A Nutrien potash facility is more than a mine; it is an integrated operation
with office buildings, storage buildings, milling facilities, a tailings management
area and tall head frames that house the surface and production shafts, and it's
driven by people with a diverse mix of training and skills: geologists, mine
workers, engineers, administrators, technicians and others. All these people
contribute to feeding the future. Safety is our top priority and every employee,
supplier and visitor to a Nutrien potash operation receives safety
training and is required to wear personal protective equipment in all
areas of our operation. Let's begin our tour at the service shaft, which connects
service operations to the ore body about one kilometer underground. A large
industrial elevator called the cage carries people, supplies and even
vehicles and mining equipment to underground operations. It travels at
roughly 400 metres per minute, moving the length of a football field in
about 15 seconds. A trip down the shaft is like a journey through time with each
layer of rock representing hundreds of thousands of years of deposits. When you
reach the mine area, the rock around you is nearly 400 million years old and the
natural temperature is a constant 27 degrees Celsius or 81 degrees Fahrenheit
even in the middle of a Canadian winter. Underground operations have roads,
vehicles, offices, electrical stations and repair shops. Vehicles designed for
safety and energy efficiency transport workers from the service shaft to active
mining areas often dozens of kilometers away. Our highly trained team studies the
depth, shape and thickness of a deposit, identifying the safest and most
efficient ways to access the ore body. Innovative technologies continue to
improve the way we mine and enhance the safety of underground
workers. At the rock face, powerful potash boring machines cut wide tunnels to
extract ore from the deposit. A typical mine will have a number of borers
operating at different locations to be able to produce a continuous supply of
ore to feed the processing mill. As the borer advances, a series of conveyors
carry the raw ore to underground storage areas until it can be hoisted to the
surface for milling. Large bucket containers called skips carry the ore to
the surface. As one skip is being filled at the bottom of the shaft, a second skip
is dumping ore at the top in a continuing cycle that takes about 90 seconds to
complete. Once the ore reaches the mill, we begin the process of transforming it
into plant-ready fertilizer. Milling can be broken into three main stages:
crushing and cleaning, flotation and drying, and sizing and compaction. In
crushing and cleaning, raw ore is fed into large crushers to make the pieces a
more uniform size. The crushed ore is sped into agitation tanks or scrubbers
filled with a brine solution. During this process called de-sliming, the mix goes
through screens, cyclones and other specialized equipment to remove clay
particles, leaving behind potash and salt.
In flotation and drying, we separate potash from the salt crystals. During
flotation, a reagent is added to the mixture and causes air bubbles to form
around the potash crystals. The crystals then rise to the surface and are skimmed
from the solution by paddles, moving one step closer to a finished product.
To remove excess moisture, the slurry of potash and brine is fed into large
centrifuges that pull the brine away from the potash
like the spin cycle of a washing machine. The damp potash is then fed into fire
dryers that take out the remaining moisture. To prepare a consistently sized
granules, we begin the process of sizing and compaction. Potash is sized and
separated through a system of oscillating screens sifting through the
different sized crystals. Under-sized crystals are pressed together then
crushed and screened again. This compaction process is repeated until the
granules have a common size. At this stage, the product can be sent to
warehouses and each Nutrien facility has significant storage capacity. From
these facilities, plant-ready potash can be loaded into rail cars and shipped to
buyers around the world. Almost all the potash we produce in Canada is exported
to other countries where it is applied to improve crop yields and quality.
It's how Nutrien fulfills our Purpose to grow our world from the ground up.