Mix dirt from Montana City, water from Boulder, an inventor from South Africa, a machine in the testing phase plus gravity, and what do you get?
Partners in a project underway in Boulder hope the answer is precious metals, including gold, jobs and reclamation of old mining remnants.
Owen Voigt is taking a leap of faith that he hopes will pay off, and not just for him.
“It’s small but it’s a start for the economy here in Jefferson County – and then there’s the clean up,” he said.
The project has its roots in a newspaper article Voigt saw about a new mining process invented by Daan Roux of South Africa. Using no chemicals and relying only on water and gravity, the machine supposedly separates metal concentrates from other materials in the soil. Intrigued by the story, Voigt went to look at the test machinery while on a mission trip, he explained.
Although the machine has been used all over Africa – South Sudan, Congo, Angola, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique, and Lesotho – and in South America’s Ecuador, it had never been in the U.S., said Roux and Voigt.
Last week the first such test machine in the U.S. was in Boulder, processing waste material from the Bonanza mining claim in northern Jefferson County on land owned by Rusty Giulio and with the aid of heavy equipment belonging to Giulio. After dumping the Bonanza waste material into the machine, Voigt and others watched three products come out: sand, oversized reject material, and concentrate.
Spreading out an array of concentrate he said was from the previous day, Voigt said the glittery material would be going to the Golden Sunlight Mine in Whitehall to be assayed. He estimated about 30 to 50 percent of the concentrate was gold, with silver, copper and lead making up the rest. Earlier tests revealed about sixteen hundredths of an ounce of gold per ton of waste material, he said.
Roux said the test machine is still owned by his company, Mat Autoux & Sons Diamond Mining PTY, Ltd. It is on loan to demonstrate its value in anticipation of Voigt and others in the nation ordering much larger production machines, said Roux.
Voigt said his company, Legacy Mining, is renting the space and equipment from Giulio. It is Legacy Mining that has to determine whether the project is economically viable, said Voigt, something he seemed optimistic about.
But even if the economics do not work out, he said, the small test project will already pay dividends for Jefferson County by reclaiming old mine waste and providing a handful of jobs, said Voigt.
