Work ramping up at Nutrien Rocanville
August 26, 2021, 4:32 pm
Kevin Weedmark
Work is ramping up at Nutrien Rocanville on three major projects, and work will hit its peak this year between mid-September and the end of October, with 900-1,000 contractors on site when the mine is shut down for six weeks for its maintenance shutdown.
The three major projects are the Self Generation Project, in which Nutrien is creating its own natural gas powered generating plant, mill refurbishment in Mill One, and underground bin replacement, replacing some of the original bins that have been in place since the mine opened.
“We had the first couple of generators come in for the Self-Generation project (in which Nutrien Rocanville will generate its own power),” said Larry Long, senior vice-president of potash operations with Nutrien. Long is a former general manager at the Rocanville mine.
“What’s going on right now is we’re installing these generators as they’re coming on site. The first two high efficiency natural gas type generators have come in, so we’re installing them. The pad for the building are poured and now they’re dropping the genset generators in there. They’re starting to do the hookups to the natural gas and they’re going to be doing all the wiring up and all the instrumentation over the next few weeks and months.
“The generators are coming from overseas and when they are shipped here they have to be put on a special rail car because they’re very heavy. They don’t have a lot of cars that can take that weight and so part of the shipping issue is making sure those cars are available. There’s a little bit of sequencing when these generators come in.
We have to have special cranes for lifting them in and installing them, so the logistics of getting them overseas to here is probably the biggest part of the job.
Probably in the end it will be quicker to install them than it was to get it shipped here. There are not many companies in the world that make these types of generators, they’re pretty big generators and they’re very specific types of high efficiency natural gas generators.”
The work for Maintenance Shutdown both in the mills and underground starts September 19 and will be completed October 30. The planning and preparation work has already started.
“We’re working on Mill One, the original mill,” says Long. “There are two circuits within Mill One. The new mill, Mill Two, also has two circuits. We’re doing work on Mill One, installing the new electrostatic precipitator, it kind of helps capture the particulate so it’s not released into the atmosphere. We’re upgrading the storage bins on the surface where the raw ore coming up from underground is dumped from the hoisting system, and we’re doing work on the mill galleries, and the belt lines.
“The ongoing electrical upgrades that we’ve been doing, we started the electrical upgrades when I was actually general manager there in 2017 and they’re just wrapping up now. We use a lot of copper wires. We’ve got a lot of electrical distribution systems and everything runs off electrical power so we’ve been upgrading that now for about five years. That’s going to be largely completed finally this year for Mill One.
“There are three new east storage bins because obviously they’re on the eastern end of the property at the original Rocanville site. The bins being replaced are original, they have been there since the mine was commissioned in 1969.
“We’re replacing them with four new bins and there’s all the work associated there. There are four new bins, 13 new conveyors associated with those bins and the distribution equipment that is associated with that bin system. The work on that project will be wrapping up for this year during shutdown and there will be more work done next year, in 2022.”
Major work at Nutrien Rocanville will continue for the next two years, with the number of contractors peaking at 500-1,000 each year.
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