J. Allan Coope was born in 1935 in Ripley, a town in Derbyshire, England and studied geology at King’s College in London and geochemistry at London University’s Imperial College. After graduation, Coope started working for the Newmont Mining Company, being sent first to the Philippines and then to Nevada in 1961. He worked with John Livermore assaying prospects for gold through mapping and sampling in Carlin and the surrounding area, and he was instrumental in the development of the Carlin Trend. Coope was interviewed by Victoria Ford in 1998. So what happened with the Carlin Trend was that it started back with some early publications in the 1930s on micron-size gold. Then it was kind of put on hold for the war and the years after, and then in the 1960s—1959, 1960, 1961—that’s when Newmont Gold came in? That’s right, and we got into it. And the time, the price of gold was low. Thirty-five-dollar gold—not many people were looking for gold [when it was] at thirty-five dollars. Well, the idea was that there’s gold out there that people haven’t really been looking for, and that’s John Livermore’s push, talking to people like Fred Searls, who was really brought up during the gold rushes in California and Nevada, and Bob Fulton, who was born in that part of the world. So all these people had gold in their blood, and that’s true with a lot of people who’ve prospected for gold in the past. You never, never lose interest in gold. There’s always, probably, another find to make, and if it’s high grade, you’ll make money anytime. You see you can make a profit out of it, so you become a gold bug, and you’re a gold bug for life. And you had that background in Newmont. That’s the only way I can explain it—why Newmont would get into the gold business when really it wasn’t financially and economically attractive. You have the concept of invisible gold, which was real. And then you had the people who had got the gold bug from previous years. So really, when we were looking for Carlin, we were looking for something near surface which you could dig out with the shovel and trucks, which we found. Carlin was sitting right there. Easy metallurgy. So it means that it’s easy to get the gold out of the rock once you’ve mined it. And Carlin was like that, because it was oxidized, because it was close to the surface. And a simple cyanide leach process took out the gold quite easily, so you have cheap mining. You had cheap metallurgy and made money at $35. In fact, .32 gold at $35 is roughly about $10.50. Now, that’s the value of a ton of rock in the ground. And Newmont, using the cheaper mining and keeping cheaper metallurgical techniques, was able to produce gold for about $4 or $5 a ton. So, the profit was $5 or a little bit better on each ton they mined, and they were mining 2,000-2,500 tons a day. They paid a dividend after eight months at Carlin. That was at $35 gold. If we’d have found a Carlin deposit that had a grade of .10, we probably wouldn’t have mined it. So we were lucky there. As far as new technology at Carlin, what’s good in the new gets incorporated into the operation, whether it’s the assay lab, whether it’s a new type of truck, whether it’s a new way of doing things in the mill, whether it’s a new way of surveying. Anything like that gets incorporated. That’s the advantage of having either good financing at the beginning or good cash flow as the operation proceeds, because you’re more or less obligated to stay competitive to do that. Otherwise, people will start producing gold cheaper than you can produce, and the market will have its say. |