Drilling Holes Turns Up Pay Dirt
Harvey wins "David Barr" Award - Article from The Province
Posted by Brynn Ford on January 24, 2011
Got a piece of mountain to drill that's a tad on the horrendously inaccessible side?
You could try Harvey Tremblay out of Smithers -- he gets his lightweight drills into places others can't reach with heavier gear.
But you'd better brace yourself for possible rejection. At a time white-hot mineral prices have unleashed a hole-punching frenzy in Canada's mining community, Tremblay is turning down work.
Tremblay hasn't closed the door but he expects his family-owned firm to say "no" to 50 to 100 projects this year. Maybe more.
"Some of those jobs would be ideal for us but if you're booked you can't take them on," Tremblay, 55, says from Smithers. "You're heartbroken because they'd be a good fit for everyone."
Tremblay's not heartbroken enough to roar into an expansion that might undermine the quality of his service. Hy-Tech, he notes, has already expanded to 30 drills from the single unit with which it started in 1991.
Those 30 drills, which punch holes year-round across Canada and Europe, have increased his business a thousand-fold over the past 20 years, Tremblay says.
Not bad for a guy who started his working life as a carpenter -- a guy who fell into drilling after his old boss made him keep busy tending drills at remote mining camps. A guy who figured three drills were all he would ever need.
"That suited me well, except that when you build up to two or three drills, you're hiring and laying off a lot of people," Tremblay says. "So we expanded into Ontario and Saskatchewan which had winter markets so we could move people around and keep them busy."
Five years ago, Hy-Tech expanded into Europe, which enjoys year-round drilling.
Hy-Tech is a medium-size company in the context of the estimated 100 or so drilling outfits across Canada. The drilling industry, which has recently seen a lot of consolidation, ranges from one-and-two drill outfits to a handful of publicly traded firms.
The weight and versatility of its patented drills set Hy-Tech apart from the competition, Tremblay says. In the company's early days, Tremblay set himself the task of modifying an underground drill to handle rugged surface drilling.
The result was a nimble drill that's hungry for the depths. Hy-Tech drills quickly break down into small modules that even lightweight helicopters can haul. But they're able to plunge up to 2,700 metres into the earth.
Scott Petsel, former mining manager at NovaGold Resources' Galore Creek property, says Hy-Tech out-performed others doing similar drilling at the same sites in the northwestern B.C. project. "They're very safety-conscious and very efficient and very inventive," Petsel says. "They had a good, strong reputation."
Hy-Tech's reputation for safety recently got a boost when the Association for Mineral Exploration B.C. -- whose annual conference started Friday in Vancouver -- gave it an award for "leadership and innovation in mineral exploration health and safety." In 2009, the Great Place To Work Institute named Hy-Tech one of Canada's best workplaces.
While Hy-Tech is headquartered in Smithers, its workplaces range from glaciers and mountainsides to swamps and frozen lakes. Each drill consumes an average of 10,000 gallons of water daily. At sites where no water is at hand, Hy-Tech may run up to 18,000 feet of hose to the nearest lakes.
"Every hole presents a new problem," Tremblay says. "There's a lot of potential for things to go wrong because of the nature of what you're asked to do. Drilling is one challenge after another."
Drilling remains the key tool for exploration geologists to figure out which minerals lie beneath their feet -- and to decide whether they exist in sufficient quantity to justify building a mine.
Among the properties Hy-Tech has drilled that have become producers are B. C's Eskay Creek. It also worked on the Red Chris project in northwestern B.C. that is headed toward development. They're all built on-drill core evidence squeezed from the ground by companies like Hy-Tech.
"Every inch of rock from the top of the ground to the bottom of a hole is captured and put in rows," Tremblay says. "A geologist can come along and see everything that's in the ground. It's just like reading a book."
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