OCR Text |
Show MINING AND FINANCIAL ' The immense Emery County coal field development de-velopment project announced in Thursday's papers cannot fail to redound to the benefit of Salt Lake. The deal embraces the purchase g, by the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company, acting through W. G. Sharp, Of the control, of the Castle Valley Coal Company, Com-pany, involving a cash consideration of over $900,000; the purchase of the Black Hawk Coal Company for a consideration of some $600,000 and the purchase of options which expire in June on the control of the Consolidated Fuel "' Company, which concern owns 3600 acres of coal lands in Emery County and operate a railroad rail-road from ts mine at Hiawatha. The purchase pur-chase of the control of the Consolidated Company Com-pany involves a consldeiation of $1,200,000. With the control of these concerns in its hands, the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company secures ownership to over 9000 acres of the best coal land in Utah. Negotiations at this end have been carried on through William G. Sharp, J. R. Sharp and H. A. Iverson and a good many local men Interested In-terested in various coal concerns are affected by the deal. Many of those who have sola their holdings and interests to the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company are A. J. Orem of Salt Lake, Windsor V. Rico, J?. C. Kittle, J. S. Critchlow, David Eccles, the Scowcrofts, Brownings and Pingrees of Ogden, (the Sweets of Salt Lake, and others. ,' The Utah Coal and Coke company has been, .organized and it is said this concern will act 'as the parent company for the various subsidiary sub-sidiary interests which have been purchased by .the United States Smelting, Refining and Min-'ing Min-'ing Company, and of this company, J. S. Sharp J .is president, A. L. Fullmer, vice-president, B. R. i McDonald, secretary and treasurer, and G. A. flverson and G. W. Fullmer, directors. j It is said three parties of surveyors are working south from Provo surveying possible froutes for a new railroad to tap the center of ithe coal fields purchased by the United States Smelting, Refining and Mining Company. Notwithstanding the comparative indifference (Ot Salt Lake and Utahs capitalists to the possibilities possi-bilities of Utah oil fields, the search for profitable oil wells which took a new start two years ago, is Jiroceeding with a degree of perseverance that speaks for the future. The latest boom is not a Hash in the pan like those which proceeded it. tit Is not a stock-selling campaign. There is no longer a field for the exploitation of the public (jn connection with oil explorations. That field was worked out five or six years ago. Present 'day operations are financed, so far as they are i, financed at all, by practical oil men or by the , owners of oil locations. Consequently the raising of capital goes on s)owly, but the proportion of the money used for actual drilling is large beyond precedent. There is scarcely a section of this slate state in which rigs cannot bo found puncturing punctur-ing the epidermis of mother eaith. The lesults up to this time have not been sensational," but they are sufficiently encouraging to keep the (prospectois at the job. Peti oleum of every grade , . has been found in varying quantities in San Juan, Wayne, Grand, Emery, Garfield, Washington, Juab and Uintah counties, and exceptionally good 1 piospects have been developed at Rangely, a few miles over the state line in Rio Blanco county, Colorado. The question now is not so toujh that of getting get-ting oil as of deliyeiing the oil to consumers at pcrmissablo cost. Seveial wells to opened that would bo capable of furnishing a commercial product, pro-duct, if their market lay close at hand, but the 1 i ilelds in which the oil has been discovered have never been valuable in any other respect, and for that reason have been avoided by the railroads. It is not enough for the Utah oil companies to develop wells from which they can pump a few dozen barrels of oil daily. They must jog along pntiently with the means at their command, until they can guarantee production at a rate that will justify the investment of the large units of capital capi-tal required for the extension of railroads and the construction of pipe lines. The local market for crude oil is developing J faster than the visible supply in the Utah fields. In another six months the Garfield plant of the American Smelting & Refining co'mpany will be using as much oil as all the wells in the state are capable of producing, but the supply is coming and will continue to come from southern California Califor-nia until the Utah oil men are prepared to make deliveries in wholesale quantities and at low transportation trans-portation cost. It is not generally known that three oil burners and that an increasing number of tank cars are arriving at the plant daily over (ho San Pedro railroad from Bakersfield. The trial of oil fuel at the smelter began four months ago. After checking up the results on the first J furnace so equipped it was found that the capac-1 capac-1 ity of the furnace was increased one third and the cost of operating reduced one-third. Similar results re-sults followed the use of oil in the second and third furnaces and the American company now is extending the system to the remainder of the plant as fast as the (mechanical equipment can be provided. " Tho use of oil burners in smelting copper ores was not an experiment. Demonstration was made at the Steptoe smelter at Ely, Nevada, more than a year ago that oil fuel was practicable in a physical way. The question at Garfield was whether the oil could be hauled the great distance from California in competition with coal from the nearby Utah mines. The answer emphatically emphati-cally is in the affirmative. The discontinuance of stoking alone makes a reduction in the labor oxpense account which is sufficient to pay for many hundred miles of oil transportation. Pipes, injectors, sprays and other apparatus required in making the change aro cast and finished in the smelter's own "machine shops. In doing away with coal the company is doing away with many employes, but the jobs abolished are the man-killing man-killing jobs that only foreigners have been wlll- J ing to fill. The force probably will bo cut from one-third to one-half by the time the oil instnlla- 1 tion is completed. Pertinent curiosity as to the cost of production produc-tion at the Chino property in New Mexico has been satisfied in part by the report of the directors direc-tors that in the last quarter copper was made at an expense of 8 cents a pound. This rate does not satisfy the management, which expects to attain at-tain a much lower cost, and it comes still further from satisfying the old line copper producers who have cherished secretly tho hope that the new porphyries in New Mexico and Arizona would add nothing to the supply of ultra-cheap copper put on the market by the Utah Copper and Nevada Consolidated. It is an axiom of the porphyry operators op-erators that production costs vary inversely to the quantity of ore handled. The fact that tho Chlno's S-cent metal was made with only two sections of its mill working, leaves a wide margin for cost-reduction with the starting of the remaining remain-ing sections. The statement first published in GOODWIN'S WEEKLY that the Prince Consolidated company at Pioche, Nevada, would mine its low-grade ore by the caving system, made a favorable impres- il (Continued on Pago 15.) MINING AND FINANCIAL. (Continued from Pago 8.) sion on stockbuyers and accounts to a considerable consider-able degree for the strength of the share on tho local market. The bulk of the Prince ore belongs to the class that may earn profits or create a liability as it is mined cheaply or expensively. Caving, whdre conditions are right, is pretty close to the last word in mining economy. Experts pronounce the conditions right at the Prince, and if the experts are right there will be no difficulty in realizing a modest net earning on every ton of the huge low-grade reserve. Enthusiastic advocates advo-cates of the Prince say that the company has ore and tailings in sight worth ?3 for every share of stock outstanding. Prince, Iron Blosso'm and the other conservative conserva-tive Issues are the pillars of the mining stock market this week. New York Bonanza and some cf the speculative mediums are in retirement. Indications In-dications are, however, that the subsidence of speculation is temporary. A bubble here and there shows that deals and turns are maturing under the surface and will come to the surface H before lorfg. The tone of the market in the last H week has been strong much stronger than the H prices or the amount of the sales would indicate. H |