Those who think about the economy in Sierra County should be comfortable with dollars and sense. Here is a dollar and sense way to think about copper mining at Copper Flat. If NMCC mines, it plans to process 30,000 tons of ore a day. The average ore at Copper Flat, says NMCC, has 0.25% copper. That means every day, on the average, the mine will produce 30,000 tons x 0.25% = 75 tons of copper. 75 tons of copper is (75 tons x 2000 lbs/ton) 150,000 lbs of copper.
NMCC claims (but I doubt it) that it can do this with 1,100 AFY of water. I won’t do the conversion here, but you can find a conversion tool online. 1,100 AFY is about 1 million gallons a day. If drinking water at Walmart costs $1 a gallon (actually, it’s more). The water used to produce 150,000 lbs of copper is worth about $1,000,000.
That is, NMCC is using about $6.67 of water ($1,000,000/150,000 lbs) to produce a pound of copper, which is today worth $6.57. The project doesn’t seem to make economic sense. If we weren’t giving NMCC the ore and the water for free, the whole project would be untenable.
But just think, that is true only if NMCC mines 30,000 tons of ore a day. Using NMCC’s own estimates of its water consumption, I have shown that with 1,100 AFY of water it can process less than 10,000 tons of ore a day. Following the calculations above, you can easily show that if NMCC mines 10,000 tons of ore a day with a million gallons, it is using $20 worth of water to produce one pound of copper worth $6.57. Business-wise, that sounds like idiocy. That brings up a further question about dollars and sense.
If you have all that free water, couldn’t you do something else with it that is more economically sensible and profitable? For example (this is one I gave several days ago in a response to a comment: Hearing on Copper Flat Mine, III – Sierra County Citizen), suppose you bottle the water and sold it. At $1 a gallon, your water would bring in $358 million every year. You could make $5.4 billion from the water not used during the 15 year life of the mine. The jobs created would be permanent. That is the economic future of the county which was given away to NMCC for free, and that future will not come back because the water under our feet is going to disappear, evaporated into the air at the rate of a million gallons a day. I’d call that economic leakage.
People who support development in Sierra County are lining up to support the mine. They don’t seem to understand that without the right to use water there’s no water for development. Where will water rights for development come from? The mine’s water rights are already contracted to go to a consortium of individuals who want to sell the rights outside the county, were money is. The basin is closed to new water rights because rights to use water already exceed water. Unused water rights are being forfeited by the OSE. The basin wide adjudication of water rights will eventually get rid of other unused water rights. Municipalities, like T or C or the small water associations, have extra rights for 40 years. That’s all, folks. When NMCC starts using their water rights, these same developers can celebrate as they watch their futures (and Sierra County’s economy) evaporate with the water.