Paul Gemmill

Paul Gemmill (1907-1992) grew up in a mining family, whose travels took them to California, Nevada and Mexico. Gemmill attended the University of Nevada, graduating from the Mackay School of Mines. He worked in many different capacities in the mining industry, ranging from a mining engineer to the general manager of Combined Metals to executive secretary of the Nevada Mining Association. Gemmill was interviewed by Mary Ellen Glass in 1974 to 1975.

     This is a point, too, that people don't generally recognize, that the cost of our domestic minerals, to us, is determined by the cost of supplying it domestically, because with the backward countries or the developing countries that have richer deposits, especially in the metal areas like copper, lead, zinc, and gold-silver—of course gold and silver are in a different category entirely, but the base metals—those countries are going to hold their price up to what it costs us to produce for ourselves. This is already illustrated very well by the oil picture, and we're not going to be out of this reliance on Arab oil until we're able to supply our own. That's pretty doggone evident. And it's the same thing now in copper. We are virtually self sufficient. In fact, we've got new properties on stream that are planned for, and being brought into production, ahead of our present requirements. But present requirements, of course, are in somewhat of a depressed situation. And there's no question but what the additional production is going to be required down the road a ways, it's absolutely impossible to strike an exact balance on any of these things.
     So right now, you find the major copper companies are curtailing their production, because they build up a supply of copper, refined copper, overhanging the market, and there's nothing they can do but stop feeding it; and especially when the price has dropped to where some of these operations are marginal, you see? But, it's a difficult thing to come up with any balance on it. Nobody's ever done it, and I don't think it will be [chuckles]. You're escalating up and retreating down, and I think it's going to be probably even tighter because when these backward countries (or the "developing countries " may be a more polite phrase, is it?—[laughs]) are so irresponsible that an American company can go in there and spend tremendous amounts of money developing a property, and then they expropriate it. They've got richer copper ore. And they've got sort of a control on the market in that sense, but, of course, they haven't got the efficiency that our American domestic producers have. So we're going to have to rely on what it's cost us to get it out of our own ground. And that goes, I think, for the other base metals. And when that cost goes up, well the price goes up. And, of course, the cost, you always want to remember, is a relative thing; cost in dollars is one thing, cost in constant dollars is something else. If you put the inflation equation into the picture, these costs haven't escalated like people talk about, in dollars. They haven't escalated. The cost of copper in terms of a man's day's pay has stayed virtually constant. They're getting into lower and lower-grade ore, producing larger and larger quantities. And yet they're holding the line on real cost to the consumer, because the consumer, we assume, has got his income escalated, along with the rest. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that are not going along with the escalating wages. What the answer is there, I don't know.

     Well, now we're still on this problem that the mining industry has—particularly, it concerns the environmental aspects, which has added a tremendous cost to any new operation just to comply with the air quality, water quality, and the bonding that they say has to be put up to restore the mine, the property, after you mine in it. And they're still going on the assumption that when you mine, that the mine is depleted and it should be restored to its original state. You know, the mineral's not there anymore, so land should be restored. Well now, this has some validity in mining a particular bed of coal somewhere that you can reach with a strip mine. It has a lot of validity in that case. But in the metal mines, it's not true. The mine, the old mine, is the best place to start looking for the next reserve, and if you destroy the evidence of the diggings that are already there, you've destroyed the major part of evidence that would be used to find the next ore body.
     The market conditions and the price of the precious metals is why the old mining camps have not received, over a period of from thirty-five to forty years, the attention that they would have had on the basis of parity prices in relation to the early discovery times. Now we have prices coming up to somewhere around the parity price area, and these old camps are getting a fresh look. If the mines had been obliterated some way or other and the evidence destroyed, it'd be far more complicated to have the fresh look. So that's altogether wrong in the metal mining business to require obliteration, calling it restoration. But that shows just how public pressure becomes misdirected, and it isn't anything but that. It's just ignorant public pressure.