Moncton’s Major Drilling Announces Kim Keating As New Board Chair
MONCTON–Major Drilling Group International Inc. will soon have a new chair of its board. The company announced this week that current board chair, David Tennant plans to retire.
Kim Keating will replace Tennant as board chair once she is appointed later this summer at the company’s Annual General Meeting, which is on Sept 8.
A release from the company confirmed Tennant had expressed a desire to retire at its 2022 AGM.
“We would like to thank David for his longstanding dedication to Major Drilling, as board chair since 2005, and as a Director since 1995,” said Keating. “David’s help in guiding the company through most of its history has left an indelible mark. He is an accomplished leader and highly regarded business lawyer who has provided a steady hand for the entire board over the past two and a half decades,” Keating stated.
Keating also credited Tennant for his navigation through “numerous industry cycles and changes in senior management.”
A wealth of experience
In Tennant’s comments on his own departure, he offered praise for Keating. He said Keating’s appointment as board chair reflects her tremendous success as a national leader in the engineering profession and her strong operational experience.
A member of Major Drilling’s board since 2019, Keating is a professional engineer with 25 years of international experience in the oil and gas, nuclear, hydropower, and mining sectors.
Most recently, she was chief operating officer of the Cahill Group, one of Canada’s largest multidisciplinary construction companies.
She joined Cahill in 2013 as its director of projects and later oversaw the construction and delivery of one of the largest topside modules ever built for a major offshore oil and gas development.
Keating has also held a variety of leadership roles, from engineering design through to construction, commissioning, production operations, and field development with Petro Canada, (now Suncor Energy Inc.).
Positioned for further growth
Tennant says Keating’s appointment comes at an exciting time for the Major Drilling as it sees an upturn in business.
Tennant feels the outlook for the industry as a whole is positive. He said he’s fully confident that the culture, leadership, people, and prospects are in place for Major Drilling to continue to prosper.
Major Drilling, a public company listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, was formally established in 1980 and today has field operations in Canada, the United States, Mexico, South America, Asia, Africa, and most recently, Australia.
The company returned down under in 2021 after an almost seven year hiatus when it announced it had purchased McKay Drilling, a leading specialty contractor in Perth, in an acquisition worth $75 million CAD.
RELATED: Major Drilling Purchases Australian Company
Despite new expansion, most of the company’s drilling work is done away from Canada. Even though only a few of its several hundred rigs actually operate in the Maritimes, Major Drilling has remained headquartered in Moncton.
The company offers a suite of drilling services, including surface and underground coring, directional, reverse circulation, sonic, geotechnical, environmental, water-well, coal-bed methane, shallow gas, underground percussive/longhole drilling, surface drill and blast, and a variety of mine services.
Major Drilling director, president, and CEO, Denis Larocque told Huddle in a 2021 interview that the company was well-positioned to take advantage of the ever-growing need for the base metals that make up the battery components in electric cars.
A fully electric car has around 80 kg of copper in it, compared to 40 kg for a hybrid car and 20 kg for an average gasoline-powered car.
Aside from copper, Major Drilling also drills for lithium, cobalt, and other metals that go into batteries. About fifty percent of its work still comes from gold.