Mr. LEFEVRE. No questions.

Mr. LEMKE. We will hear from you, Mr. Ralston.

BENEFICIATION OF PHILLIPSBURG, MONT., DISTRICT ORES

Mr. RALSTON. In the order taken up by Mr. Moon, I will talk about Phillipsburg and Butte. In this case I am quoting from Bureau of Mines Reports of Investigations 3931 and 4138.

In the Phillipsburg district the low-grade ore, every one of these samples that we have taken from the various parts of the district to concentrate has given a sinter concentrate of 48 percent manganese, or above.

In this case there are some small penalties due to silica and alumina being a little above the acceptable proportion.

They are not high-grade ores, but the higher-grade ores can be directly sintered to 35 percent manganese grade, which during the war could have been sold.

But they can be concentrated with recoveries of over 80 percent to give sintered concentrate of over 48 percent manganese.

In testing some of these tailing dumps from previous operations where they were making the super-high-grade battery manganese oxide, about two-thirds of the manganese in that can be recovered and sintered into 52 percent manganese grade.

You cannot make a plain tailing, due to some of this silica and alumina that Mr. Moon has mentioned being there and having to be discarded, and it carries with it some manganese.

But you can, as I say, get at least two-thirds of the manganese in quite acceptable grades there.

Some of the lower level carbonate ore that went into the stock pile was also amenable to rather coarse crushing and gravity concentration treatment; 88 percent of the manganese went into a concentrate that sintered to above 50 percent grade.

Both of these districts in Montana, practically all of the ore, has recoverable concentrate of quite acceptable grade.

TREATMENT OF BUTTE, MONT., MANGANESE ORES

I don't want to concentrate or comment on the Butte District. The first time I ever saw it the rounded granite boulders were all around the hills and they were black. On inquiry it was confirmed, "Yes, that is a manganese oxide vein."

So the very early miners in Butte must have known there was a good deal of manganese somewhere in those hills, to have all of the granite stained black.

The Butte district has always been able to take care of all of its own problems and the Bureau of Mines has done very little in the way of concentrating their ore:

Several companies have operated there and have been quite proficient concentrating metallurgists.

I think that is about all I have to offer.

Mr. LEMKE. Mr. D'Ewart?

Mr. D'EWART. I do not believe you have mentioned that they could produce quite a bit of electrolytic manganese.

Mr. RALSTON. I think not. They have kept very close watch of the Bureau of Mines work on electrolytic manganese and they underwrote

in a way the one corporation in Tennessee we have spoken of. It is managed by a former Anaconda man.

They have always had in mind that they possibly might make electrolytic manganese at Great Falls.

Mr. D'EWART. Their ore is treated at Anaconda ?

Mr. RALSTON. The concentrating of the ore I believe is at Anaconda concentrator.

Mr. MOON. The nodulizing, too. There is a 270-foot kiln there at Anaconda.

Mr. LEMKE. Would it be possible to locate an electrolytic manganese plant at Butte?

Mr. RALSTON. I would move closer to the power. I think you can move high-grade concentrate to the power cheaper than you can move the power to the place where the material is mined.

Mr. LEMKE. Mr. Hedrick?

MORE ABOUT PHILLIPSBURG AND BUTTE, MONT., DISTRICTS

Mr. HEDRICK. I was not here when you first began discussing this. How long has this field been known in Montana?

How old is it?

Mr. MOON. The first manganese production from the Phillipsburg area was 1900. I do not know when the first production of manganese occurred in Butte, but it was at least as long ago as 1918 because there was a sizable production in that year. The actual occurrence has been known much longer than that.

Mr. HEDRICK. Was it mined there during the First World War? Mr. MOON. Both of these districts producing during that time. Mr. HEDRICK. It has been in operation since that time, or was it closed down after the First World War?

Mr. Moox. To the best of my knowledge there was no production of manganese from the Butte district until I think it was 1941 when they started in again. The Phillipsburg district though all during the period between the two wars produced battery grade manganese ore. Mr. HEDRICK. Is this plant operating today?

Mr. Moon. Yes, sir.

Mr. HEDRICK. That is all I have.

Mr. LEMKE. Mr. Engle?

Mr. ENGLE. No questions.

SOCORRO DISTRICT, NEW MEXICO

Mr. LEMKE. We will take up New Mexico.

Mr. Moon. There are a number of manganese districts in New Mexico. I was asked to provide some further comments on the deposits of Socorro County.

In 1943 the Bureau of Mines conducted quite a small project. It consisted of trenching, test pits, and an adit, which was 125 feet long, on a brecciated zone mineralized with manganese oxide.

The principal ore mineral in this deposit is psilomelane. That is the hard manganese oxide. We worked there only about 3 months. In that time we indicated by this work that there was about 60,000 tons of 8 percent manganese in a limited area and calculated only to a very shallow depth.

Milling tests by the Metallurgical Division indicated that this material could be concentrated rather easily. A private concern then conducted further work on this deposit and while they thought they could do something with it, they found it was not quite large enough to operate at the scale they had contemplated. But they then became interested in another similar deposit nearby, and 18 months later, that would be about January 1945, one of the Bureau of Mines engineers visited this deposit again where they were working and, based on the work that this company had done, calculated there was in the two deposits approximately 300,000 tons of 10 to 11 percent manganese. That was calculating to a depth of only 24 feet below the surface which was the average depth of the positive showings that they had made.

I do not have any recent reports on developmnts at that property but I understand the work was continued subsequently and in fact the oprator I believe secured a contract for delivery of manganese concentrates to the stock pile.

I think from the Bureau of Mines point of view this is a good example of where a small Government expenditure resulted in creating enough interest so that private capital was willing and able to follow

it up.

Mr. LEMKE. That is you show the way and they follow?

Mr. MOON. That is our purpose; yes, sir.

Mr. HEDRICK. Do you know what the cost of production is in this particular area?

Mr. Moon. No, sir; I do not.

Mr. LEMKE. Is that all you have on that?

Mr. MOON. Yes, sir.

Mr. LEMKE. Mr. D'Ewart.

Mr. D'EWART. I have no questions.

Mr. LEMKE. Mr. Engle?

Mr. ENGLE. Nothing.

Mr. LEMKE. Mr. Ralston?

Mr. RALSTON. Mr. Moon has already mentioned everything essential there I think. There was no problem in the concentration of this material. The principal problem was the low grade and the effort to make ends meet financially.

Mr. LEMKE. They have been able to meet those apparently?

Mr. MOON. I am not sure the property is still operating. I hope it is.

Mr. LEMKE. Now we will take up No. 9, Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

TYPICAL MANGANESE OXIDE DEPOSITS OF THE SOUTHERN
APPALACHIAN REGION

Mr. MooN. The bulk of the commercial manganese in the southeastern United States is produced from secondary deposits which seem to have resulted from the weathering of manganese-bearing limestones. Judging from the occurrences that have been described, it seems that it is essential to the formation of one of these deposits that there be a structural trap so that the manganese which is carried in solution from the decomposition from the limestone is reprecipitated in the form of oxides in this trap. The usual occurrence is when

there is an impervious layer, sometimes a quartzite, under the decomposing layer of limestone and the solutions percolate down by gravity. Then when they are trapped by a fault or some other structural impediment, the material is reprecipitated.

A typical occurrence is that a clay, which is formed as the residual of the weathering of the limestone, has manganese oxide nodules scattered through it. Such deposits are numerous.

I believe in this map on page 260 it shows a lot of spots of occurrences in the general Appalachian region.

As a rule the individual deposits are not large, although many of them have produced good oxide, simply by washing away the clay from the manganese nodules.

When that is done, of course, any soft oxides that are present are lost. They are also washed away with the clay.

I mentioned that most of the deposits are small. A production of 30,000 tons of concentrate from an individual deposit is exceptionally large. Most of them are smaller than that. Probably the largest individual deposit was in Virginia, in Augusta County, the CrimoraOld Dominion deposit.

Records show that a total of 170,000 tons of concentrate with a content of approximately 44 percent manganese has been shipped from these two mines which are essentially the same deposits.

The mining methods are often crude in operating these small deposits, but in recent years, large earth-moving equipment has been employed in several localities, such things as power shovels, bulldozers, the type of equipment that is used in highway construction.

It has always seemed to me that if a single operator could line up several of these small deposits and plan to mine then in succession, that he might have a better chance of paying off the cost of the highpriced equipment. It is almost impossible to make a good estimate of how much manganese is left in this type deposit. The individual deposits are small. They are not the type of thing that can be laid out in advance.

For example, the Bureau of Mines worked on seven of them during the war. The total tonnage found by the seven projects was about 160,000 tons, and most of that has been mined since we worked on them.

Usually if an operator finds a deposit that can be mined profitably, he goes ahead and mines it. It is not blocked out in advance. So it is almost impossible to give an estimate.

The only thing you could go on would be some sort of statistical approach. There has been one of these found every so often in the past and presumably others will be found. But it is very difficult to arrive at any sort of a firm estimate.

ENORMOUS ZONE OF MANGANIFEROUS SCHISTS IN NORTH AND

SOUTH CAROLINA

Another type of deposit that is found is this: This actually was listed in the outline as another subject. I have taken it up here. This large zone of manganiferous schist is found in Gaston and Cleveland counties in North Carolina and into Cherokee County, S. C.

It is really an enormous zone that does contain some manganese. In places the whole zone is on the order of 20 miles wide. It contains some deposits of manganese oxides near the surface which apparently

were formed by the weathering of manganiferous garnet called spessartite. I do not believe there has been any satisfactory process worked out to recover the manganese contained in the silicate.

Even in the oxidized zone near the surface there is still a certain amount of residue, a residual silicate that is manganese bearing. For example, we took a number of samples in this area and the manganese content would be about 10 percent but only about half of that manganese was present in the oxide-the other half was still combined as a silicate.

We spent 6 months in the summer of 1944, from April until October, trenching, auger drilling, and sampling the more promising looking parts of this zone. Several limited areas where the predominant occurrence was as oxide, were found. But to date only a very small production of selected material has resulted. There has been no general development of the manganese deposits in that zone.

That is all I have to say on the southeastern deposits.

Mr. LEMKE. Would you say indications are there might be some undiscovered in the field as a result of these explorations?

Mr. MOON. Yes. I think there is a fair chance of finding additional deposits of the first type spoken of. Of course, this second type, this enormous manganiferous schist zone, we know it is there but we do not know how to use it yet.

SWEET SPRINGS DEPOSIT, WEST VIRGINIA

Mr. HEDRICK. Do you have a record of what percentage was found in Sweet Springs, Monroe County, W. Va.?

Mr. Moon. No, sir; I do not, but I can tell you my recollection of it which may not be exactly accurate. The ore there I believe was on the order of I would say not above 10 or 12 percent in the crude. as it occurred in the bank. That was the first type that I spoke of that occurrs in clay. There was quite a successful, although rather short-lived operation there, as you probably know, and to the best of my knowledge the deposit was all mined out.

There does not seem to be any more there. When we were running out of ore we went in there and tried by drilling to extent the deposit; and we were not successful.

Mr. LEMKE. Mr. Ralston.

BENEFICIATION OF APPALACHIAN REGION MANGANESE OXIDE ORES

Mr. RALSTON. In general these ores in the Appalachian Mountains are soft ores, distintegrating easily, and clays. They are somewhat segregated into nodules. About the only thing that can be done to them to beneficiate them is to put them through what we call a log washer, or a long trough with a rotating log with arms sticking out from its sides, to stir the material as it is washed through by the water. You wash away clay and any of the manganese that goes down to clay size, and have left the more nodular material.

The rocks are picked out and thrown away. Then you have left some manganese ore. It is a very wasteful process but being in an area made up almost entirely of small deposits, that is about the only thing you can put any capital investment into and get it back. So it wastes the ore; does not give a very good product.