to deal with emissions, to deal with costs, and to push through that piece.