Once again, ORC threatens to pull out with its promised 70 jobs if the County doesn’t cut a deal and if you watch the video, appears to openly challenge Bob Main for daring to prudent with our resources. The World reports
…Main, despite being outvoted last week, still argues the county should find out what it has before entering into any agreements.
‘It wouldn’t be prudent to lease the ground if we don’t know what we are leasing out, especially when this is known to be a gold-bearing region,” Main said.
Oregon Resources wants permission to explore and possibly mine chromite on 6,000 acres of county-owned forest in the Beaver Hill area between Charleston and Bandon.
Meanwhile, local citizens are doing some heavy research into the matter and have uncovered some interesting facts including this nugget from Jody McCaffree.
As I wrote before there is also serendipity. When the Pro-Or process was in development the scientists and engineers designed circuits in the process to which to divert ‘by-products’ either for further processing or for disposal. They were pleasantly surprised when it was pointed out to them that chromite ores originating as had the ones in the mountains of Quebec almost always contain platinum group metals. In the common pyrometallurgical processes, however, for example, as used in the RSA, it is very expensive to separate out the small quantities of PGMs.
The Pro-Or process however naturally separates out the PGMs from chromite, if they are present, and even if you were to run the process only to separate the PGMs from the chromite the cost of doing so is a tiny fraction of that incurred in the RSA per ounce of PGM recovered.
This discovery led the Pro-Or process developers to realize that they could process automotive emissions control catalytic converter scrap to recover its PGM values at only a tiny fraction of the cost of adding such scrap to the ‘normal’ feed of a recovery furnace in the RSA used for the smelting of PGM bearing ores. Pro-Or announced to the world last year that it was running a full scale experiment to test the cost of recovering PGMs from catalytic converter scrap and that the results would be published late in 2007. I have heard nothing so far, but I am hopeful.
In the meantime the conditions of the world market have seeded one (re)start of chromite mining operations in the U.S., in Oregon; Oregon Resources Corp. is well on the way to starting up a mining and “processing” operation in Coos County. This will be the first chromite mine to be put into operation in the U.S. since 1961.
Black chromite sands had been mined in Oregon (and in the same, Coos, county) for a long time to make firebrick and casting molds from this naturally occurring high temperature material, so this restart is not a new discovery. The last time that a mine in Oregon was worked for material for end use metallurgical purposes, though, was during World War II when supplies from the RSA were either cut off or dangerously impeded by enemy action at sea.
…The most interesting aspect to me of the Oregon Resources Corp. proposal is that it is stated that the company will move 67,000 truckloads of chromite sand a year for 20 years to its processing plant. If a truckload is estimated to be 20 tonnes – a very small load from a mine, but one that can be accommodated by existing road load restrictions then ORC will bring 1.34 million tonnes per year of chromite to its processing plant.
If ORC were to be fortunate enough to have even 1 part per million (ppm) of platinum in its chromite and it used the Pro-Or process to refine the chromite then ORC would produce yearly 40,000 troy ounces of platinum for each part per million contained.[emphasis mine]
Main is right to determine what the County really owns before selling it or leasing it. Meanwhile, Stufflebean, who apparently wouldn’t know an ROI from an IRR if it hit him in the face (oh, yeah! it did, here is managing millions of dollars of county money is quoted as saying –
‘If they find what they are looking for and there happens to be precious metals that are of a quantity to mine, then the leases will cover how much the county will be paid,” Stufflebean wrote in an e-mail.
That amount would be five percent if the County signs the lease as ORC would prefer. Whereas the article found by Jody points out “At 1 ppm there would be enough PGM in the Coos, County, Oregon chromite ore being mined and processed by ORC to pay for the operation if it were recovered;” Stufflebean, he’s okay with giving 95% of your resource away to ORC.
Nikki Whitty, where is she? Finally, it appears she is being cautious with County resources… whether cautious enough not to sign a lease, well only time will tell.
