Seems this overdue candidate for abandonment may actually be getting an extreme makeover…
http://www.elynews.com/articles/2006/11/17/news/news05.txt
…thanks to a proposed coal fired power plant.
You see folks, this is why you don’t go around haphazardly abandoning so-called marginal lines. You might just need them someday.
Back in May, I got to visit the rail museum in Ely, and do the double-shot program of driving the steamer #93 and an Alco RS.
One of the regulars at the museum was asked about the line’s future prospects, and he told me of another factor weighing in favor of the rebirth of the NN: high copper prices. There’s still plenty of copper ore there, and higher activity in the mine could help add to the demand for efficient, low-cost transportation. Let’s hope.
Where would the copper ore be processed? Isn’t the nearest copper smelter down in southern Arizona?
Sorry I’m sketchy on details here.
I don’t know how much refining capacity still exists there in Ely, or, if raw ore were shipped out, where it would get refined.
The conversation was primarily between my brother (a chemical engineer by training) and this fellow with the museum who apparently used to work as a metallurgist. I’m a layman, but in between items beyond my grasp, I could pick up that there might be a lot of shipping out of there. Perhaps the ore would only get partially refined there; I really don’t know. But the museum worker seemed to feel strongly that continued high copper prices might be enough to get the line active. Maybe not, but with the prospect of a coal-fired power plant in Ely, it looks like the NN might get busy again.
Copper can be mined by chemical extraction so not as much copper ore is being hauled.
dd
The Nevada Consolidated Copper Co. (Kennecott Nevada) copper smelter at McGill (just north of Ely) closed in 1978 and was subsequently razed. The nearest copper smelter is now BHP-Billiton (former Kennecott, former Utah Copper) smelter at Magma, Utah.
The copper ore from the Robinson Mine a few miles south of Ely is concentrated at the mine and either exported through Richmond, Calif., for smelting in a Pacific Rim country such as China, or trucked to an Arizona smelter such as Grupo Mexico (Asarco) at Hayden. Copper ores from porphyry (disseminated) ore bodies such as Ely are always concentrated as close to the mine as possible as they have very low tenor, on the order of 0.7% or less these days in the U.S., which would hardly pay the freight to the UP (WP) connection at Shafter, much less all the way to Richmond or any domestic smelter. The Robinson concentrator has a design capacity of 38,000 tons per day of ore, which equates to maybe 400 tons/day of wet concentrate. You could haul that by truck to Wells or Wendover and transload it for not much more cost than hauling it by rail.
S. Hadid
Yes, but only if its an oxide copper ore, which is leached using a dilute sulfuric acid and recovered from solution by electrolysis, a process known as SX-EW (solvent extraction-electrowinning). That’s no incidental consideration because most major copper-bearing ore bodies are made up of roughly 50-50 oxide and sulfide copper ores, and sulfide copper ores are not amenable to leaching (the copper-bearing minerals are not readily attacked by dilute sulfuric acid) and must be concentrated and smelted, just as oxide ores aren’t amenable to economically viable concentration methods.
Most porphyry copper deposits such as Ely consist of an oxide cap and a sulfide core beneath the water table. Historically the oxide ores were treated as worthless overburden because economical SX-EW techniques hadn’t yet been invented. Today the tables are turned and oxide ores are often much cheaper to refine.
How it works: Oxide ore is crushed to about 3/8" to 1/4" size (a major economy compared to the fine powder that sulphide ores must be crushed to), then heaped and treated with dilute sulfuric acid, which dissolves the major part of the soluble metallic minerals in the ore. The pregnant liquor from the leaching beds or vats is pumped into a cell where it acts as an electrolyte and is deposited on cathodes. Cathode copper is 99.9% pure and ready for use as-is, whereas blister copper from a smelter must typically be electrolytically refined to remove trace elements to make it suitable for electrical conductors. The slime in the bottom of the cell that doesn’t deposit on the cathode from either SX-EW copper or electrorefined blister copper is recovered because its valuable – the trace elements are silver, gold, platinum, bismuth, etc., depending upon the particular ore.
S. Hadid
Actually the mining company, Quadra Mining Ltd., estimated 10 years worth in 2004. Add a few more years for running some of the “waste” that gets classified as low-grade ore after copper prices run up some more.
S. Hadid
BTW- The power plant(s) are not going to be built in Ely. They are going to be built near Cherry Creek, some 40 miles north of Ely. The line will be rebuilt with 132 lb rail from where the power plant (s) track joins the main to Cobre (the ex SP connection). When this happens the rest of the line will be brought up to par to transport copper concentrate out of Ruth again. That may mean 132lb rail if NN gets there wishes but is not guaranteed. The NN will retain ownership of the line and other users will lease the right to operate on it.
I was just up there and got this picture of the flooded Liberty pit. Soon this will be pumped out so mineing can resume in this pit too.
It’s gunna take some work to get this line back in shape. This is the NN mainline crossing of hwy93 at Currie.
Was/is there a processing plant capable of using the chemical process still open outside of Yerington? I thought this process was what was producing some radioactive byproducts. I think it was owned by Anaconda Copper?
Dave
SX-EW extraction of copper metal from copper ore is done immediately at the mine site because the cost to transport the ore very quickly exceeds the value of the ore. Just moving the ore from the bottom of the pit to the original ground surface can exceed the value of the ore! Solvent extraction doesn’t take a complex or expensive plant, but the electrowinning portion of the process is an expensive facility. I’m not aware of any operation that collects the pregnant liquor from the leaching operation and transports it any significant distance to an electrowinning plant; again, the sheer tonnage of liquid involved quickly overwhelms the value of the solute copper.
Anaconda Copper’s Weed complex at Yerington operated from 1953 to 1978 and produced 2 billion pounds of copper from 0.6% ore. The plant was sold to be razed. The purchaser decided instead to leach the tailings, and did so from 1982 to 2000, by which point it had gone bankrupt. It abandoned the site and left 92 million gallons of pregnant leach solution in the system, along with a large unreclaimed area. The property is currently being cleaeed up by the EPA using taxpayer money in an effort to avoid contamination of groundwater. There’s a new project nearby called Pumpkin Hollow that proposes to produce another 6 billion pounds of copper from 0.2% ore. This after a circa 1890-1930 operation that produced from 2-4% ore! It goes to show that yesterday’s waste is tomorrow’s ore.
S. Hadid
Piece of cake!
PS - At least they didn’t turn the NN into a stinkin’ rail trail!
Nice pictures, Chad. Ely is my home town and I have been gone for about 20 years. I have a lot of pictures from when the line was still in operation over 20 years ago. Still have a lot of relatives in the area. Several years back, I walked the line from Currie to Cherry Creek. Most of the road bed has actually sunk, the rails even with the ground. Some of the dates I found on the rails were in the 1920’s!