Two Dumps

Old mine waste is interesting again now that prices are up. Tailings, slag and dumps that sat untouched for decades are now called resources. I spent time on exactly this in Uganda in the early 1990s: two projects, both about pulling metal out of what earlier mining and smelting had left behind. If you are looking at a reprocessing deal now, the pitch will not tell you this: the metal is almost never what kills them.

The first was at Kasese, in the west. The old Kilembe copper mine had left a stockpile of cobalt-bearing pyrite there: about 820,000 dry tonnes, assaying 1.38 per cent cobalt, according to the IFC's later project disclosure. Enough for some 10,000 tonnes of cobalt. The cobalt was real. I had it assayed by Alfred H. Knight. But recovering it needed a smelter, and there was strong environmental opposition to building one. I was up against BRGM, the French geological survey. Their route was bioleaching: bacteria that dissolve the cobalt straight out of the pyrite, with no smelter. They won. The cobalt was never in question. The way to get it out was.

The second was a pile of slag from a copper smelter near Jinja. The copper in it was real too. But the pile sat in the middle of a landlocked country. To sell it I would have had to move thousands of tonnes of low-grade material to the coast and onto a ship. We approached Marc Rich and Co as a buyer, and I went back and forth by phone and fax with their logistics people, trying to make the freight work. It never did.