TPT January 2008

From the AmericaS

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 www.unlockthevalue.com. 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

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J anuary 2008

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