Nepheline Syenite Market Conditions

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The ideal scenario would be to do the preliminary crushing of the nepheline syenite on the mountain and having the haul trucks on a continious circle, climbing the Waldport side of the mountain, descending via the Plum Creek road to Toledo for shipping by barge or rail in the raw state to customers as Coors, or for refinement to a higher priced material.

Toledo has much to offer as a manufacturing/warehouse site. Being the region is financially depressed due to a cutback in timber operations there are federal, state, and local monies available to subsidize any sort of endeavor that would retrain ex-mill workers into rock polishers, for example.

The Oregon and Lincoln County Economic Development Commission, working with the City of Toledo have offered a very favorable long term lease on the industrial site pictured here, with possibly a "built to suit" package.

As mentioned, the property is accessible to within five miles of the quarry on paved road which is rather curvy and narrow in places with the remainder being an all weather gravel (read—crushed nepheline syenite) road.

A stroke of luck, as far as mining properties go, is that as Table Mountain also hosts a microwave repeater station, there also is an electric line (buried) coming in from the Toledo side.

Prices for Canadian ceramic grade nepheline syenite listed in Industrial Minerals (London) in December 1987, were $66 per ton for, 200 mesh, bagged; and $99 per ton for filler-extender grade, bagged.

Lately prices have been raising for pottery and paint use as extender supplies are getting squeezed. Nepheline syenite is finding applications as a replacement for quartz silica.

A market that should not be overlooked, due to the West Coast location versus shipping from Vermont and Georgia, is that granite dimension stone prices in 1987 averaged $34 a ton for "irregular-shaped stone and rubble", and $343 per ton for dressed slabs and blocks for buildings In 1987 a total of $107,056,000 worth of dimension granite was sold in the United States, at an average value of $170 per ton, or $0.66 per cubic foot.

As the recorded production of all dimension stones for the Pacific Northwest in 1987 was only 297 tons, compared with 466,739 tons total from Georgia, Indiana, and Vermont, location may be a positive factor.

An interesting aside, considering location and ease of shipping, is that in 1987, according to the Bureau of Census, 31,320 tons of rough granite was exported from the U. S. (primarily from Vermont and Georgia) to Japan for finishing into the gray monuments that are used exclusively throughout that country in place of marble headstones. The value of this material was $4,478,760, at $143 per ton.

DEVELOPMENTAL FACTORS

As the USFS has been quarrying and crushing some of the material on site for road gravel, it is not expected that environmental issues will be used as an excuse to slow development of this operation.

You can also view a Flash version of this site with a virtual video tour of the property at: Nepheline.com or Property-Prospect-Showcase.com