TPT January 2008

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From the AmericaS
January 2008 108 ›
cent rate for its gold (“Solve a mining puzzle and win $10 Million,”
September 20).
Barrick broadened its approach after various techniques for removing
the silver proved either unsuccessful or financially prohibitive. “[The
prize offer] is a way to go out to the global scientific community to
focus that intellectual horsepower,” the company’s chief executive
and president Gregory C Wilkins told the Times. “Rather than limit
the problem to a very small R & D staff, we have turned our R & D
group into managers of research.”
The winner, if there is one, will have earned that big purse. Unlike
the gold deposits at Veladero, the silver in the open pit mine is
encapsulated in silica, a tough material, and cyanide leaching
processes remove very little silver from the ore. William F Bawden,
who teaches hard rock mine engineering at the University of
Toronto, told Mr Austen, “If you’re going to attack this, you’re going
to need to pull together different groups of people who probably had
nothing to do with mining before.”
Clearly of the same opinion, Barrick has imposed no restrictions
on competition entrants. Detailed information about the mine
and the silver-extraction problem are posted on the website
. But the company also braced itself
for some highly notional suggestions. As submissions come in,
Mr Wilkins said he expected the review committee to “filter out the
crazy stuff pretty quickly.”
Barrick will not reward any process that is environmentally
unsound, and Mr Wilkins told the Times that he hopes the
competition will stimulate research into cleaner processes for
extracting minerals. Mr Austen wrote, “Mishandled cyanide at
mine sites has poisoned rivers, and cyanide leaching draws
undesirable toxins from ore, particularly mercury, in addition to
gold and silver.”
Barrick Gold has its headquarters in Toronto, Ontario, and four
regional business units in North and South America, Australia, and
Africa.
• The Times observed that Barrick has an encouraging example
in another Canadian mining company, Goldcorp (Vancouver,
British Columbia), which in 2000 posted geological data for an
underperforming gold mine in Ontario and offered $500,000
in prize money for information leading to more productive
drill sites. The competition identified sites that had not been
exploited by the company. Production at the mine has gone
from 50,000 ounces of gold a year to 500,000 ounces.
Energy
The US Supreme Court will look at ExxonMobil’s
$2.5 billion penalty for the 1989 “Valdez” oil spill
On October 29, the Supreme Court agreed to review the punitive
damages imposed on the Texas-based energy giant ExxonMobil
for the environmental disaster caused when the Exxon Valdez ran