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Desert Fox Minerals, aka Copper Fox Metals, held an open house last night at the Veterans Memorial Park in Miami to answer questions about its activities at the Van Dyke claims.
Roughly 30 people showed up, including Elmer Stewart, the company’s president and CEO, project manager Dr. Tim Marsh, geologist Jack Bernard, driller Willie Franklin, and others representing the company, who fielded questions from community members in attendance throughout the evening.
The company’s employees and contractors have been investigating a copper deposit at Van Dyke to potentially mine since the beginning of April. The large copper deposit lies below the town of Miami at depths deeper than the height of the Empire State Building (1,250 feet).“We’re not going to dig up the town to get it,” assures Bernard. “You’d have to be super rich.”
Instead, the company will use a method called in-situ leaching (ISL) to extract the copper. Because the deposit is a copper oxide deposit, the company is able to leach the copper from the host rock, dissolve it in a weak sulfuric acid solution, and pump it to the surface.
Since the company is still in its early exploratory stages, some questions could not yet be answered, such as: what kind of money will this bring to the community, and how many people would the project employ?
First, the company has to finish drilling to see whether or not copper mining prospects are good, Stewart says. This will set the stage for the project going forward.
“This is the first phase,” Bernard said. “We may or may not return.”
Back in the late ‘70s, a company called Occidental Minerals drilled 46 holes at Van Dyke and conducted tests to estimate how much copper was in the deposit. The company estimated there were 1.2 billion pounds of copper total, and further estimated that 62% of the deposit was oxidized. Work on the site stopped abruptly when the chairman of the board decided to get out of mining and stay in petroleum.
Desert Fox is spending the next two to three months drilling seven additional holes to verify Occidental’s data and to test for sulphide copper-molybdenum. They just completed their first core hole.
Meanwhile, Bernard, along with the other geologists, are analyzing the rock for faults and estimated copper content.
“We have to prove mineralization and assays are still there,” Bernard said. “If it supports historical data, then we will continue infill drilling.”
So far, the company believes Occidental’s work was very good.
“We don’t always have successes in this business,” Stewart said. “[But] all the work we’ve done so far to verify Occidental’s work shows a strong correlation between what they said was there and what we’ve found was there.”
If Desert Fox finds a good correlation between their holes and those drilled in the ‘70s, then the company will complete a resource estimation, followed by a preliminary economic assessment sometime in the fall. These would answer a lot of the community’s questions, Stewart said. Then, if all goes well, the company hopes to begin producing copper in three years.
As the project continues, the company plans to hold more public meetings with the community in the future.
Desert Fox first learned of the Van Dyke ore deposit back in 2011, when the company was approached by Bell Copper for a corporate acquisition. To acquire the deposit, Copper Fox paid Bell Copper $500,000 Canadian dollars, and paid an additional $1.5 million to the vendors of the Van Dyke Deposit.
The following questions and answers were included in the pamphlet handed out during the open house:
Will our drinking water be contaminated? No. Injection wells and recovery wells will be surrounded by strong acid-proof casing that will prohibit any leakage of leach solution going down or copper sulfate solution coming back up. Also, the wells for drinking water are located three miles away in a different rock formation.
Will there be any subsidence of the surface? No. There will be no cavities created underground from the in-situ leaching method of recovery.
Will there be any blasting? No. Explosives aren’t used in in-situ leaching.
Will there be any noise? Yes. During the exploration and development phases of the operation, drill rigs will be used to sink the well casings. All efforts will be made to keep the noise to an acceptable level, but residents will know they are there. After drilling is done there won’t be much noise.
When will the project start producing copper? That depends on many things, but if all goes well, Desert Fox could be making copper in three years.
How many people will be working for the company? Right now about a dozen company employees and contractors are employed by Desert Fox. During development and after the mine begins production employment will rise to several dozens of people.
Jenn Walker began writing for Globe Miami Times in 2012 and has been a contributor ever since. Her work has also appeared in Submerge Magazine, Sacramento Press, Sacramento News & Review and California Health Report. She currently teaches Honors English at High Desert Middle School and mentors Globe School District’s robotics team.
