Letter to the editor: The price of success

Tom Morrison (T.N.M., Sept. 2/02) raises an important issue in his letter. When I entered the mining industry, the main concern was that the World’s mineral resources were becoming exhausted. Jobs were plentiful, but look around the floor at any recent PDAC annual convention and you will see few young faces, let alone anyone recruiting help. Our industry has been too successful.

One interesting cycle I have observed over my career is that the search has always moved to commodities of higher unit value. We have moved successively in our exploration targets from coal and iron, to copper, tin, uranium; to gold, then platinum group metals; and finally, diamonds.

We are at the end of this cycle. We have a done a good job in exploring the top one hundred metres of the Earth’s crust. Once industry has mined out what we have found and turns to the much greater challenge of prospecting the second hundred metres, Morrison will be proved right: there will be few left who know what needs to be done and nobody at all who knows how to do it.

Brian Hester, Vineland, Ont.

Afton paid for, not optioned

I would like to point out an item of interest in an article Thomas Schuster wrote about Afton Mines (T.N.M. Aug. 19-25, 2002).

Teck did not option Afton; rather it gained control of the company by buying it from Placer Development. According to reports at that time, a deal was negotiated during a flight between Vancouver and Toronto by the companies’ former chief executive officers, T.H. McClelland of Placer and Teck’s Norman Keevil Jr. The price? Four million dollars.

Efrem Specogna, Nanaimo, B.C.

T.N.M. welcomes letters

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