The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.
Bill Boor, senior vice-president of global ferroalloys for Cliffs Natural Resources, had already been asked several times about the company’s projected start date for its Black Thor deposit in the Ring of Fire by the time he addressed a lunch crowd Tuesday.
Boor told 330 people attending an event organized by the Greater Sudbury Chamber of Commerce that he hoped to clear up any confusion about his company’s schedule to begin production at its McFaulds Lake mine site in northwestern Ontario.
“How do you clear it up?” Boor asked rhetorically during his 40-minute speech. “My simple answer is, ‘It depends.’ ” Many things will have to come together to meet Cliffs’ target of beginning production by the end of 2016, he said.
The company is in the middle of completing a feasibility study that will refine what came out of a pre-feasibility study. That will result in “a very specific project with tighter understanding of the impacts of what needs to be managed here,” said Boor.
Using targets the company believes are realistic, it is looking to complete the feasibility study by mid-2013 and to have permits in place in the second half of 2014. 
The environmental assessment for the project will be “running parallel and that’s an uncertain timeline,” said Boors.