RE: Times Today 8 Oct8 Oct 2019 10:30
CONT,D“As you’d expect there’s an awful lot of people on the site who are invested in the project literally,” said Mr Smith, who has “a fair bit of my own money sunk in it. That’s a double-edged sword. You’ve got people that absolutely want to do the right thing by the business because they’re not just employees but also owners of the company. The flip side is it’s double the worry.”
Workers have taken heart from the fact this tunnelling is still going on, even as other aspects of the project have been paused, although Sirius won’t say how long it can afford to do so. Indeed, Mr Smith argues that it helps to have “a degree of control over your own destiny”. The tunnelling has been going so well so far that he now believes Sirius could scrap plans for a third boring machine, which had been due to tunnel from the middle. That could help to reduce costs and potentially help the company to secure financing.
Up at the mine site in the national park, the ramifications of failure would be all the more dramatic. Here two enormous cylindrical holes have already been excavated, ready to house the equipment that would sit above ground in a normal mine.
The visual impact on North York Moors national park has been minimised “As part of minimising the visual impact, we have created a large opening at the top, which is 35 metres diameter and 45 metres deep,” Graham Clarke, 56, operations director, said. From each of these, mine shafts will be sunk a mile down to the polyhalite; one has already been started.
If Sirius fails, it will have to use its final ring-fenced funds to fill in these holes. “We have no expectation that that’s what we are going to have to do. As with every other challenge we’ve met on this project, we expect we will come through this,” Mr Clarke said. “We will do it.”
The idea for the Woodsmith mine was born in a converted bedroom in Sydney, where Chris Fraser, the Sirius Minerals boss, used to live and from where he commuted for the first two years of the project (Emily Gosden writes).
“I was basically two weeks here, one week seeing people like customers in China or North America, and then one week at home getting over jetlag. I was a wreck.”
Born in Britain but raised in Australia, Mr Fraser, 45, worked in banking, financing iron ore, coal and fertiliser projects, until 2009, when he left to set up his own business. Scouring the world for opportunities, he was alerted to the existence of ICL’s Boulby potash mine in North Yorkshire and decided to explore the potential of untapped deposits near by. He hired Peter Woods and Rick Smith — the veteran geologists after whom Sirius’s mine is named — who mentioned that the area also contained a “massive” deposit of polyhalite, deemed to be “of no commercial value”.
Mr Fraser disagreed and the project grew from there. Almost a decade on, he has “everything” invested in it, both financially and professionally — he owns about 1.8 per cent of the company. CONT'D
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