Aberfoyle’s reputation much larger than its size

With only 265 employees thinly spread over 4,000 km from Tasmania to Western Australia, base metal and gold miner Aberfoyle Ltd. (47%-owned by Cominco) has a reputation far larger than its size.

“They’re an aggressive bunch,” one Australian mining analyst says with a smile. “And when the rich Hellyer zinc mine is developed, we’re going to hear a lot more from them.”

Dr Max Richards, Aberfoyle’s managing director, agrees that the world-class Hellyer zinc-lead-silver deposit is “the centre of the company — its future. It has 18 million tons of ore and an expected mine life of at least 15 years.”

Richards, an Australian geologist who joined Cominco in Trail, has worked with Aberfoyle since 1971. The corporate office is in Melbourne with a staff of 23; another 43 are in the exploration group; 50 are employed at the Bardoc open pit mining and carbon-in-pulp gold operation in Western Australia; about 150 work in Tasmania at the Que River zinc-lead mine, Clevland mill and Hellyer mine site.

Aberfoyle, a 61-year-old gold company, has been mining in Tasmania for all of that time, Richards says. From 1926 to 1981 it was primarily a tin producer, but the company’s tin mining ceased last year because it was uneconomical. The Que River mine in northwest Tasmania started in 1981 and is expected to have a 10-year life.

Aberfoyle’s innovative and budget conscious engineers converted the former tin mill at Clevland earlier this year to treat 250,000 tonnes of Hellyer ore a year. The engineers and operators are gaining valuable experience with the fine- grained Hellyer ore and expect little trouble commissioning a major new plant in 1989.

The first shipment of 5,400 tonnes of Hellyer zinc-lead-silver concentrate destined for a mainland Australian smelter was shipped last May. The Clevland operation is producing concentrate at 85,000 tonnes a year. The planned new plant would produce more than 300,000 tonnes a year for shipment to Australian, Asian and European smelters. Full-scale development of the much bigger Hellyer deposit was expected to begin late last year.

The Bardoc gold operation, 55 km from the fabled gold rush town of Kalgoorlie, produced its first 6.05- kg gold bar last January. Open pit mining began over a year ago, and so far several million cubic metres of ochre-colored earth have been stripped from the Zoroastrian and Excelsior pits adjacent to the heap leach treatment plant. Mining of a third pit, Davyhurst, about 80 km from Bardoc, will begin early next year.

An interesting project of Aberfoyle’s exploration department is the “Beach Sands Program,” an attempt to find an economic heavy mineral sands deposit. These deposits are formed by wave action on beaches and consist of an accumulation of titanium minerals, zircon and monazite. The exploration strategy is to focus on ancient shorelines now lying inland above sea level. Aberfoyle holds more than 15,000 sq km, mostly in the Murray Basin of South Australia where these old shorelines are located.

“Aberfoyle’s effort to become a substantial mining company depends on good explorers and an aggressive mine-making group,” Richards says. “We draw on a variety of advice from Cominco, enabling us to combine the virtues of smallness with the resources of a large integrated mining company.” From Orbit, Cominco Ltd.’s in- house publication.