MINER DETAILS — Industrial minerals worth watching

Industrial minerals are the wallflowers of the mining industry. While gold, diamonds, copper and even zinc easily attract investor attention, it’s not easy to drum up interest — let alone excitement — in gypsum, limestone, garnet, graphite, barite and diatomite, to name a few.

Companies active in such ventures have to break through a wall of indifference to educate and drive home the point that the definition of ore — a deposit that can be mined at a profit — isn’t restricted to the better known precious and base metals.

Indeed, with prices for most metals depressed, opportunities for profitable industrial mining ventures suited to niche markets or newly found applications may never be better.

Take zeolites for instance, minerals whose high porosity and exchange capacity make them potentially useful in environmental applications. The British Columbia government’s resource branch is already testing a number of zeolites, including several mined in the province, to treat water from the abandoned Britannia Beach mine near Vancouver as part of an acid mine drainage research effort.

The results show the zeolites are capable of removing up to 95% of the copper, which can be collected and the zeolite regenerated by washing it with sea water (sodium replaces the copper). By reusing the same solution, it might be possible to raise copper concentration levels high enough to make copper recovery economic.

Interest is also expected to grow in fluorite (acidspar) as pressure continues to phase out chlorofluorocarbons linked to depletion of the ozone layer. Fluorite is being touted as an “ozone-benign” replacement, which accounts for recent interest in Silverspar Minerals, active at a fluorite deposit in Arizona.

Further afield, Trans America Industries and Boron Chemicals are involved in a profitable boron mining and processing business in Chile. They aren’t competing with giant RTZ, which holds the famous 20 Mule Team trade name. Instead, their marketing strategy is aimed at offering low-cost, high-purity customized boron products.

Boron has many traditional uses, including in cleaning products. But it also has new and interesting applications in advanced ceramics, plastics, superconductors and in medical research where Boron 10, a stable isotope of boron, has been used to destroy cancer cells.

What industrial minerals lack in glamor, they make up for in usefulness.