History

Canadian Wollastonite is a company focused on the commercial development of a high grade wollastonite deposit located north of the St. Lawrence River in the eastern part of the Canadian province of Ontario. The St. Lawrence deposit is situated approximately one kilometer south of the municipality of Seeley’s Bay, and it straddles the boundary between the City of Kingston and the municipality of Leeds and the Thousand Islands. The size of the deposit is estimated at over nine million tons, and when it is fully developed, it will be the first active source of wollastonite production in Canada.

Canadian Wollastonite is a privately-held company which was incorporated in Ontario in 2001. Over the course of its history to date, the company has invested several million dollars in various up front developmental activities in anticipation of successful commercialization of the wollastonite deposit. The last several years have seen the company pass a number of important milestones in this process, in particular:

	2002: The project received an official endorsement of its plan to develop the wollastonite deposit from the Government of Ontario.
	2004 - 2005: Site preparations had begun for development of three shallow pits and plant engineering work was initiated. By the end of the year, Canadian Wollastonite and its partner SGS Lakefield had successfully developed a new, effective, and environmentally friendly beneficiation process for wollastonite ore.
	2006: Detailed engineering for the final process and plant design was initiated.
	2006 - 2008: Process engineering was modified, final environmental testing was undertaken, and plans were prepared for the construction of a one-fifth scale pilot plant which would be used to assess the commercial viability of Canadian Wollastonite’s new process technology and provide large-scale samples for customer testing. Additional development work was undertaken to evaluate the feasibility of co-producing a low Fe diopside which is present in abundance.

Concurrent with the activities outlined above, over the past several years the St. Lawrence wollastonite deposit has also been the subject of technical papers in leading scientific journals and articles in well-known industry periodicals. As a result, there is now growing recognition of the fact that the St. Lawrence wollastonite deposit represents what may potentially be one of the best sources of wollastonite in the world. Rigorous scientific testing has also demonstrated that the dry powder concentrate produced by Canadian Wollastonite has physical and chemical properties which make it highly competitive with the best wollastonite products currently available from other sources.

We have marked the entrance to the St. Lawrence site with two sixteen-foot Inuksuk, both of which were constructed with forty tons of boulders taken from the skarn. To put the geologic time frames represented by the St. Lawrence deposit into greater perspective, the first Inuksuk (which we refer to as “Rock”) has witnessed Kingston and the surrounding area connect to and tear apart from Africa at least three times.

Click here to learn more about the “Legend of Rock”.