<font color=orange>Bre-X did the mining industry, and Pacific Archipelagoes a world of good. People who were not even sure if Indonesia was not a city in Malaya and thought that Jakarta was mainly a Java module, now know what the main political problems of the area are and how many Orangutans live in Borneo. On the mining side it began to dawn on people that it was geologically reasonable to find large epithermal deposits of gold in the Pacific Rim. It was always easy to find deposits of minerals in Indonesia and New Guinea. Geologists I know who explored there in the 50's told me that you could find an orebody a day there. (The trouble always was the political red tape and corruption, which was worse than Canada, if you can imagine that.) In fact the tropics have had a 'reverse' kind of erosion where the granite is acidically eroded and the sulphides remain behind, forming hills. On the hilltops are many of the large orebodies, such as Grasberg. It is also known that most of the gold was refractory. This caused some of the real recent feasibilities of 1.5 million ounce orebodies there to come out negative when modelled on conventional grind and cyanide processes.
On a further note on the refractory nature of the Pac Rim sulphide ore, it is interesting to realize that many of the ore bodies of the south west United States are similarly locked up in sulphides and also refractory. In the 1890's one US geologist introduced a process with roasting that made these deposits economic. This continued until the 1930's until gold price became fixed. You cannot easily do this process today because of environmental restrictions on air emissions that have been in place since the 1950's. But I know of some patents in this area in conversion that would allow abatement to 99.99% of the sulphur. Since sulphide iron oxidation is exothermic there is a net energy gain, and by co-generation it would pay to mine and process what feasibilities 3 years ago said where uneconomic bodies. This, by the way, was demonstrated in part at a mine where I used to work, Kerr Addison mines in Ontario, without the abatement part. Kerr got their profit and 15% of their gold by this treating pyrites in this way. (You can also recover the metal in the same process by diffusion of gas, which process predates cyanide, interestingly. This is done for nickel today in Sudbury) I happen to know the people who hold some of the patents that would be useful in this area. Ironically it is refractory gold, largely ignored at the .05 to .10 ounce per ton range, that would be most economic to mine and mill by this process.
Canada's deposits of non refractory gold are on the average larger than most epithermal deposits worldwide only average a million tons in size. If one takes the McIntyre and Hollinger mines as one unit, as they are adjacent to each other, then their Gold ounceage is 36 million and their tonnage is 103 million. Only about half the developed gold was ever mined from these deposits, and they were shut down at low gold prices around the early1970's. This would make these two deposits combined about 20% larger than Bre-X claimed to be. the Dome and Pamour orebodies abut these two previously mentioned and would add an additional 17 million ounces so far mined from 4 mines in Timmins. The gold potential of the Matheson and Detour camps combined may be as great as Timmins was, but the development and exploration there has languished, although at one time Dome mines projected their Detour Mines mining potential as over 6 miles of continuous drifting. Altogether in Canada there are at least 100 well defined bodies of possible Gold ore that either have mills nearby or are awaiting development, and are not being mined or explored today. During the nineties it came to be realized that straddling the Alaska-Yukon border there was a 100 mile or more long trend that contained perhaps 20 major Canadian exploration projects for Gold, and on the Alaska side, the Pogo deposit of Teck Corporation, which by preliminary drilling is projected to have more gold than in all three mines at Hemlo, and at 0.50 ounces per ton at that. Perhaps the Pogo is the single most important domestic gold discovery of the last 25 years and helps to define a new North American gold camp. If you add the sandstone hosted gold deposits of Peru that host the fabulous Yanacocha deposit, that governments have fought over and may have 60 orebodies regionally, and Barrick's undeveloped potential there and in Argentina-Chile, it is apparent that gold mining could be in a healthy state if prices improve.
The sad fact is I know of only two gold mines in Canada that started since 1995 that are still in production. They are Wheaton River in BC and River Gold Mines in Wawa. Actual gold mining has little to do with mining promotion, necessary evil though it may be.
The upshot is that there is in fact a Bre-X of refractory gold awaiting higher prices that could be exploited ,and will be, when the current crop of new age economists and paper money mavens retreats and normal human commerce begins again in earnest.
mailto:echarters@primus.ca
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