New Mexico Officials Express Support for Wind Mountain Mining Project
Geovic Mining Corp staff found a broadly supportive audience for their vision of a rare-earth mine at Wind Mountain, when they described the project to a group of government officials at an event held near the peak last Friday (April 13).
The event was organized by New Mexico State Rep. Yvette Herrell, who said she felt that state officials should not only discuss the Cornudas Mountains project in the state capital, but see where it was playing out. In addition to Rep. Herrell, the group included Otero County Commissioners Ronny Rardin and Tommie Herrell, New Mexico State Sen. Bill Burt, John Bemis, secretary of New Mexico’s energy, minerals and natural resources department, Fernando Martinez, director of the department’s mining and minerals division, representatives of the Bureau of Land Management and others.
Rardin was the most vocal in his support for the project, saying that it could generate millions in tax revenue for Otero County and create local jobs. He said the project could produce $25 million in tax revenue for Otero County.
“This could really be a boost for our area,” Rardin said. “The impact could be tremendous. We could fund new schools and actually pay our teachers what they deserve.”
Rardin also described the development of domestic sources of rare earths – which are essential in many military as well as consumer-electronic and alternative-energy technologies – as a patriotic duty.
“It’s our American duty to be reliant on America,” he said.
Though less effusive than Rardin, other elected officials present at the event also suggested their support for the project, with Rep. Herrell describing it as “very exciting” and Burt saying that a rare-earth mine could help diversify Otero County’s economy.
Geovic completed a round of exploratory drilling on the north slopes of Wind Mountain, northwest of Dell City, earlier this year; while they emphasize that the project is in its earliest stages, Geovic staff say they believe the mountain’s volcanic rock may contain sufficient rare earth resources to make a production mine there commercially viable. A class of heavy metals, rare earth elements are used in everything from night-vision goggles to electric car batteries, laptops and iPods; China produces almost all of the world’s rare earths, and a push is on to develop North American sources of the metals.
Geovic’s project has drawn strong opposition from members of the Mescalero Apache tribe and from environmental groups, principally the Coalition for Otero Mesa, which argues that federal lands in the Cornudas Mountains and adjacent Otero Mesa grasslands deserve permanent protection from extractive industry. Area residents have also expressed concern about a mine and its potential impact on the mountain, which, rising thousands of feet above the surrounding plains, is second only to Guadalupe Peak in its prominence as a local landmark.
Geovic has sought to allay those concerns by saying a production mine at Wind Mountain would be “low-impact.” And at Friday’s gathering, Sec. Bemis commended Geovic for a “valiant effort” in minimizing impact in its first round of test drilling, when the crew packed in, on foot and with animals, a portable drill and other gear.
“We were pretty impressed,” Bemis said. “It’s a world-class outfit.”
Thus far, Geovic has conducted exploration on land managed by the BLM, but the company is interested in leasing state land at the mountain and pursuing work there. Such a lease could generate revenue for the state’s public school fund, and a mine at the location “could be a very significant thing for the entire state,” Bemis said.
In their presentation, Geovic geologist Garrett Mitchell and Gary Morris, a geologist and the company’s vice president, recapped what the findings generated by the company’s exploratory drilling. Geovic believes the zone of rare-earth-bearing eudialyte extends from a ring around the mountain’s base deep beneath the surface of the earth; in a second round of drilling, Geovic would drill deeper – to depths of about 1,500 feet – to assess the deposit. The new round of drilling would focus on the southeast edge of the mountain, rather than its northern slopes.
Mitchell said the company plans to initiate the permitting process for the second round of exploratory drilling in two to three months and that he hopes to begin drilling again within six months. A second round of drilling would involve a much larger rig than the portable “Winkie” drill employed for the first holes, but Mitchell said the company is “looking at options to keep in the spirit of what we’ve been doing in terms of minimal impact.” He said the company might use a helicopter to drop in components of the drill rig, or might pack in the components, and he said that disturbance to the land would involve “at most a 50-by-50 foot drill pad, likely cleared by hand.”
Morris described the potential economic impact of a mine at Wind Mountain, saying that it could employ 100 to 150 people, in both skilled and unskilled positions. He said the Wind Mountain deposit appears to be similar and comparable to a rare earth find in Dubbo, Australia, which also targets eudialyte, and is a $400 million project. Geovic has spent about half a million dollars on its exploratory work thus far, Morris said.
Mitchell said that rare earth deposits are presently being explored in northern New Mexico and that if a processing facility were constructed in Alamogordo, the community could become a hub for concentrating rare earth ore from across the state.
Morris emphasized that, while the initial lab results from Wind Mountain are “encouraging enough to take it to the next step,” the company is a long way from developing a production operation – and that, even if subsequent exploration “proved up” the resource, it would likely be a decade or more before a mine was in operation.
“For every 10,000 prospects, you may get one mine,” he said. “There’s a lot more to come – we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves.”
Restating earlier comments from the company, Morris said that if Geovic were to pursue a production operation it would not dig an open pit, but use a “portal” to tunnel underneath Wind Mountain and mine the ore from within. He said, beyond the portal entrance, to be located about a quarter or half mile from the mountain, and a few small vents, there would be little disturbance to the surface of the land and that the mine would be “almost unseeable.” Morris said engineers will soon be examining the integrity of the rock around Wind Mountain, to insure that a portal and underground mine would be safe.
Morris said he spent more than a decade working to clean up mining and oil and gas operations that had outlived their usefulness and been abandoned by companies – and that Geovic would not launch an operation that would leave environmental degradation in its wake.
“If we can’t mitigate, we’re not going to do it,” he said. “We want any impacts we have to be manageable.”
Government officials at Friday’s events seemed receptive to that message, though committed oponents of the project and of any industrial-type development in the Cornudas Mountains are unlikely to be satisfied.