Click here for the entire series about copper: http://thetyee.ca/News/2014/03/24/Travels-with-Copper/
PRINCETON B.C. — The “cradle” of this copper story lies here, about 300 kilometres east of Vancouver near Princeton, B.C., a boom-and-bust mining and logging town that by the late 20th century seemed used up and ready to die.
Between 1927 and 1996, some US$6-billion worth of copper had been dug from the mountains south of town, extracted by at least five corporations, now all long gone. What was left, most traditional assays concluded, wasn’t worth the cost of pulling out of the ground.
But by 2011, change was on the horizon, driven by both new technologies and distant market forces 9,000 km to the east (see sidebar). Under new management, Copper Mountain again began producing raw copper for export, putting 380 people to work full time, and supporting about 1,500 other jobs indirectly.
“I’ve died and gone to mining heaven,” Princeton town councillor Frank Armitage gushed at the mine’s official re-opening. A 40-year veteran of the industry, Armitage is now both Princeton’s mayor and Copper Mountain’s human resources manager.
This dual role says a lot about Princeton. There’s little separation here between the mine and the community, because without copper there’s not much of a community left.
Cash from Japan makes it work
The story of Copper Mountain’s modern resurrection goes something like this: when the 2008 financial crisis struck, and other miners were ducking for cover, Jim O’Rourke was wheeling and dealing. An engineer educated at the University of British Columbia, O’Rourke is a B.C. mining legend and its unrivalled copper king. He had already retired from launching two other mines — the Huckleberry and Gibraltar copper mines — when he pulled together a team, bought the 18,000-hectare mine site near Princeton, and in 2006 began drilling exploratory rock cores with urgent speed.
Despite many technical advances in geology and technology, extracting rock samples from across a promising ore body remains the only real way to know what lies below. By the time O’Rourke had drilled and analyzed over 100,000 metres of cores, two years later, he was confident there was enough copper beneath the historic workings to sustain about two more decades of steady mining.
Then, the coup: Mitsubishi Materials Corporation (MMC), an affiliate of one of Japan’s biggest manufacturers, agreed to buy a 25 per cent stake in the mine outright and to buy all its raw copper. Eventually, MMC even secured $322 million in loans from a consortium of Japanese banks to finance the new operations.
Japan and British Columbia have a long history together in the copper trade, dating back to before the Second World War. Today, Japan is our biggest customer for raw copper (followed by China and South Korea) according to Bruce Madu, a director of B.C.’s Ministry of Mines. In his words, Copper Mountain’s relationship with MMC is “an ideal scenario.” The Japanese company’s investment provided both initial capital and a guaranteed ongoing customer for the revived mine, while leaving a majority of its stock in the hands of existing shareholders.
For the rest of this article, click here: http://thetyee.ca/News/2014/03/24/Copper-Mountain-Resurrected/?utm_campaign=map