50 years of potash mining

They were looking for oil, but they found something even better.

It was in 1943 that a drilling crew working for Imperial Oil completed an exploratory well near Rayville in southern Saskatchewan.

Eight thousand feet — deep by even today’s standards. And around the 7,400-foot level, there were traces of potash.

And in that starts a story that every Saskatchewan person deserves to know.

As John Nightingale points out as he guides me around the Saskatchewan Potash Interpretive Centre in Esterhazy, the existence of traces of potash doesn’t mean there’s a lot of it. Nor does it mean that it’s easily mined.

So Imperial Oil moved on.

However, others in the geological and mining community thought long and hard about the importance of what had been found. Within a decade, mining companies began sinking shafts down toward potash deposits.

That potash is important has been known for centuries. As pointed out by Nightingale (a veteran mining engineer who grew up on a mink farm in central Saskatchewan and rose to head the Saskatchewan operations of IMC, one of The Mosaic Company’s corporate ancestors) it was long created, in tiny amounts, from the ashes that farmers got by clearing land and burning brush. “Possibly by accident, they found that it made poor ground better,” said the jovial walking encyclopedia of potash. “They didn’t know what it was, but it was the potassium.”

So beneficial was it that underground mining of potash started in Germany in the 1850s and in the U.S. in the 1920s. Demand exceeded supply; that’s why the discovery of potash in Saskatchewan got a few bold firms going after it. Easier said than done. In succession, they ran into the same problem: the Blairmore Formation, which can be thought of as a 250-foot-thick band of quicksand between 1,200 and 1,400 feet underground. So great was the flooding that Western Potash, which sank an early shaft through it near Unity, never produced any potash.

The Potash Corporation of America set to work on a site near Patience Lake and ran into flooding too. “It took ‘em six years to get going,” Nightingale said as we toured the sleek, high-tech interpretive centre, opened in 2006 with financial help from the industry and its suppliers.

Working away was International Minerals and Chemicals (IMC), whose contractors and consultants hit on the idea of freezing the Blairmore Formation, then sealing if off from the shaft that went through it with a variety of means.

The story of potash in Saskatchewan has many interesting angles like the grit and guts of miners themselves, including fire and rescue crews. There are the recurrent political storms over ownership and royalties, as illustrated by the Saskatchewan NDP’s acquisition of most of the industry in the mid-1970s and the high-profile battle over PotashCorp. in 2010. But none of that would matter if successive generations of engineers and miners couldn’t have got it to the surface in the first place.

And that’s the point of the potash interpretive centre. No politics, just a thoroughly detailed course on how it’s mined and the engineering miracles involved in building and operation, as one of its displays says, “a city underground.” Incidentally, Nightingale drove off in a pickup truck bearing a front licence plate that proclaimed, “ESTERHAZY — POTASH CAPITAL OF THE WORLD”.

“We’ve got the biggest mine in the world here,” he said, beaming. “And we’ve got another one coming — and the first successful mine.”