BISMARCK, N.D.—An Australian company plans to resume drilling test holes this spring at a germanium deposit in southwestern North Dakota to determine if opening a mine there is feasible.
Formation Resources Inc. of Bismarck, a unit of PacMag Metals Ltd., based in West Perth, Australia, was granted a state permit last year to drill about 600 test holes for uranium in southeastern Billings County and north central Slope County.
Jim Guilinger, a PacMag consultant and president of Arvada, Colo.-based World Industrial Minerals, said about 450 test holes have been completed. He said the holes showed positive results for uranium and molybdenum, a substance used to harden steel. The surprising find was germanium, a scarce and valuable mineral used in making semiconductors, transistors and infrared equipment.
The company has said it was the first time that a large germanium deposit had been found in a coal seam in North America.
Guilinger said the company will begin drilling more test holes once the ground thaws.
“We’re moving forward on it and we’ll do more drilling this spring because we can’t work in winter, especially in North Dakota,” he said.
The company has been analyzing the test drillings over the winter.
“Everything is positive,” Guilinger said. “If it wasn’t, we’d stop.”
PacMag Metals has leased about 25,000 acres of private land in North Dakota in search of uranium. The company refers to the uranium-germamium-molybdenum drilling as the Sentinel Project. The germanium find has made the project more appealing, the company says.
Germanium is fetching about $1,040 a kilogram and its price has remained stable in recent months, Guilinger said. Uranium has dipped from about $90 a pound last summer to about $50.
Guilinger said a decision on whether to mine the minerals is still a way off. He said the company would need both uranium and germanium to develop the project.
“We need both minerals to make it interesting,” he said.
PacMag is the only company to be awarded drilling permits for uranium in North Dakota, said Ed Murphy, the state geologist. But he doubts uranium or germanium will be mined in North Dakota anytime soon.
“I think it would be difficult to open a mine the way things are with the world economy,” Murphy said. “I’m sure investment dollars are hard to come by.”
The United States used 55 tons of germanium last year, up from 25 tons in 2004, the U.S. Geological Survey says. But its domestic production has remained flat over the past five years at about 5 tons, the agency said.
Germanium in the U.S. comes from imported material, or from scrap. It is recovered as a byproduct from zinc mines, according to the USGS.
David Guberman, a USGS mineral commodity specialist, said world demand for germanium is flat while U.S. demand has increased in recent years.
“There are a lot of emerging uses of it with solar technologies and continued military demand for infrared,” he said.
