EASTERN OREGON
MINING ASSOCIATION
SEPTEMBER 2022
Volume 396
SEPTEMBER 2ND , 2022 MEETING AT ELK CREEK ENTERPRISES
We will have a meeting SEPTEMBER 2ND, 2022 at the Elk Creek Enterprises saw shop located at 890 Elm Street in Baker City. The Board Meeting will begin at 6:00 PM with the general meeting following at 6:30 PM. As usual we will give away a 1 oz. silver medallion at the end of the meeting.
WHITMAN UNIT DISTRICT RANGER KENDALL CIKANEK TO BE AT FRIDAY’S MEETING
District Ranger Cikanek will be the guest speaker at EOMA’s next meeting on Friday September 2, 2022. This will be an opportunity to see how your comments on the Powder River Mining Projects EIS will be addressed in the document. The Ranger will be able to give us some timeframes as to when Plans of Operation will be approved.
FAFA MEETING TO DISCUSS THE FOREST PLAN REVISION-Forest Access For All
The closure talk begins anew - will you be there to speak out against it? The Forest Service has requested a meeting with FAFA to discuss the Forest Plan Revision moving forward.
To our knowledge, and looking at the news articles coming out, we are seeing a pattern arise where the Forest Service is stating they will build from the commissioners "desired conditions" for access which is a closed forest system. If you feel the commissioners (except Baker County) and namely the Blue Mountains Intergovernmental Council are wrong and that their desired condition does not represent the people’s desire to maintain an open forest for motorized access, you will want to be at this meeting to voice those concerns clearly.
The meeting will be held at 890 ELM ST. BAKER CITY, OR on Sept. 10th @ 3pm. Please plan on attending this very important meeting and bringing every person you know that loves open access to let the forest service know anything less is unacceptable.
PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE
President Joe Biden has repeatedly said he will bring back U.S. supply chains, put Americans to work, and strive to ensure Americans don't have to depend on foreign imports for lifesaving products and products critical to our national security. Yet, in reality, his administration provides example after example of how he has done just the opposite. Raising fees, proposing royalties, restricting access to Federal lands, revoking permits, increasing regulatory requirements, refusing to issue permits, and restricting access to millions of acres, has made it very difficult, if not impossible, to develop our own natural resource supply chains. Our dependence on foreign sources for necessary minerals, and products, has not grown less under Biden’s leadership.
GOP RELEASES “LET AMERICA BUILD” POLICY
On July 20, House Republicans, led by an “Energy, Climate & Conservation Task Force,” convened a roundtable to discuss barriers to American innovation and renewal. At the roundtable, participants discussed NEPA reform extensively, and rolled out the “Let America Build” policy, which is based on six policy areas:
• Unlock American Resources • Beat China and Russia
• American Innovation • Let America Build
• Conservation with a Purpose • Build Resilient Communities
The initiative is focused on reducing regulatory barriers and cutting red tape, allowing communities to unlock their potential through agriculture, resource extraction, infrastructure development, or other means, as well as making them more resilient to floods, fires and other events. In 2018, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) released a report detailing the length of time required for federal agencies to complete the environmental impact statements (EISs) under NEPA. On average, federal agencies took four and a half years to complete an EIS – with some reviews taking more than six years to complete. Additionally, CEQ found final EISs were on average more than 600 pages, vastly exceeding CEQ’s recommended 150-page limit.
ACCESS TO FEDERAL LANDS IS CRITICAL TO DOMESTIC SUPPLY CHAIN SECURITY- National Mining Association (nma.org)
Currently, new mining operations are already either restricted or banned on more than half of all
federally-managed public lands. While mining is not appropriate on all federal lands, given the vast amount already closed to mining operations, caution should be exercised when determining whether additional lands should be placed off limits.
Federal lands continue to account for a significant percentage of our nation’s minerals production given that Western states with the largest proportion of federal lands provide approximately 75 percent of our domestic minerals.
Unnecessarily restricting access to additional federal lands harms our nation’s economic and national security. In most instances, the extreme step of banning new mining claims is unwarranted as existing laws, including environmental requirements and land use planning processes, are adequate to protect special areas
PUNITIVE ROYALTY AND DIRT TAXES WILL DETER MINING ON FEDERAL LANDS-The National Mining Association | nma.org
Natural Resources Budget Reconciliation Act: Proposes an 8 percent gross royalty on new mining operations and a 4 percent gross royalty on existing operations. It would also establish a 7 cent-per-ton tax on dirt, rock and other materials moved during the extraction process.
Whether it’s infrastructure, restoring industry and critical supply chains, creating high-paying jobs, or supporting the pivot to electric vehicles and electrification, U.S. mining is essential. An 8 percent punitive gross royalty on new operations, along with a 7 percent "dirt tax," will erode the certainty mining proponents’ value in the U.S. and threaten the industry’s long-term viability. Application of a 4 percent gross royalty on existing operations also exposes the federal government to litigation under the U.S. Constitution’s takings clause. As compared to a net royalty, a gross royalty inherently increases the risk of a given mining investment. The proposed 7 cent tax per ton dirt tax covers every ton of dirt moved. Hardrock mineral exploration and extraction is dramatically different from any other natural resource. The extracted rock from metal ores contains only a minor fraction of metallic minerals, while unprocessed and excess materials are not salable.
These new burdens ignore the extensive taxes already imposed on mining companies in the U.S. In 2019, domestic mining activity generated an estimated $18 billion in federal, state and local taxes that supported direct, indirect and induced taxes of $41 billion. As various studies have shown, the total “government take” (royalties, taxes and other fees) for operations in the U.S. is in the 40 to 50 percent range, similar to other major mineral producing countries. These studies suggest that even a small federal royalty will push the U.S. beyond the upper limit of this range and thereby impair our global competitiveness, negatively impact employment and tax revenues, and drive mining activity off federal lands. Inevitably, such punitive measures would increase our reliance on foreign sources of minerals, which is already at a record high, creating additional supply chain vulnerabilities for the U.S. manufacturing, energy, infrastructure, and defense
industrial sectors. The mining industry has publicly committed to working in a bipartisan way towards finding a compromise on royalties that keeps the industry competitive. Punitive proposals like this are counterproductive.
INDONESIA REVOKES THOUSANDS OF MINING PERMITS -Mining.com
Need a reminder of what can happen when control of the land in a country becomes concentrated in the hands of a powerful centralized government. Indonesia’s investment minister said more than 2,000 mining permits for various minerals have been revoked amid efforts to tighten the sector’s governance and plan for land redistribution.
The ministry has revoked 2,065 permits covering more than 3.1 million hectares (7.66 million acres) of land across the country, Investment Minister Bahlil Lahadalia told reporters on Friday.
HARD TO REBUILD MINING INDUSTRY AFTER YEARS OF NEGLECT-Mining.com Years of neglecting its critical metal supplies is finally catching up with the United States, whose government now realizes it must invest heavily in mining and manufacturing, as demand for the raw materials needed to build a new green economy that rejects fossil fuels gears up. The problem is, this epiphany comes 20 years too late, and there are few details as to how the country will actually go about re-building its mining sector after decades of mal-investment and relying on other countries for doing the “dirty job” of mining and mineral processing.
More clean energy means more solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and lithium-ion batteries, both for EVs and grid-scale storage. For some materials, like silicon, supply is plentiful, but for others, such as the rare earth neodymium for wind turbines, lithium, cobalt, graphite and nickel for batteries, and copper for just about everything involved in wiring, the supply chains will need to shift. That’s because for most of the metals used in clean energy and electrification, the United States relies on imports.
We weren’t paying attention when China cornered the rare earths market back in 2010 and were also blind to the Chinese locking up global supplies & processing capabilities for nickel, cobalt, graphite and lithium. About 85% of the world’s neodymium is concentrated in a few Chinese mines, and most of the world’s cobalt production comes from the politically unstable Democratic Republic of Congo. The lion’s share of palladium, used in catalytic converters, and nickel, a crucial ingredient of electric-vehicle batteries and stainless steel — is mined in Russia, which is subject to Western sanctions after invading Ukraine.
These are just a few ways to illustrate the United States’ near-total subservience to foreign critical metal suppliers. It’s hard to imagine the US being able to fulfill the Biden administration’s new clean energy agenda without either a significant increase in critical metal imports that frankly may not be possible in current market conditions, i.e., the hostility between the United States and Russia and China, or executing a home-grown strategy to explore for and mine them in North America.
BIDEN’S 30X30 PLAN SUPPORTED BY OSU SCIENTISTS AND OTHERS-Capital Press
Some 110,00 square miles of federal land in the West should be closed to cattle and restocked with wolves and beavers, according to a paper by Oregon State University scientists and others. They propose reducing the amount of federal land grazed in the West by 29%--equal to the size of Nevada—and also limiting logging, mining, oil and gas drilling and off-road vehicles. Once rid of “troublesome non-native species,” the network would advance President Biden’s Executive Order to conserve 30% of the U.S. by 2030, the authors said. Blocks in the network would include the Blue, Klamath, and Cascade mountains in Oregon. The paper intertwines reducing cattle on federal land and wolf recovery. National Cattlemen’s Beef Association natural resources director Kaitlynn Glover said, “rewilding campaigns ignore ranchers’ contributions to keeping landscapes open. Removing livestock grazing—a valuable tool to reduce fuels for wildfires and an important protection of biodiversity—will lead to new and exacerbated threats to vast areas of the West.”
EOMA ADVERTISING AND SALE LISTINGS
40 ACRE PLACER CLAIM IN SW OREGON
It’s on the Southfork of Canyon Creek, a tributary of Josephine creek on the Illinois river Real bad 4x4 high clearance road for 7 miles to trailhead, another ¾ mile moderate walk up to downstream end of claim. Stream runs through claim end to end approximately 2000 ft. $6,500. Call 541-787-0046 for more details and directions.
NINE UNPATENTED PLACER CLAIMS FOR SALE
These claims are in the Greenhorn Mining District, adjacent to the Parkerville and the Bonanza patented properties. Geiser Bowl- 60 acres, PW #1- 80 acres, PW #6 -100 acres, Black Beauty- 100 acres, Blue Mt Channel #3-100 acres, Carranza-80 acres, Dottie Two-80 acres, Mart Jones-60 acres, Wizzer-80-acres.
Contact LaRayn Rose for list prices, and of course, any reasonable offer will be considered especially for multiple claim purchases. (503) 317-6914
FOR SALE-20 ACRE MINING CLAIM ON THE NORTH FORK BURNT RIVER
This claim is located immediately downstream from Antlers Guard Station. There is an approved Plan of Operation in place with the Forest Service., which can be transferred to the new claim owner.
From Highway 7, it is just a short drive on the graveled county road to the claim. If interested, e-mail me at MinelabGeek@hotmail.com.
FOR SALE
Two metal detectors for sale: Gold Bug II detector, Fisher Double Box detector, $1,000 for both.
Call Chuck at 541-310-8510.
PUMPS FOR SALE
Two water pumps with belt driven clutch system (heavy duty) driven by a 2-cylinder Wisconsin gas engine for $250.
Also, a 5" intake 7" discharge Fairbanks and Morse high pressure pump. Driven by a 30 HP 3 phase electric motor for $450. Call Ken Anderson at 541-523-2521 or 541-519- 9497
WANTED
I would like to rent/lease/lease with option to buy property that may be productive for metal detecting and mining. Especially areas with tailings like the Powder River near Sumpter, or other local areas. Thanks, Johnny West. Email: jwestboise@gmail.com
PLACER CLAIM WANTED
I’m looking for a placer or lode claim in NE Oregon. Looking for a pick and shovel or small equipment deposits. The placer claim doesn’t have to have much water, but a little would be nice. Pay cash or gold up to $5,000. Call Sam at 541-787-0046.
WANTED-SMALL HARDROCK MILL
I need a jaw crusher or small hammer mill. Please call Pete at 541-910-9712 if you have one you want to sell.
WANTED-GOLD
Gold Specimens and Gold nuggets, mostly from Oregon mines. Fair prices paid. Also selling Gold nugget jewelry, specimens, nuggets and more. For an interesting and informative experience explore www.northernnevadagold.com . Call Robert 775-455-6470.
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AMERICAN EXPLORATION & MINING
EOMA is a member of American Exploration & Mining Association, and many of our members are also individual members. AEMA members reside in 44 states, 7 Canadian provinces and 11 countries and are actively involved in prospecting, exploring, mining, and reclamation closure activities across North America & the world. This association keeps miners up on what is happening in the mining industry. To stay up to date on mining issues, you can become a member of AEMA by going to their website at https://www.miningamerica.org/
ACTION MINING SERVICES, INC.
AMS is selling assay supplies, screens, chemicals and labware! Call for a quote and mention this ad for 10% off! Assay supplies, concentrators, impact mills, technical books (for the beginner to the advanced mill man), & more! Call for our free catalog or visit us online! Check out our website for information on Wave tables. Want to pick up an order in Plains Montana? We have moved to Plains, Montana…. please call 406.826.9330 to place the order. This way our staff can have it pulled and ready for pick up. Otherwise, we can always ship your order! sales@actionmining.com • www.actionmining.com
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