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The Canadian plan to evolve into global critical-metals player by opening one of the biggest copper mines in South America got off to an unlucky start. On Sept. 25, 1996, Frank Pickard, the Sudbury, Ont., native who was the CEO of Falconbridge, then one of Canada’s top two diversified mining companies (the other was Inco), boarded a small aircraft on the Chilean coast and flew to the Collahuasi mine in the Atacama Desert, in the far north of the country, in the Andean foothills near the Bolivian border.
Within minutes of stepping out at 4,400 metres (14,400 feet)—half the height of Everest—he was felled by a heart attack and died. He was 63. A retired mining engineer and consultant friend of mine, Jeffrey Franzen, who worked for a subsidiary of Falconbridge at the time, told me that based on the story he’d heard, Pickard’s failure to acclimatize before reaching the Andean heavens, where effective oxygen levels are far lower than those at sea level, probably triggered his death. (Legend says he was buried in a coffin made of nickel, Falconbridge’s main product, as was his wish.)
A decade later, Falconbridge, which owned 44% of Collahuasi, was bought by Xstrata, which was later absorbed into Switzerland’s Glencore, one of the world’s largest mining companies and commodities traders. Collahuasi today is the world’s third-biggest copper mine and no longer has any Canadian ownership. But all is not lost for Canada’s hopes to propel itself into copper’s premier league as the low-carbon energy revolution builds momentum and everyone from Tesla’s Elon Musk to electricity-grid operators in China demand more of the metal than miners can produce.
For the rest of this article: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/rob-magazine/article-high-teck-the-canadian-miner-bets-its-future-on-a-copper-mine-in-the/