Modular units spur Kappes, Cassiday growth

A longtime Reno mining company found a growing niche as it builds portable milling and laboratory facilities for smaller mine sites around the world.

KCA Modular Technologies, a subsidiary of Kappes, Cassiday & Associates, has built processing and laboratory testing facilities for mines in Guatemala, Alaska, Canada, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Turkey and Saudi Arabia since it was launched in 2008.

Kappes, Cassiday & Associates constructs the modular mining facilities at a three-acre site in north Reno. The modules are shipped throughout the world in cargo containers.

KCA has shipped 35 facilities, including units for mines in the Gold Bar District northwest of Eureka and the Sterling Gold Mine in Beatty. But about 75 percent of KCA's work comes from outside the U.S.

Portable facilities are built on skids and placed in cargo containers headed for the Port of Oakland or Port of Houston for overseas shipping. KCA purchases containers in the Bay Area, assembles the contracted facilities in Reno and then sends them to their destination. KCA employees typically oversee unloading and setup of the modular plants.

"We don't like to ship in shipping-company containers, because at the other end we like to take them apart. If stevedore outfits take them apart you lose half of what's in there," KCA President Dan Kappes says.

KCA employs 74 22 engineers, 35 lab technicians, 10 fabricators and several office support staff. In addition to manufacturing mobile facilities, KCA also performs field engineering on large-scale mining operations, as well as metallurgical testing. A third of KCA's business comes from lab testing, another third is from engineering and feasibility studies, and the last piece is field engineering. One of its larger recent engineering projects was oversight of construction of a $104 million project in Ocampo, Mexico for Gammon Lake Resources.

KCA enjoys a singular niche in building portable mine site facilities, Kappes says, but it competes with several U.S. mining engineering companies on larger site-built plants. Business typically comes through the reputation KCA has forged over the past 37 years, and its working relationships often last years. For instance, the mine project in Mexico took nine years from inception to production.

Engineering site-built plants has carried the company the past few years, but Kappes sees modular facilities as providing the most growth moving forward.

Kappes, Cassiday & Associates was founded in 1972 by Kappes and Mike Cassiday, who retired last year but still spends time in the office. Kappes, 64, says he might slow down in another 10 years or so. Kappes received a mining engineering degree from the Colorado School of Mines and a master's degree in mining engineering from Mackay School of Mines.

KCA has a full workload.

"We're swamped," Kappes says. "For us right now, 74 people is huge. I would almost prefer it with like 55 people or something. But I don't see us getting smaller any time soon; the mining industry is just going crazy."

Despite commodities prices that have assay labs and engineering companies working double-time, KCA has no plans to seek more work than it can handle at its 43,000 square-foot facility.

"Our goal has never been to grow big. We like to grow 5 percent each year," Kappes says. "Generally that's something we can control. There is a lot of work out there. It's just a matter of how aggressively we pursue it."