RE: RE: 21 Shafter pics in the San Antonio News SHAFTER — More than seven decades after its glory days as one of the richest silver mines in the Southwest, La Mina Grande is roaring back to life in a remote mountainous corner of the Big Bend.
Huge Terex and Volvo trucks are rumbling two shifts a day, hauling away waste rock and bringing ore to new on-site processing plant where the sparkling gray material is pulverized and then treated with cyanide to extract precious metals.
With the silver price hovering around $35 an ounce — up from $5 a decade ago — the mine's owners, Aurcana Corp., are looking clairvoyant.
“With production costs of significantly less than $10 an ounce, the idea of reopening this mine was a very good one,” said Greg Miller, a mining consultant for Aurcana, which bought the Rio Grande Mining Co. in 2008 for $40 million, since has invested $60 million to revive the operation.
Miller said some of the sweet spots are proving as rich as chocolate cake.
“Some of it's coming in at 500 ounces per ton. That's $15,000 per loader scoop,” he said.
But there are clouds on the horizon. Alarms being raised by several landowners who worry about the mine's plan to pump vast quantities of water from deep, flooded tunnels. They fear wells might go dry and that massive discharges might harm the desert.
“This is the major issue in the county as far as water resources are concerned,” said John Poindexter, owner of the adjacent 30,000-acre Cibolo Creek Ranch, where well-heeled guests come to get away from it all.
“We fear the possibility of the drying up of Cibolo Creek and other live watercourses, the exhaustion of springs and large declines in water tables,” Poindexter wrote in an August letter to the Presidio County Underground Water Conservation District.
In recent weeks, the Texas General Land Office and Texas Parks & Wildlife Department also have raised questions and objections about the mine's plans to remove as much as 1,000 acre-feet of water from flooded deep tunnels.
“The decisions regarding this project may have long-lasting impacts to critically important aquatic resources in arguably the driest region in Texas,” wrote Scott Boruff, a Parks & Wildlife director.
A clutch of political figures, including state senators Carlos Uresti, D-San Antonio, and Jose R. Rodriguez, D- El Paso, as well as outgoing state Rep. Pete Gallego of Alpine, who was elected to Congress last week, have expressed their concern and support to the water district board.
On Monday, the board will meet in Presidio with La Mina Grande's pumping and discharge issues high on the agenda.
In the meantime, the mine, just off U.S. 87 south of Shafter, is producing silver from surface deposits. If all goes well, its owners hope to soon begin underground mining from more than 100 miles of old tunnels.
Read more: https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Silver-riches-carry-a-price-4027090.php#ixzz2BvQiDUgs