I thought it might be entertaining or at least a partial tension reducer to give a little insight into the mining history of metals other than straight Gold. It may give some hope to those of you that are anxiously waiting for the almighty permit. Hope I dont bore you.

In 1973,(now I'm aging myself) I was involved in a mining project near Kelowna BC which is not far from our Carmi project near Penticton. I worked for Noranda Mines on an ore find of copper and molybdenum. The project was not noted for its high grade ore, but rather for its low grade ore. Now that might not make a lot of sense to most of you, but I will clear up why they even bothered to mine it in this short story.

The copper was 150 grams per tonne, and the moly was 3.69 grams per tonne. Hardly worth while moving over 300 million tonnes of stone and overburden to get that small amount of ore is what immediately comes to mind. However, Noranda Inc. (now Xstrata from a merger of Noranda and Falconbridge and a hostile takeover or two) deemed the project worthwhile for a completely different reason. They reasoned that if they could put the newly growing computer technology into play by not only monitoring the mining process but controlling the mining prcess,they would be able to shorten the amount of time to completely mine out the ore find. Im proud to have been a part of that history.

I was a young buck back then and was a third year apprentice in instrumentation. It was the perfect place to get the electrical and computer experience that the Alberta oilpatch was lacking. Besides, Kelowna and area was full of good looking young women, boats and fast cars, and I was still very single. After a considerable amount of suckholing, and brownnosing I finally landed a job there, which lasted for me for 4 years, got me a wife, and lost me a boat and fast car. Anyway you have to keep in mind, that computers back then were the size of a fridge, had less memory than a Gameboy or handheld phone, and the disc was the size of your kitchen table. At any rate, we signed secrecy agreements and went about our business designing and testing equipment to control the crushers, rod and ball mills, floatation circuits, and drying units to get the ore to a shippable state. It was estimated that the 300 million tonnes of overburden and ore would take 40 years to mine out at the rate they were mining it back then without computer control. They were hoping to cut that by 25% with computer control, and sell the technology to every other mining company in the world for huge bucks. The income from the mine was only suppossed to support the experiment, and not really intended to make a profit, or at least not a huge profit. The mine opened in 1970 and closed in 1990, twentyyears, and processed 182 million tonnes of ore, which yielded some 278,000 tonnes of copper, 66,000 tonnes of moly, 125 tonnes of silver, and 2 tonnes of gold. They paid $79 million dollars in taxes so we have to assume they made some money, and even at 1975 prices for the metals sold, they grossed well over $2,775,000,000 dollars, (two billion, 775 million dollars).

Remember now, we are only talking about 3.69 grams per tonne of moly, and 150 grams per tonne of copper. Back in 1975 copper was worth about $1.60 per pound (454 grams) and moly was only $12 per lb. Silver was $5 per ounce and gold was about $170 per ounce.

It is my belief that SLI outstrips this scenario by leaps and bounds, and I'm pretty sure that most of the majors like Xstrata have got their eye on us, and are drooling very heavily. Ill bet they want the permit as bad as we do. Just a little food for thought. Hope this was a little change from the normal hype and entertained at least a few of you. Good luck to all and have a great weekend. Heres looking at permits next week.Rinky