As stated in the budget document: "Funding will also support the development of efficient and green processing technologies to reduce the environmental impacts of chromite production" KWG gas-powered technology would be qualified under "efficient".

In addition, it would also reasonable to make a case under the green technology as well, since gas burning is clean technology. Canadians use high efficiency (in the 99% range) gas furnaces for home heating which produce small amount of exhaust and waste heat to the environment. This has been considered as green technology and has been subsidized by the government as part of the green program. Gas-powered electric power plants are more favourable than coal-fired and diesel, that was why the Ontario decided to build them in the first place, but cancelled them for political gains, and the rest (the $1B scandal gas plants) is history. For the RoF, gas-powered plants to generate electricity (as proposed by KWG: natural gas pipeline running up from Nakina to the RoF in parallel to the slurry pipes to generate electric power for the site including slurry facility) would be much more friendly to the environment compared to diesel.

One key advantage in the direct burning of gas for chromite conversion compared to the electric arc furnace is that the law of physics dictates that one can only get out 1/3 of the total energy in the form of electricity, the other 2/3 is lost during the process and usually is discharged to the environment.

goldhunter