Kemi chrome mine

The stainless steel in your kitchen probably owes its shine to a hole in Finnish Lapland.

The Kemi Mine sits at Elijarvi in the municipality of Keminmaa, just north of Kemi, and it is the largest underground mine in Finland, with an annual capacity of 2.7 million tonnes of ore and around 400 people on site each day between staff and contractors. It is owned by Outokumpu Chrome Oy.

Its job is one link in a chain. The mine produces chromite concentrate, that concentrate goes to the ferrochrome plant at Tornio, and the chrome in that ferrochrome is the alloying element that makes the steel from the Tornio steel plant stainless. Mine, ferrochrome plant and steel works are a single integrated operation across the Kemi-Tornio region, which is unusual: most of the world's stainless steel is made from ore that has changed hands several times.

The geology is a layered intrusion. The orebodies are stratiform, sitting in a layered mafic-ultramafic intrusive, and the chromite occurs in idiomorphic form, meaning well-shaped crystals. Proven and probable reserves have been put at 60 million tonnes. Recovery runs through crushing and heavy media separation, then grinding with gravity and magnetic separation.

It is worth seeing how much has changed. A trade profile of the project from 2002 describes Kemi as a conventional open pit only then beginning to go underground, producing 1.2 million tonnes of ore a year and employing 132 people at the mine with another 175 at the ferrochrome plant. Two decades later the pit work is finished, the mine is underground, capacity has more than doubled and the workforce has roughly tripled. That is what a long-life orebody looks like when it is worked properly.

This is an active industrial site and not a collecting locality. Finland has plenty of ground that is, so admire this one from the road to Tornio.