Elko Daily Free Press from Elko, Nevada • 13

Saturday, September 28, 1996 ELKO DAILY FREE PRESS, Elko, Nevada 13 Business -Si V'-- -to. 1 ft- Ecio flay Minerals Cove open pit gold and silver mine has a little water at the bottom because Operations are under way on the western side of the McCoy open pit, where mining has resumed that area isn't being mined right now. (Adella HardingFree Press photos) after a shutdown in 1991. Echo Bay's McCoyCove xv V.V i It it- 'X ,,3 ft t. 1 f-'- 'f i- Dennis Bevacqua, left, of mine operations and Willie Hamilton, a mine engineer, confer atop a 250-ton haul truck about the new global positioning system for truck dispatch.

By Adella Harding Echo Bay Mineral McCoyCove Mine, one of the biggest silver producers in the world, is now in its 10th year and looking for more gold to extend the mine's life beyond 2002. The mine, 30 miles south of Battle Mountain in an old mining district, is Echo Bay's largest gold and silver producer. General Manager Jeff Smith said the Cove deposit is slated to run out in 1999, and the smaller McCoy deposit at roughly the same time. He said, however, that the company will be milling and processing ore from large stockpiles until 2002, if no more gold is discovered. The proven and probable gold reserves totaled 1,526,000 ounces at the end of 1995.

"We've got a large claim block of about 65 square miles, and we are actively exploring the claims. No deposits have been proven up, but we do have some targets on the property. Our goal is to extend the mine life." Echo Bay actually began extending the mine life shortly after buying the operations from Tenneco Minerals Co. in 1986, when the life of the mine was expected to be only two or three years. But that was when Echo Bay had only the McCoy deposit, Smith said.

Once the Cove deposit was discovered, Echo Bay built its mill and processing facilities to recover silver as well as gold, lead and zinc, he said. The company discovered the Cove gold and silver deposit soon afterwards and began a major expansion project on the Battle Mountain Trend where Joseph H. McCoy first discovered gold. The town of McCoy soon sprang up and reached a peak population of roughly 50 in the early 1930s but was deserted by 1936. Today, Echo Bay is mining ore from both the larger Cove open pit and at the west end of the McCoy site, although production is projected to be less this year than last because of the current ore grades, Smith said.

The company predicts a 20 percent drop in gold production this year and next, compared with the 310,016 ounces produced last year. Silver is also going to be down, according to the company. The mine produced 11,905,806 ounces of silver in 1995, but this year may produce 7.5 million to 8.5 million ounces. In the quarter ending June 30, cash operating costs were up to $256 per ounce of gold, compared with $223 a year ago, reflecting the lower production rate and higher cost of mining deeper into the Cove pit, Echo Bay reported when the figures were released. Echo Bay now employs roughly 525 people, Smith said, down from the more than 600 working at the mine site when the company was mining both above and below ground.

Smith said there were few layoffs, however, when the underground mines shut down because miners were transferred to other jobs on the mine site or to Echo Bay's Kettle River underground operation in east- More than a mile of conveyors move crushed ore to the heap leach piles at the McCoyCove Mine. 1995 annual report The fleet includes four Wiseda 250-ton trucks, 10 Caterpillar 150-ton trucks and 10 Caterpillar 195-ton trucks, all of which are expected to be on a new global positioning system for more accurate dispatching within a couple of weeks. Smith said he is especially proud of the mine's safety program. McCoy Cove has two million hours without a loss time accident. This week, five employees received awards at the Health and Safety Conference in Elko for excellence in safety promotion from the Holmes Safety Association and the Nevada Mining Association.

The five included Smith, Rick Bell, Kerry Tuckett, Richard Stewart and Robert Stalder, and Smith was named at the convention as mine manager of the year for his safety promotion. McCoyCove also received an Award of Merit recently from the National Safety Council for 1,122,133 employee hours without a loss time accident And the mine won the top safety award for large mines from the NMA last month. Smith, who has been at McCoyCove for nine years, the last two as general manager, said he is also proud of the mine's continuous improvement program to keep employees informed and involved in the mine operations. prr i til. 'iiii-1! fn ii ii nn.1 'i, I II I VV-K' era Washington.

Others went on to other companies with underground mines, he said. Echo Bay is currently mining Cove as an open pit operation, but for four or five years, there was also an underground mine reaching under the open pit And there was another underground mine into the McCoy pit The company closed the McCoy pit in 1994 and the Cove pit in 1993, and stopped surface mining at McCoy in 1991 but is back again mining the west end of the pit because later drilling pinpointed more gold at McCoy, Smith said. Silver is produced from the Cove pit while only a mile away, the McCoy pit has little silver but "just enough copper to be a nuisance," Smith said. The Cove pit is 900 feet deep and is dewatered at a rate of 20,000 gallons per minute. That water is pumped from the mine to infiltration ponds.

Smith said the water from the mine is drinking water quality, and there is no problem infiltrating it "It goes right back into the aquifer." The mine has been dewatering for about five years. McCoyCove processing is split between heap leaching and a flotation process. The flotation mill processes about 10,000 tons per day, and a little more than 10,000 tons are processed each day by heap leach. Year to date, 60 percent of the tons mined have been heap leached and 40 percent sent through the mill, Smith said. "We started out with all oxide ore, but there is becoming more and more sulfide," he said.

Oxide ores can be heap leached. Ore to be heap leached is moved from crushers by a conveyor system that is more than a mile long to the heap piles. The leached ore is sent to the process plant where it percolates in a zinc mixture. The gold and silver is then captured in filter presses. The leftovers are returned to the leach pile for more cyanide treatments.

The sulfide ore is sent into the flotation system, which the company expanded last April. There it is crushed and fed into the semi-autogenous grinding (SAG) mill and from there classified according to size and sent on to one of two ball mills. The ore then goes to the flotation tanks where a cyanide leach forms the concentrate from which come the gold and silver. Echo Bay produces dore bars that are 95 percent pure precious minerals, gold and mostly silver. The company sends the bars of commercial refineries for further processing, Smith said.

And concentrate produced at the mill is sent to a smelter to extract lead and zinc. The company's fleet of 26 haul trucks mines more than 170,000 tons per day to "minimize the time and expense required to keep the Cove pit dewatered," according to Echo Bay's Carbon plant operator Matt Jones runs a sample in the lab of the Merrill-Crowe process plant at McCoyCove. We Can Reduce Your Heating Bill and Eliminate Your Enviro-Liability Every gallon of used oil contains 140,000 BTUs of energy. With Shenandoah's state-of-the-art atomizing combustion technology, you can convert those BTUs to free fuel to heat your shop. Patented burner design User-friendly maintenance Slide our gun assembly.

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ill The Steam Store 219 Commercial St. Elko, Nevada of Magic Valley Inc. Elko Division 156 4th Ave. Twin Falls, Idaho 208-734-3694 FAX 208-734-3771 702-738-9700 FAX 702-738-9702 McCoyCove General Manager Jeff Smith stands near the zinc feeders in the plant that handles heap-leached ore, using the Merrill-Crowe process..