By IAN ROSS

Having air side assets is an added bonus for a leading edge geology assay lab now opening its second location in Northern Ontario.

Activation Laboratories Ltd. (Act Labs) is spending $1.2 million at Thunder Bay International Airport to renovate a former Confederation College aviation school hangar into a full-service facility.

The Ancaster, Ont.-based company has been following the footsteps of miners around the globe, establishing facilities in major camps like Antofagasta, Chile. They service customers in 80 countries.

Northwestern Ontario, in the eyes of company president Eric Hoffman, is the next big thing.

There's a string of emerging and revived camps in Geraldton, Marathon, Fort Frances, Kenora and at McFauld's Lake in the James Bay swamps where many miners are unearthing new gold, base metals, diamond and uranium deposits.

"We can see from what's going on, they'll be a lot of development in this area over the next 10 to 15 years," says Hoffman, an economic geochemist.

One only had to wade through the crowds at the Northwestern Ontario Mines and Mineral Symposium in Thunder Bay this spring to sense the enthusiasm of the upcoming field season.

It was especially fruitful for Hoffman who had three companies showing strong interest in his services. "I think we've lined up a substantial number of samples from here."

The company already counts Noront Resources, with its flagship Double Eagle nickel-copper-platinum group metals project at McFauld's, as one of their clients.

When fully operational in May, the lab will have enough capacity to analyse 12,000 gold samples per week and measure "virtually the entire periodic table," says Hoffman.

Act Labs operates a Timmins sample preparation lab, but the chemical analysis is done in Ancaster. Many of those samples will now head to Thunder Bay.

These days, many assay labs are backed up with work.

Hoffman says they were enticed to move to Thunder Bay by clients complaining about existing services.

The company is promising higher quality analytical services with faster turn-around times.

Instead of waiting months for analysis of gold samples to come back, clients can conceivably have the results within a day.

He's also promising tighter security than what he sees at competing labs. At one backlogged Northern Ontario facility, he observed the workload was actually spilling out the door.

"If your samples are practically on the sidewalk, (the security is) not very tight."

Granted, Hoffman adds, the substantial volume of work these days is more than most labs originally planned for.

The Thunder Bay facility has an alarm system to ensure people can't access samples to possibly salt them. And police background checks are conducted on all prospective employees.

The company is on a local hiring spree to find 50 to 60 employees, ranging from labour positions to technicians skilled in sample preparation, fire assay, wet chemistry and analytical instrumentation.

"It's a lot easier to find employees in Thunder Bay, than Ancaster," says Hoffman.

The company has been on the leading edge in developing deep detection mineral exploration technologies and analysis since the 1970s.

Then Hoffman, a young University of Toronto-trained geologist refined a technique called Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis. It involved encapsulating a sample in a plastic vial, placing it in a small nuclear reactor at McMaster University and zapping it with neutrons. It measured up to 35 elements at the time.

"It's probably one of the best analytical techniques for gold."

Today, the various technologies are so far advanced, more than 60 elements can be detected in rock and soil.

"It's allowed us to go one or two orders of magnitude lower in detection limits than we previously could.

"We can go to any lake here and I can tell you what quantity of gold is in the water in that lake."

The company has also pioneered other techniques such as Enzyme Leach, a selective soil extraction method using bacteria that eats away at a mineral deposit. When the bacteria dies, the proteins left behind makes its way to the surface. The soil patterns help determine the mineralization below surface overburden and rock to depths of 800 to 900 metres.

The company is working on an off-shoot of its Soil Gas Hydrocarbons method where VMS (volcanogenic massive sulfide) ore deposits can almost be DNA-fingerprinted.

www.actlabs.com