I used to publish a rockhound magazine.
Each issue had an interview with a mining guy.
Kurt Wegnar was the most interesting of the bunch.
Here is his interview….
See what he says about gold, China, lazy government officials who lie on their
back and spread their legs to do research… and the mafia.
The interview took place, I think, in the summer of 1995.
Mr. Wegnar died in 2003.
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Rocks: So, you were saying that the U.S. Bureau of Mines is about to close down?
Kurt: The economy of the acts by the U.S. Government, yes… And, of course, mining is reduced down to a trickle in the United States.
Rocks: Isn’t it because of the BLM that the mining is going down to a trickle?
Kurt: Basically. A lot of people like to blame it on EPA and that’s a small part of the problem. The big problem is that they have changed the rules for BLM lands and the fee schedules now require high advanced payment for claim. I think it’s $200 plus royalty sharing and it makes it so that mining is very marginal in that state.
Rocks: In terms of profits?.
Kurt: We never — oh, I shouldn’t use the term ‘never’ — lately we just have not been rated as a country that had great mineral natural resources. Whatever we have are marginal deposits — generally. And this is another reason why we are killing ourselves because we take the column-like deposits — you are familiar with Carlin I presume? Carlin is Newmont Gold. They and Barrak are the biggest gold producers in the United States. And they’re heat bleaching. Now most people don’t understand what that’s all about. I’m concerned about it… Heat bleaching, of course, is where you are in low yield deposits . . . low yield gold. And you’re trying to, volumetrically, you’re trying to glean a profit out of that by working in huge volume. Do you know what heat bleaching is?
Rocks: Tell me what it is.
Kurt: It’s basically where you scoop out a little bit of earth and you put down… your ore layer upon layer upon layer. It’s not quite all this simple. You’re going to be irrigating the ore and the liquid has to drain in a particular direction. You’re then going to pump into your strict carbon . . . carbon pulp extraction system etc. But the result is that you lay layer upon layer and then you — sprinkle irrigate the surface of this with cyanide solutions. These solutions, of course, permeate or theoretically permeate, the layerings of the material that you’ve laid down. Out of that, pull the gold and silver into carbon pulp stripping operations. The problem is, it’s a normal procedure is to try to cover them up with dense material so that it is presumably safe. Of course, that’s supposing, that there is very little wind erosion of the compaction that you’re laying down. And water erosion. I’m concerned about the after effects of all these pads being laid down. I’m in mining and yet I’m totally for the environment. I’m totally against some of the practices that are being used even though I’m a consultant in mining.
Rocks: What’s that?
Kurt: We’re negotiating a contract on this gold. This happens to be chalcopyrite — fools gold. This happen to be from Brazil. This particular material has substantial copper in it and gold. And, of course, our forte is basically in precious metals. This is why I’m talking to the Bureau of Mines. They’re telling me the only way to go is the smelter. The only way to go is the normal procedure. And I’m telling them their procedures are 200 years old.
Rocks: You’re saying the BLM is behind the times?
Kurt: Instead of doing most of the things they do, cyanide bleach and so on, we are following the dictates of a great hydrometallurgist… the president of one of the large gold companies, who said that modern hydrometallurgy is nothing more or less than reversing the processes of nature.
Rocks: Who said this?
Kurt: That was the president of Homestake Mining. So, why would we then continue with the particular types of hydrometallurgy we are using? Anyway, we intend to get this out, without talking too technically… with a new process which incorporates salt and a little acid and very high pressure and exothermic reaction. We are going to do this in a different manner.
This also is from Brazil. That’s where, of course, I spent my last 20 years. This is quartz sand or another way to say it is silicate sand with high levels of silicon which we are now supplying to General Electric. This will replace copper. In telecommunications they tell me in the next 20 years, 70 percent of all the copper will have been replaced by fiber-optic. That’s what this is for. So . . .
Rocks: So the world is turning to sand?
Kurt: Yeah. So, the trend in mining is turning. We’re turning from copper lines in telecommunications to fiber-optic and less and less copper applications. So, I thought I’d show you that. I happened to have it in the car because that’s what we were talking about at the Bureau of Mines. We are as I said, in the precious metals sector primarily and we’re staying out of base metals because first of all, we are too small a company. We are not equipped to tear down a mountain for a thimble full of material. I don’t believe in that anyway. The natural resources in terms of minerals are far richer in Brazil than in the United States. Even though your article expounded a great deal about Alaska and Canada*, I don’t believe in sitting in 50 degree water, freezing while you’re trying to do some mining nor do I believe in a short season. It’s like a man said to me, “Mining operation in Alaska,” he said, “I’ve got to get my equipment out there so I can get it on dock in July,” maybe June if he’s lucky. And then he’s got to start heading out of there in September. Ridiculous. By contrast I’ve mined in Mexico and Costa Rica and principally in Brazil and I’ve done a great deal of exploration, for instance, in Costa Rica. It’s fun to be in 85 degree water. No big strain.
Rocks: Aren’t you testing new ways to extract these minerals that we just didn’t have before?
Kurt: Let me give you a little ‘for instance’ Some of my brethren would disagree with me, but that’s alright. We mine a mineral in the ground and we put it through all kinds of crushing and grinding and beneficiation to get it down to almost a talc or floating material. We then take that material and we go through flotation to get certain minerals floating off the top, take the rest of the material and we might go through still a second process and a third process, finally some areas leaching to cyanide. And then we produce some metals that are alloyed. One of the materials, for instance, in my sector we call a dory bore. Then the dory bore has to be separated because we have two or more minerals involved — silver and gold and so forth. That has to go through an electrolytic disassociation reassociation process. Wouldn’t it be easier to go back to the periodic chart and get everything back into atoms and ions and disassociate them and have those then come out as a relatively pure solution from which we could directly have a pure metal?
How much do you know about gold?
Rocks: Well, I know there’s a big argument about it. Some people say we could live without it and some people say the dollar should be based on it.
Kurt: Gold has artificial value . . .
Rocks: That’s not what I heard.
Kurt: But what metal is precious that doesn’t have an artificial value?
Rocks: Good question… that question kept me up all night.
Kurt: You know… platinum. Platinum is a far better metal than gold in terms of economic stability. It’s always constant in price. It has great industrial applications.
Rocks: It’s in demand.
Kurt: It will always . . . well, as far as we can now see at least, be in demand. Platinum is used for catalyst conversion of petroleum products. Palladium has been used in palladium caladium mixes as catalytic converters for your automobile.
Rocks: Uh huh.
Kurt: It has many, many other uses in addition to jewelry. It makes more sense to invest in platinum and that’s why today the precious metals merchants suggest an investment in precious metals. They don’t say gold anymore. They are implying across the spectrum — gold, silver, platinum. Now one must realize that there are seven elements within the platinum family. There’s platinum as the lead metal — we call everything platinum. It’s the platinate group. So there’s platinum, palladium, there’s rhodium, drethenium, iridium, osmium — they are all platinum. Each one has a specific function. So, in terms of . . . I’m an electrochemist, I’m a chemical engineer — in terms of me, the metal that has the greatest enhancement for me and it would be detrimental to me if it wasn’t available would be drethenium and platinum iridium. If I didn’t have those, I’d be out of business. The hooker cells. Everything that makes your plastic, whether it’s polyvinylchloride — PVC — and many other things, they all are derivatives through a chlorine process which demands and requires whether you to use hooker cells or solvay cells that uses what we call a stabilized anode concept. The stabilized anodes are all coated with platinum.
Rocks: Hm. So the readers should run right out and buy some stock in platinum mines?
Kurt: Well, I’m not saying that because I’m not an expert. What I am saying is that I am in agreement with some things I’ve heard. Commodity brokers who know more about all this than I do… might suggest at least 25 percent or more of their capital invested in precious metals. If I were investing in precious metals, I wouldn’t be investing in gold. I’d be investing in platinum. But it’s just as true that you can invest in other things. For instance, this material.
Rocks: The sand.
Kurt: Let’s take that sand for example.
Rocks: Who would have ever thought to invest in sand!?
Kurt: I could probably buy that sand at . . . a dump truck load for $7.00. But by taking that material and washing it, bleaching it and doing a few things to it, then selling it to the fiber-optic industry, they will pay $5.50/lb. There’s much more money to be made in something like this even than gold because you are also talking larger amounts. So, if you’re shipping 10,000 lbs. of fiber-optic sands to Corning Glass or to a number of companies that are in the fiber making industry at $5.50/lb., that represents large sums of money. I’d rather have this than that.
Rocks: You’d rather have sand than gold.
Kurt: Yeah.
Rocks: You know the world has changed when we value sand more than gold!
Kurt: Hang on to your hat.
Rocks: Okay. I am.
Kurt: Are you a fisherman?
Rocks: I’ve fished a bit.
Kurt: Do you use graphite fiber rods?
Rocks: Yup.
Kurt: MIT is doing research, and it will be out soon — everybody’s telling me this; I’m in this business — that silica fibers will replace graphite fibers and they are doing work on sand to make sand fibers that will replace graphite fibers and will be cheaper . . . and better!
Rocks: (Laughing)
Kurt: Don’t laugh at sand!
Rocks: I can see the headline now — WEGNER MAKES MILLIONS IN SAND!
Kurt: No, it’s not just me. The people that are in this are huge companies.
Rocks: Wait a minute… you never did get around to saying why the BLM is going out of business.
Kurt: Well, I think it’s a whole series of events, but primarily when they started altering the fee schedules for mineral rights on government lands, that just about killed them. What it did — what the average person doesn’t realize — it killed the small companies. It didn’t kill the big ones.
Rocks: Oh ohh.
Kurt: It had an effect on the little guy, which is based on the old concept in the United States that by some sheer miracle you could still become a millionaire… You could go out and fall off of a train, land into a ditch, pull yourself up and you’re still alive and in your hand you’re clutching a gold nugget. And you say, “Eureka! I made a discovery.” The chances of that happening, of course, are one in 10 billion. But, it’s still the dream, isn’t it?
Rocks: It’s my dream. Then I could get out of publishing
Kurt: And so, little guys, rock hunters and stone hunters running all over the mountains could set out some stakes and say, “I just found a great gold deposit and I’m rich, I have 20 acres” which is one claim. But that just doesn’t happen anymore. Because if you do that you have to pay $200 per year on that ground and you have a very stiff schedule to develop it or lose it. In addition, you’ve got to pay the government a chunk of your profits of it. It affects the little guy that wants to mine 100 claims, which is still a small pettlings in terms of Kennecot. Making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Rocks: So, it’s a false concept.
Kurt: It’s a false concept and everybody thinks it’s a great concept. If you talk to environmentalists they would say, Eureka we are getting even with the big boys — no you’re not. Big boys are in business making lots of money. They can afford to make good studies and tie up large tracks of land still. As a matter of fact, they’ll do it like in the oil business with all the policing laws, which are going to go to taxes anyway unless they reinvest. So, they don’t care. But the little guy who runs an automobile shop here in town or a group of guys that are in a insurance business or whatever, that want to start a small mining company, they’re knocked out of business. Don’t even count on it.
Rocks: I can see that it’s kind of a stupid decision from the government’s part because they’re not working those lands anyway. To create such an obstacle for someone to come in and actually mine it, they’re just losing tax money because once they do mine it, it starts a revenue stream from them to the smelter to the craftsmen to the jewelry store that they could be getting taxed on at every level.
Kurt: What started all this is regrazing — here’s this big fat rancher and he controls all that mountain. He’s got U.S. grazing rights on all that mountain and the U.S. Government isn’t making any money on it and this guy’s getting rich.
Rocks: So you can see the grazer. You can’t really see the miner. He’s not so public,
Kurt: You can see the grazer. Now, what people are doing too often is the mixing apples with peaches and grazing permit . It’s been going on since the West was developed. But, mining is different. It’s different because the cattle rancher goes up on that mountain doesn’t have to do anything but to drive his cattle up there. But the miner, that little guy that runs the garage or the insurance agents that want to start a mining company, mining is very financially intensive on the front end. They’ve got to go and develop equipment. They’ve got to bore holes They’ve got to hire geologists. They have got to do all this and that — and, on top of that pay the government $200 . . .
Rocks: Oh, they have to hire lawyers, too.
Kurt: Yeah.
Rocks: Nowadays.
Kurt: Yeah, a lot of them. So, you’re out of business before you begin. And, so you can’t compare grazing fees conjunctively with the problems of mining. They should be treated separately. And I think the thing that enables exploration to continue — and not just the big companies — it’s the little guy that accidentally walks up the canyon and stumbles upon something and says, “Eureka! I’m going to make money.” Today there is no incentive to do it because you can’t. There’s no advantage to pounding a stake in the ground. Plus the fact that you have the land tortoise; you have the desert tortoise; you have the spotted owl problem; you have all these things. Okay, so you restrict this area. I can’t do anything. I can’t even step on it or I’m going to be fined $20,000. Now, how do I control that spotted owl from flying from here 50 miles away and landing somewhere else and he’s going to restrict me there, too? I mean this is getting to be . . . and the difficulty is… New York is a beautiful example of this because you have the great metropolitan New York City and you have the rest of New York state, which everybody loses sight of because everybody thinks New York is New York City. Well, in northern New York you have a lot of dairy farms and you have a lot going on. The city people in that state control all the farms. They control the policies — everything is set for the City and not for the country. The country doesn’t carry any votes. It isn’t powerful enough politically to control anything.
Rocks: I get you.
Kurt: And so, the city dudes are dictating to the country dudes what they are going to do with their milk, how they are going to raise their milk, what they can have and what they can’t have. We used to have a great dislike for the New York City people because of that. Now that’s what’s happening to the United States. We have population dense areas in the East from whence we pull Secretaries of the Interior dictating to the West — they’ve never been out here really on top of anything very long. They don’t know what’s going on. They’re dictating to us how we’re supposed to manage our resources out here. And they don’t know anything about it. It’s gotten out of hand. So, the thing that . . . I don’t know how we’re ever going to change that except to have a Secretary of Interior from the Western United States who grew up — not an attorney — and that, unfortunately, is where all these guys come from. They are all attorneys.
Rocks: That is a problem.
Kurt: But somebody that really lived on a farm and knows what it’s all about.
Rocks: And how in the heck is that going to happen?
Kurt: It won’t.
Rocks: I have a theory that the problem will correct itself when these guys drive everybody out of business and there’s no tax money to pay them. Then they’ll have to get a real job.
Kurt: What’s happening is there’s been a 34 percent increase in multinational mining companies leaving the United States and going into just Latin America alone. Thirty-four percent increase in the last 18 months. I used to be in Brazil and I could not find very many U.S. companies. The last time I was in the Maxute plaza, all around me were geologists. Barrick is down there. Kennecot is down there. Western Consolidated Goldfield are all down there. They are getting the hell out of here.
Rocks: So it seems to me that the problem will correct itself when these guys leave the country and it ruins the revenue stream for the . . .
Kurt: Geologists don’t have work. I have people calling me as far away as Oklahoma to find jobs. They’re almost in a state of panic not knowing where they’re going to work or whether they are going to get their retirement.
Kurt: What were we talking about ?
Rocks: About the BLM and why it’s going out of business.
Kurt: Well, I don’t totally know why they’re going . . . of course, they’re economizing in Washington. But, I’m just telling you what they told me. If you were a prospector in gold you would understand that you don’t have the assay (service) we used to have. You know, where people used to go to have their ores assayed. We now find ourselves going from here to Los Angeles, or Reno, or Phoenix to get ores assayed. With the demise of the mining industry, comes the demise of the suppliers and the supporting companies that sell to these large companies. And they’re gone.
Rocks: What’s this about the Rain Forest?
Kurt I have lived in Brazil 20 years and I keep hearing about how terrible we are treating their rain forest. Now the greatest objection I have to all of this — I’m going to cite two cases to you — is where James Mitchner comes into write a history on Brazil. He comes into Brazil and he spends two weeks and then he leaves and he knows all about Brazil and now he’s going to write a history on Brazil. Ridiculous. At that time I was in Brazil already 7 or 8 years and I didn’t know anything about Brazil. I’m a student and I’m a prolific reader. Had he spent some time in Brazil and lived in Brazil, then maybe he could write about Brazil. But all he’s doing now is going down to gather information from what sources? Good sources? Bad sources? And then he’s putting that forth in a book as if he had written and gleaned all this information. Ridiculous.
Rocks: Yikes
Kurt: Another case in point. I had a friend of mine who was an executive in Brazil come down to visit. I was told by some friends that Walter was lonely and he can’t speak Portuguese and he doesn’t know what to do and can’t you help him? Could you at least have dinner with him? And I was alone down there and I said, “Sure, I’ll do that.” So Walter and I started to have dinner every night for three consecutive nights in a row. On the third night next to us sat a very voluptuous matronly woman eyeing Walter. Walter was a good looking guy — tall, lean, thin. And this woman really began to take to Walter. And Walter began to take to her, The fourth day Walter called up and said, “Kurt, I’m . . . uh . . . not feeling very well today. Can we postpone going out tonight?” “Sure, Walter, okay.” The fifth night, “Well, I’m occupied. I’ll let you know when I’m free. I’m going to be busy for a while.” So finally… I called him up and said, “Walter, when you leaving?” and he said, “I’m leaving tomorrow.” I said, “Don’t you want to get together with me at least to say goodbye before you go?” “Yeah, it would be a good idea . . . uh . . . yeah. Let’s do it. Do you mind if I bring somebody?” I said, “No.” So he, of course, showed up with this gal. The end result was that we finished eating… Walter goes to the counter. He picks up his key and gives the key to her. She turns around and heads towards the elevator. He then, chuckles to himself and I thought he was talking to me. I said, “What’s that, Walter?” He said, “That’s going to be some report.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “Well, I can tell you. I must be very obvious to you what occurred.” And I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Well, this lady is here representing the Senate, the United States Senate, (she is a full Ph.D.), to write a report on human rights. And Kurt, she’s been flat on her back all day long, all night long, I know ‘cuz I was there. And I’m just saying that’s going to be some report.”
Rocks: (Laughter!)
Kurt: This kind of . . .
Rocks: There’s no hope.
Kurt: No there isn’t. What’s happening in the United States right now, we have an ordinary, perhaps uneducated public making judgments that aren’t always to the best interests of the total scene. Getting back on… the subject, that’s why all of this has gone on because right now we have Eastern Secretaries of Interior who know nothing about the — really know, beyond a two-week study — don’t know anything about the Western United States and the problems we encounter and the things we face. When we go hiking we are liable to step on a land tortoise and kill it and for heaven sakes, don’t give me a $20,000 fine because it was accidental and so forth. This type of a situation. So, what has happened is we have constricted more and more mining companies, more and more we’ve wiped out the middle sector of mining — the average little miner — we’ve made it impossible for him and he’s going to fade from the scene in a hurry. We’re a service and no longer an industrialized nation. And we’re going to be relying more and more upon other countries to industrialize.
Rocks: Um hum.
Kurt: We are going to be nothing but a computer nation making software for people. And that’s what’s happening in Utah. Somebody said to me the other day, a banker said, “My God, you would think that’s all there was, was computers. That’s nothing. What are we teaching to our children? Where are we teaching chemistry and physics and all the things that we used to learn to make us as confident as we used to be? Today we use computers and the average kid if you take the computer away, can’t multiply 8 x 4.” Alright. At any rate, these companies now are vanishing here. They are not vanishing. They are just leaving. And, they are going to reopen in Brazil. They are going to open elsewhere. Those countries are going to stop being underdeveloped countries and exceed us and pretty soon we are going to be the underdeveloped country.
Rocks: So, we’ll change the sign at the entry of America. It will say, USA, Banana Republic.
Kurt: Yeah. Let me give you a for instance. And I want to get back to burning the rain forest. Mr. Ted Kennedy’s pet project is, that he doesn’t want the U.S. multinationals to give all these benefits to all these people that want to go and work overseas. He doesn’t want to subsidize taxes, or subsidize housing, or subsidize this, or subsidize that — and so, they pass legislation because the U.S. citizens are not educated, particularly in international trade. And they all agree with Mr. Kennedy. “Yeah, these SOB’s, they are down there making all this money.” What they don’t understand is, that it was necessary for the U.S. to do that because the standards of middle class. In order to have those, you had to have all these subsidies in order to provide that for yourself and be able to afford it. And that’s why these things were given by multinational companies to entice U.S. personnel to go down and to face disease and danger and anarchism and terrorism and all these things in order to go down there, in order to be able to take these jobs. There had to be some sort of a reward. The rewards were made but Kennedy took them away. And so now when you go to Brazil today or any other country you no longer see the multinational companies. You see the U.S. heads of multinational companies now headed up by Argentineans, by Japanese, by Germans, but there are no more U.S. managing U.S. interested companies. Okay. That’s the scene abroad.
Rocks: We’ll call it the Mitchner effect.
Kurt: Yeah, the Mitchner. And that’s a good effect. Because that’s about our mentality with our Presidents and anybody else. They go down, they take a quick look. When they go down on a tour with a Brazilian President to tour the area, what do they expect to see? The best of everything. But the way you really get it is to co-mingle with the people. For example: so here I am, I am walking with some Americans through the Hilton. President Gisal was one of the Junta. That’s at the time the Brazilian Generals ran Brazil and these people, these Americans, came up and said, “Isn’t this terrible to have these military dictatorships and everything?” And I said, “Lady, thank your damn lucky stars that’s exactly what they have. If you’d spent time down here, you’d know why that is.” It is later on I was going to become for a brief period of time the Director of Corporate Strategic Planning for Borden Corporation in Brazil. And for the first time I stepped out of the shoes of an engineer into the shoes of an accountant and I began to work with statistics and growth curves and conditions and now, today, I can tell you why that was. Mitchner can’t get it in two weeks. The problem was that in the city of Sao Paulo alone, every year at that time, you had approximately 500,000 people immigrating into that city from the north every year. And then the Americans that walk down the streets look at the tar paper shacks and say, “Look, how terrible this country is!” No, it’s not terrible. It’s the fact that they are not restricting these people from coming from the north into the city because they can’t absorb them. It’s a natural trend that’s occurring. How is it ever going to be corrected, I don’t know because the problem is, as I said to these Americans, I said, “You know, the difficulty we have as Americans is that we’ve forgotten the development of our country.” When we colonized, what did we colonize? We colonized all along the coastlines. And that’s what the Brazilians did too. And then as we began to migrate beyond the first 13 states and go westward, we then used slave labor — let’s call it by what it really is — we used slave labor to build the transcontinental railroad. We used Chinese, Italians, anybody we could get and half the time they weren’t paid, and if they were paid, they were barely paid enough to eat corn and dry bread. But we made that great railroad which enabled the interior of the United States to be developed. We are a country that has a coastline on both sides so that was easy, Brazil — no. Brazil has one coastline. And so the interior only connects with other Latin countries, so there was no motive to build a transcontinental railroad. Nor did they have the manpower and everything else to do it. So the interior of Brazil where the mineral wealth, agricultural wealth, lies has never been developed — even to this day!
Rocks: Uh huh.
Kurt: You see. And that’s why it’s so backward. And that’s why you don’t have taxes and that’s why you don’t have education in there. That’s where the most prolific people are. It’s interesting, too, in a chapter of civil rights… If you go to Brazil where they never had really segregation, if there’s a segregation process, it’s natural. There are no laws and no conditions. People intermarry — miscegenation is the greatest thing in Brazil and yet, it’s interesting to see that the Europeans nestled and settled in the south, which is a south temperate zone equal to north temperate zone where we live. And that the Africans, the slaves that came in there, they all settled in the north course of the equator. It’s a division that’s phenomenal if you’re a sociologist. You ought to go down there and study that.
Rocks: Get to the second problem.
Kurt: Oh, the Rain Forests. Perhaps the greatest debacle that could be brought to the surface on that was Mr. Ludwig who was supposed to be a multi-billionaire and his great adventure in bringing a pulp plant and floating it across the ocean. Well, there was a great write-up about having a pulp plant built in Brazil — a huge factory, one of the largest — and float it across the ocean. Now, that was no small task. Because Brazil is on the Atlantic side and Japan is on the Pacific side. You don’t bring it through the Panama Canal, you’ve got to go all the way around the Horn, Argentina, all around . . . not only a very, very long voyage, but a very dangerous one. They brought these pulp plants, two parts, huge floating factories across to start a pulp-making business outside the city of Manowzon in the Amazon. It was a fiasco. He went broke. And the reason he went broke is like so many Americans, to go to the James Mitchner effect — 2 weeks in Brazil. Somebody knew all about pulp and paper mills but they never really made a very thorough study of what kind of trees they had in the Amazon. You can’t take a pine and mix it with a hardwood or mix a hardwood with a poplar or mix it with a cedar and expect to produce good paper. So on each acre you might have 30 or 34 variety of trees, that if you are sending people in to clear, as they are now professing everybody does. They are just clearing the forest — ridiculous. Because when you clear these trees down, you have 34 varieties of woods. What Ludwig discovered immediately was, you couldn’t make a pulp and paper plant work that way.
Rocks: Looks like trouble.
Kurt: As a matter of fact, if he would have studied that thoroughly he would have found out that most paper is made from reforestation. That pulp and paper plants like Weyerhouser and others, they go in and they plant one variety of pine over, say, 100,000 acres and then if you went and cleared those, you would have all pine wood going into your factory and you would be able to fine tune your operation and, yes, you would produce a good pulp. Or, if you didn’t want to use pine, then use eucalyptus. Well, . . .
Rocks: So, you are saying that “raping the rainforest” is a bit overrated.
Kurt: Terrifically overrated. Let me tell you the other thing.
So, Ludwig’s plant shut down. Is there still pulp and paper industry in Brazil? Yes, there is. Now, there’s one tree that’s very peculiar to Brazil. That’s a eucalyptus, which didn’t come naturally to Brazil. It was planted. Yet, most of the wood going into pulp and paper operations is eucalyptus. If you go around the Sao Pablo area or the places where you have a large paper making operation, you will see huge forestations where they have planted pines all the way through. And then you’ll see huge operations where they’ve planted eucalyptus trees. Thousands of acres. Now let’s economically look at this. How long does it take a pine to reach adulthood where it could be chopped down and sold as a Christmas tree? Well, it takes longer for a pine to grow than a eucalyptus. You can harvest a eucalyptus tree every 7 years. So, the Brazilians have zeroed in on eucalyptus to plant. Now, how do you harvest a eucalyptus? Well, you plant it, first of all. And then you go in and you clear them all in one mass. Now if you send some of these two-week buddies down there to look at this and they’ve cleared, you know, a plot of 100 acres, let’s say, they’re going to have a fit. You are destroying our Rain Forest! they say “No we are not”. They are in the pulp and paper business and all of those were planted. Now, the other thing they do after they harvest it, they set that on fire and the reason they set it on fire is because burning the underground, the underbrush, accelerates the seeding or the saps coming up from the roots and the new young shoots coming up and coming to the second crop. They harvest these trees without replanting. That’s the amazing thing. Eucalyptus, every 7 years, and they keep coming back up.
Rocks: So, it’s not a bad thing that they are burning the forests?
Kurt: It’s a necessity.
Rocks: We’ve been fed a big line!
Kurt: Yes, we have. And most of the Americans that go down, go during the month of June or July… St. John’s month. The way the Latins celebrate St. John’s month, is with fires, whether you light candles or have street fires or whatever, everything is fire. And so, arbitrarily the farmers have chosen to burn whatever they do in June and get it over with. So that’s a big fire month. And if you see that and you see all that smoke curling above Brazil — oh, my gosh, they are destroying the Rain Forest! Well, now . . .
Rocks: (Laughter)
Kurt: Is there really some damage occurring to the Rain Forests? Yes! But, let’s put it in the proper framework. Let’s put it in a proper context. The biggest fires and the biggest clearings that you’re going to see are clearings that relate to pulp and paper because you’re talking about denuding an area that I’ve planted. If I’ve planted 1,000 acres of trees, I’m going to be harvesting 1,000 acres of trees. And if you look at that bare ground, you’re going to say, “OHHHH. No”. But they are all going to come up again in 7 years, they’re going to be trees just like they were today. Brazil is encouraging industrialization. One of the things that the government did was say to everyone, “Look, in that jungle, we will give you so many acres and you guys stay up there and clear that and raise some agriculture.” So, there have been movements of Brazilians into the jungle to clear. But by far, very few comparatively speaking, because the jungle lands are not that rich for agriculture. They are very bleak. And when you clear them, very little grows. And so it didn’t take people long to find that out. You just can’t do that. So, that was one government project that was a fiasco. I’ve just told you again, Ludwig went out of business because you just don’t go in destroying the jungle to pulp and forest. It can’t be done. You have 34 different varieties of trees and even if you were in the lumbering business and somebody ordered a particular type of wood going into Japan, and you marked all the trees with an “X,” you might have one X here on this acre and another one 15 acres away and you’d be all over the place. Imagine the cost of sawing those trees down and bringing them all together to make one unified shipment. These people don’t know what they are talking about, in my opinion. Is there a danger? Yeah, there’s a potential danger. Is there great danger in the future? Maybe. Maybe we want to scare people. Maybe we want the Brazilian government to be more restrictive. Is it insurmountable? No. In nature, there are two statements I want to make to you that chemically are true. Nature pollutes itself. We need to understand that.
Rocks: Uh huh.
Kurt: For instance, I can take you to achalcopyrite deposit — huge deposit — in Denver which, if you understand what chalcopyrite is, it’s iron, sulfur, and a few other things, that when you get highly oxygenated water it makes its own sulfuric acid. So, if you get water trickling through these things, you’re going to have sulfuric acid and nature contaminates itself that way. As a contrast, nature also has great capabilities to heal itself — just like the human body. Never you mind about mankind. Mankind is a pollutant — no question about it in my mind. If you let companies or anybody run away without checks and balances — and, I’m a great believer in checks and balances — the thing will get out of hand. And what occurred is that when you start altering a biological balance of streams in nature, great and terrible things occur. For instance, silting of a river is a common occurrence if you are letting a guy do strip mining or placer mining without them really knowing what they are doing. Silting the river means the river gets shallower and shallower and shallower.
Rocks: I guess it makes for good media . . .
Kurt: I’m not saying the people are necessarily . . . are not necessarily vicious, they just don’t know yet. They have the best of intentions. But the way to hell is paved with the best intentions. Without knowledge, without know-how we can have all the intentions in the world and you are not going to make it — in gold, especially. And there’s a lot more to the gold industry than the guy going out and panning a little gold. There are some things you have to know. There is no substitute for experience. So, these are some of the things that . . .
Rocks: Where would someone get the best information on gold?
Kurt: Well, you wouldn’t get it from another amateur.
Rocks: Yeah, okay.
Kurt: And all these, whether you read the California Journal, all of these things, are all written by amateurs.
Rocks: (At this point I’m thinking… “If he thinks they are amateurs, what does he think of us? Yikes.”)
Kurt: … not too many of them are people that can say they’ve been with a huge company. I’m a research chemist in gold or I’ve had . . . for instance, I did my first research with Englehart Industries in electrolyzing gold in 1967. You know, working on new concepts of stabilized platinum anodes or putting gold on solutions. I mean, these kind of people don’t even relate to it. How many kinds of gold are there found in nature? If a person thinks that gold is metal, he’s crazy! You look at your period chart in chemistry and you’ll find out that gold is listed as an element which means it’s atomic. Therefore, there are a lot of atoms in gold all around us. Maybe in the water, in your body — all over — in very minuscule amounts. But how did nature bring those atoms together is what we should be thinking about. Now we’re getting into this field where Homestake mining said, all you have to do is reverse the processes of nature. So how did the atoms come together. How did these things form large veins of gold, chimneys of gold and all these things? . . . is this where the gold is? Absolutely not! The greatest volume of gold in the world is in the ocean. Now, it’s minuscule and the ocean is a huge mass and gold is very difficult to get. But the ocean contains, because of its mass, a lot more gold than the earth. The earth came out of the ocean, didn’t it? It grows.
Rocks: Yeah.
Kurt: Now, the other thing is just as interesting. They talk about ocean mining today. They talk about big nodules of copper in the bottom of the ocean. Probably gold. I could take you to certain places which are very deep and if you had a diver’s outfit, you could find nuggets of gold that big. The point is, and I asked this of the U.S. Bureau of Mines just the other day, if these are pure nodules of copper, how did this come about in the ocean wall?
Rocks: Gold or copper?
Kurt: I mean copper, sorry, which is a more complex metal. Although . . . the noble metal series of platinum, gold, silver, copper… They all belong together. They are called noble metals. How did that nodule become pure copper? They can’t give me the answer. I think I have the answer, but they don’t. And I believe that most things — now everything we have in life is very much oriented to chlorides — salts. Our desert sands — calcium chloride, sodium chloride, carbon. That’s all we know in the Western United States. Our waters are very salty. Anyway, so part . . .
Rocks: Wait a minute. So, are you just going to leave us hanging or are you going to tell us how it became copper?
Kurt: Well, I think this was a gleaning effect in ocean water and probably electrically because a chloride makes a very, very good electrolyte. We don’t fully understand the total action, but I believe the salt as an electrolyte played a great part in more and more copper assimilated to that nodule and that nodule getting larger and larger and larger over periods of time.
Rocks: Good night!!
Kurt: You take your buddy . . .
Rocks: Wait a minute. Now, that’s exciting, if we could reproduce that action.
Kurt: Well, I do.
Rocks: You do?
Kurt: I play with the forces of nature, yes. I’m going to get into a few things here that you’re going to . . .
(Tape change)
. . . what is it that makes your heart function?
Rocks: Probably electric impulses.
Kurt: And where does the electricity come from?
Rocks: Uh, the copper in our brains ??
Kurt: It’s initiated in the brain. But to carry that electrical impulse to your heart takes what? What is the PH of your blood, do you know? Your blood PH is normally 7.3, slightly alkaline.
Rocks: If it’s too acidic . . .
Kurt: If it’s acidic it will carry current. Anyway, I’m just giving you this as an analogy — I’m certainly not a doctor. But the point is, I discussed this with a cardiologist …so, you have a heart condition… You are building up moisture. Your heart isn’t functioning. You’re not evacuating the moisture and your are accumulating more liquid in your system and so the first thing they do is give you a diarrhetic and they put you on a salt-free diet and now you are really in trouble. Because now you don’t have any electrolytes in your system. So, now to compensate for that, they do what? They start feeding you potassium pills. What’s potassium? Another form of salt. So now potassium can be digested by the body and they are loading you with potassium in lieu of sodium chloride. Anyway, all of these things equate to chemistry — particularly to gold chemistry — and because gold is as it is, atomic. It does many strange things in the consolidation of gold as we know them today in rare areas. Let’s take as a typical case in point — the Carlin deposit. It was listed in National Geographic, it was written up beautifully. The article started by the old prospector saying, “Yup, I had gold claims here. T’weren’t a thing on it. Sold it for $2,500.” Some 20 years later a brilliant mining engineer stood at almost the same place and said, “Yes, in the next 3 years we are going to collect 79 tons of gold out of this area.”
Rocks: Whoah!
Kurt: What were we talking about? Well, we were talking about an invisible gold that can only be measured with hunstrum dionize. And it said, as I recall the definition, “A Carlin deposit is a finely disseminated deposit laid down by hydrothermal solutions.” These hydrothermal solutions came from where? From geothermals coming out of the ground and geologists refer to them as menz coming down from the floors to the Magna and they carry with them highly mineralized waters that would go to the surface. So, now we get involved in something very interesting. Is gold soluble in the water? Yes, it is. It depends on the nature of the gold. You see, if we go back to the atomic concept of gold that is on the periodic chart, then golds can be sulfides of gold. They can be chlorides of gold. They can be salts of gold and a salt of something is something before it’s a metal. So, if you talk about orace chloride, which is a salt, okay? An orace chloride, a monovalent gold, is very susceptible to warm water in going to solution. And in the process if you put a strong light source behind it, great magnification, when you put this type of material into a hot water, you can actually see a reaction occurring, that a fine cloud of yellow material drifts away from that reaction and that’s your fine gold. It represents about 8 percent of the total potential dissolved and it drifts away and the rest of the solution goes down to the bottom and now the orace chloride becomes an orace chloride or a trivalent gold and now it’s much more complex. Now it combines very readily for the first time with sulfides and tellurides and all the other things. And, by the time we’re done with some of these golds, we can get as many as 47 different complexes of mineralization containing gold in the ground — very difficult for us to get the gold out of that deal. So, that 8 percent that drifted out as a result of that reaction is so light and so fine that by density to settle down as most miners would consider heavy gold to be. So it stays in the oxidized layers of the earth which is the first 300 or 400 feet of the crust of the earth. And that’s where it nestles as a fine gold. That Carlin Mine now is getting out every day and putting in the heat bleaching. The rest of the material — the major part of the material — is way down below the oxidized levels of the earth in the unoxidized ore, which today, geologists try to term as refractory material. And in that material is where the gold is and they call it refractory, which is not a good name. I don’t like to use it, but refractory might imply that you have to use fire and tremendous heat in order to separate that gold out of your material. That’s where we find ourselves. Now, the placer miner who goes into a placer stream is accidentally trying to find a chimney or vein of gold that’s been spalding off — a very small amount of the total gold picture — has been spalding off through erosion and other things. Small amounts of itself, down into streams which you can then find fairly close to the surface of where the stream is. Actually, he is doing the wrong thing because if you really think about it, most of your gold probably is going to lie in the old stream bed, not the new stream bed, which is higher up. And you’ve got to, if you find that higher up stream bed, prehistorically that’s where the best of your gold is going to be, not down in the bottom of the river where it’s already been eroding all of these many years and it’s finer and finer and finer. So, that’s what you look for. For instance, one of the things I do now, we have natural resource deposits and (I’ve showed you one in silica, fiber optic quartz), but the other material that we had that we mine is ominite. Ominite is a ferrous titanium which implies iron and titanium together. It’s a cheaper material to use and what it’s used for is they put that in a conversion process to make the titanium dioxide, a white paste, TiO2, which is a pigmentation (bleach) and the reason I’m in that business is that this TiO2 replaces leaded paints. See, I’m always environmentally oriented. So I prefer to get in the business that’s going to help mankind.
Rocks: So I see
Kurt: And mankind is going to be helped by using titanium as a coloring agent rather than lead. So, we’re in that business. And that’s very interesting because when we look for ulminite beds, most — you’ve probably heard if you relate to the prospectors, you probably relate where prospectors are looking for black sands and they are trying to find gold in black beach sands and this is ridiculous. The beach sands that we look for today, yes, you can see a little bit of gold in them. But, what you’re looking at is something that isn’t going to amount to very much because the lensing, the layering of that beach sand laid down by the winnowing action of the waves has not completed its harvest. Where did the black sands really come from? They didn’t come from the ocean. That I can tell you. They came, as in Brazil and most places, they came from the Sahara or the higher area where we have granitoid material which is weathering and wearing away and coming down the ravines and being polished and ground up as it comes. And being carried by the rivers to the shoreline where the ocean currents disperse it along the beaches and where the winnowing action keeps laying it up on the beaches and everybody hurries up to find the gold in it. But that isn’t where you find your gold. Your gold is found in the ancient shoreline, which may be 15 miles inland. For instance, right now in Stark, Florida, right outside of Jacksonville, they have ulminite beds which Dupont is involved in. And the shoreline is some 20 miles removed from the ocean because the land mass has been rising and expanding, coming up out of the ocean and you’re getting further and further away from the existing ocean beaches, as we refer to them today. So, the old shoreline is what you’re looking for and that’s where your biggest deposits are. For instance, if you were to auger down into a modern beach sand to find the black material, you might find 8 inches, 6 inches, 7 inches of this material in lensing. But if you go to the old shoreline, you might find meters there. Now you are in a commercial operation. We’re no longer thinking about the amateur. We are thinking about bigger things. We auger down through the overburden down into what amounts to the old prehistoric beaches and we carry that forth all the way to the escarpment where it ends. This is the (felubial) plane or the alluvail planes which were laid down by the early oceans. That’s where you get material. And in that material might be the only place — really — where you’ll find your gold. Not in the beach sands on the ocean.
Rocks: Who are you selling gold to these days?
Kurt: Well, whatever we sell to stays in Brazil. I don’t do any gold work in the United States. The little bit we do, we sell to Englehart.
Rocks: What do they do with it?
Kurt: They probably melt it down and put it on the marketplace. Let’s go into that subject. Gold. We’re off the gold standard since President Roosevelt took us off of it in 1933. I don’t know which President closed the mines, it may have been Nixon, I’m not sure, but one of the Presidents closed down all of our mines and there was a period of time when it was illegal for you and I to own gold and to sell gold.
Rocks: That’s right.
Kurt: Now, when that edict came from whatever idiot President that was, and he was an idiot. What they didn’t realize would happen is that as soon as you close down the mines and you stop your pumps from operating, all of those mines fill with water. And the water decayed the mines so that they’re almost not restorable. If you go to Denver, as a case in point, and you go from Idaho Springs on that little dirt road all the way up to Central City, you’ll pass the Becky Sharp and the Pittsburgh and the Calhoon and all of these old mines that were great producers in their day, but when they closed them down, that was the end of it and they are all full of water and nobody knows what to do with them. We have it right here in Utah. If you go to Eureka, Utah and you take the Burgan and the Trixie and they are all full of boiling hot water — have been for a long time and nobody knows what to do. If you pump the water out, the mine might collapse. That was a terrible mistake for an inexperienced President to make who had inexperienced Eastern Secretaries of the Interior — didn’t know the first tiddley wink about mining. And as a consequence, we are still paying the price of it today because our precious metals sit under ground and we can’t get them out. Now, other countries are not doing that. Japan is hoarding gold. China is hoarding gold like crazy. And why are they hoarding gold? Because their currency, they’ve printed so damn much paper that it’s not worth anything on the international market.
Rocks: I hate it when a country does that….Well, in all of my investigations, the problem seems to be the law itself.
Kurt: We need to almost start all over again and I would agree with you. Get rid of all the attorneys. Kick them out. As a matter of fact, I’d pass a law that no attorney could be in the Congress of the United States. Just complicating an uncomplicated . . . look at the fiasco with the Simpson trial. You know, the whole thing is just absolutely ridiculous. I don’t care about the justice and I’m not talking about whether Simpson is guilty — I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I don’t make any judgments. The only judgment I can make is how ridiculous that judge is. And, how they are making a farce out of the whole judiciary system. It’s a . . . anyway, there’s a lot to be told about gold. There’s a lot to be told about all this. The future is glum for the United States. It’s very bright elsewhere and all I can say to people is that if you want to be in mining, go elsewhere. Don’t fight this battle. You won’t live that long. And, the freedoms that we talk about in our country — let’s call them what they are. If you look at Waco, if you look at the Weaver situation, if you look at the IRS, we don’t have those freedoms that we’ve been brainwashed to believe. We don’t have them. We have a regulatory government which is very restrictive and there are governments that we may call by whatever name we wish elsewhere that are less restrictive. I’m a permanent resident of Brazil. I found myself very free and very easygoing in Brazil. Nothing like here. I don’t have people chasing me down and regulating me and checking on me and who knows, Gestapo-type situations. Should a man still have the right, should he have the hope, no matter how poor… that accidentally or by learning or by hard work… still be able to become a millionaire? Should he have at least that glimmer of hope? Yes, but it doesn’t always exist in this country. Because in every single case they have removed it from you… if by nothing else then eventually by the IRS. Can you find it elsewhere? Yes, you can. You certainly can. Anyway, let me tell you one more thing before you leave.
Rocks: Okay.
Kurt: The thing I’m trying to keep up with is what’s going on — really going on — and sometimes you can read it below the line and sometimes you get more information out of a mining journal than you do the newspapers.
Rocks: That’s why people read Rocks Digest all the time.
Kurt: Tell it the way it is! And the way it is the way people find it and report it. Mitchner says something and, boy, it’s got to be like this. I can say he was there two weeks. And somebody went down and tried to do something and the Americans, the American society now gets upset because we say, if the U.S. Government really is sincere in wanting to know what’s going on, why don’t they call a meeting and invite a whole group of us in and let us who have lived down here for 34 years tell them what’s going on, and set them straight? Why do they send a woman that lays on her back for two weeks and then gives a fallacious report? Mitchner gives a report after two weeks. What is he going to write? He’s going to copy what somebody else said. That’s the only time he has. That’s not going to be factual. It’s very sad the way things are going. It’s very, very sad.
Rocks: Thanks for your time.
Kurt: Be careful how you quote me.
Rocks: We’ll make you famous.
Kurt: No, I believe in the Democratic process. Let me just say this in conclusion. I believe in what was established in the United States. I’m not a radical in any direction, but I am a constitutionalist. I believe in the Constitution of the United States. I believe in the constitutional process, but I don’t believe in unconstitutional processes that are being imposed upon us such as affirmative action. I don’t believe in that. Do I believe in equal opportunity? Yes I do. Do I believe . . . am I color conscious? No, or I wouldn’t be in Brazil. In Brazil where you have every color conceivable and I have friends . . . I select from whatever area and the last thing I look at is color. But, I am opposed to political control of the situation and imposing things upon people blindly. I just read an article on school grants which were refused by the Negro population that was readily received of these grants that were misspent on drugs and heroin and things. This never should have happened. Overreaction again on the part of our government on giveaways. We didn’t think about black and white and pink and purple until the politicians got all these issues. The politicians have created this quagmire and a quagmire it is. Affirmative action. Do you want to go to a doctor that got a passing grade somewhere along the line because they plotted him on a curve and because he was Black they gave him an increase in his grade markings by 40 percent? Do I want marginal people working on my cars? Do you know why we are losing our manufacturing skills — because we have marginal people working in the factories. Everybody is passed if he’s Black and if he’s not white, he doesn’t sit on the front line. Instead of utilizing white leadership to teach the Blacks and expect the Blacks to catch up… Nobody ever laid down and said, “You’re going to get something free.” Everybody was expected to measure up or die. When I was going into high school and I was taking intermediate algebra and failing, because nobody at home could explain it to me. Mildred Taft, a beautiful teacher, said to me, “Kurt, don’t you want to enter college?” and I said, “Yes.” “Will you not need elementary algebra?” and I said, “Yes I will.” She said, “You’re failing it. Do you want help?” “Oh yeah.” “Well, if you pledge your time to come after school and be with me, I’ll help you.” You know what that meant to me? That meant that I didn’t get on my bus to go home to the farm ten miles away and I had to walk. That’s what I did in order to pass algebra. Fortunately I was able to hitch a ride now and then but many times I walked the whole distance. That’s the difference between what’s happening with Blacks and that’s why I’m unsympathetic. To me, when I go to Brazil, I’m not against Blacks. It’s an amazing thing. Gee, we are all free. All of us are together. It doesn’t make any difference. When I’m here, I resent them. Why? Because they are getting all these special favoritisms and the more you give them, the more they’ll want. It’s a natural quirk not just with Black, but with whites, too. The more welfare you give them, the more help you give them, the more they want. Children are like that in a home. You can’t give them enough.
Rocks: Agreed
Kurt: When I studied sociology back before all this movement started, in school I remember reading the facts . . . somebody said to me the other day, “Yeah, you can’t blame the Blacks for all of this. They only represent 11 percent of the population.” I said, “I’m not blaming anybody. Since you’ve brought it up, and you mention they only represent 11 percent of the population, that’s not the right figure to use. What you need to say that 11 percent of the population represent 40 percent of all the crimes. They represent 50 percent of all the welfare received. They represent this and those are the true figures. Don’t give me half the truth.” And that’s what’s got to be corrected. We can’t as a country forever hold ourselves in sin for the Civil War, the pre-Civil War and the things that were done. I might say to you that I’m totally against slavery. I am. And, I don’t even know your persuasion but I am. I am totally against delusion and all the injustices that those people received, However, I’m equally against affirmative action and all the other things that they are getting at the sacrifice of the white population. Better performance and better workers should always be based in the United States on the best quality — quality control, quality assurance. Not on mediocrity. That’s what’s bringing us down as a nation.
Rocks: I’ve got to get this to the press so we can do something about it.
Kurt: I’m just vocalizing and I appreciate the opportunity.
Rocks: Thank you for your time again.
Kurt: Like I said, I can to a better job with you on the technology. This is just . . .
Rocks: But this is not the California Mining Journal!
