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Show vr Compliments of l -- N r v lO uJ . Weston and Company, Vol. 1 Inc. Sept. 22, 1969 No. 30 25c per copy Mine engineers enjoy confab Over 2,000 AIME members attend Rocky Mtn. meet More than 2,000 engineers and their wives gathered at the beautiful new Salt Palace in Salt Lake City last week for the was Minerals, Instruments and Computers A Kennecott Copper Corporation and Brower Dellinger, SME President and manager of Mining & Exploration of National Lead Co. conjunction with the International Computer Applications Symposium and the Northwest Regional Meeting of the Instrument Society of America. Keynote speakers on computers and minerals were F. D. Rodgers, president of the Data Processing Division of IBM Corporation, J.C. Griffiths, head of the Department of YORK - Nuclear explosions to free trapped natural gas reserves are according to a Texas business executive who said his company can achieve the same results with conventional explosives. William C. Kester, president of Controlled Reaction Corp., Dallas, said his company had unnecessary supplies and proces- ses caught the attention of hundreds of engineers at three- - successfully employed day AIME conference in the Salt Lake City Salt Palace, highyielded to stimulate an initial More then 2,000 engineers and their wives attended the techmqnes confab. non-nucle- N-te- st took Equity Oil Co. has engaged justFred place. Evans, Equity president, CER Geonudear Corp. of Las if the properties could said that Vegas, Nevada, to study the using nuclear explosives in Equitys gas holdings in the Piceance Creek basin of Colorado. Equity's properties are about 40 miles north of the Project Rulison site where a similar test feasibility of I be developed successfully they would provide a ' source of natural gas for not only commercial use, but also for possible development of Equity's in-si- tu recovery process. oil shale Utah's Gov. Calvin L. Metal Mining Division of the delegates as hundreds gathered for the opening talks. The US. must achieve a minerals policy which will bond both government and the mining a common John C. Kinnear Jr. industry in The meeting program consisted of 34 technical endeavor, told the group. Kinnear pointed to the present $7 billion annual cost to the country of importing needed metals as an indication of the need for encouraging with 173 technical papers being presented. Sessions sessions, covered the finding, mining and processing of metal ores, coal and minerals; the application of computer hardware more exploration in this and software to these functions, country. and instrumentation necessary Kinnear urged the mining to carry them out. engineers' to do more to More than 100 exhibits, many improve the mining industrys, of them elaborate and expensive, image by telling what it is doing gave engineers a glimpse of (Continued on Page 2) non-metall- ic Texan says Rulison unnecessary NEW Equity Oil Co. signs for gas field Ramp ton and Salt Lake Citys Mayor J. Bracken Lee welcomed president of operations for the Path to the Future The conference was held in DISPLAYS OF MINING EQUIPMENT, and vice t Rocky Mountain Mineral morning, , mining tomorrow as well as showing what's available today. President-Elec- Conference of the Society of Mining Engineers of AIME. Theme of the conference, which got under way Wednesday PH Geochemistry and Mineralogy at Pennsylvania State University; John C. Kinnear Jr., AIME ar flow of 5 million cubic feet of gas per day from a well which previously yielded only 3,000 cubic feet per day. He said the experimental explosion took place last week in West Virginia. nuclear device was exploded under the western slope of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado last week. The Austral Oil Co., of Houston estimates some 6 trillion cubic feet of gas is in a tight rock formation in A the area of the blast. The method used by Controlled Reaction Corp. consists of strategically planting high quantities of conventional explosives in controlled steps. carefully The West Virginia experiment was undertaken by the company 40-kilot- on in cooperation with Petroleum Tool Research, Inc., Pryor, Okla., and Consolidated Gas - Supply Va. Corp., W. Clarksburg, Rulison shakes wraps off new plans GRAND VALLEY Colo. -- the Project Rulison, nuclear explosion underground that shook western Colorado last week, also shook the dust off plans for three more blasts in Colorado and Wyoming. Two of them, like Rulison, will be intended to jar loose ratural gas locked in underground rock formations. The third is to aid the recovery of oil from vast shale deposits in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. T h e two Colorado experiments are Project Bronco and Project Dragon Trail. The Wyoming experiment will be WASP - Wyoming Atomic Stimulation Program. All, like Rulison, are cooperative ventures of private industry with the Atomic Energy Commission. All involve millions of dollars spent in hopes of getting billions of dollars worth of locked-i- n natural resources. Kennecott Copper Corp., the UJS. Bureau of Mines and the AEC are working on a still different atomic project for Safford, Ariz., in an effort to recover copper ore. All the projects are part of the Plowshare program to find peaceful uses for atomic energy. WASP, being prepared by International Nuclear Corp. of Denver, calls for a 13,500-fodeep well in the Pinedale Field of Wyoming. The size of the explosion has not been decided, but officials hope it will be larger than Rulison, which was equivalent to 40,000 tons of ot TNT. Its earliest possible detonation would be 1970. |