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There is enormous potential for the vast bentonite deposits in the Harper Hills, 64 kilometres west of Christchurch, to be modified to meet a range of global applications from paper production to drilling fluids. Charles Landis of the Texas company Halliburton Industrial Producers Group, and Phillip Lundy of Transform Minerals, the present owner of the 10 million tonne resource, says modification with precise additions of sodium cations could vastly expand the market for the Canterbury bentonite. Further exploration would almost certainly find the resource greater than presently inferred. Transform Minerals has a resource consent to extract up to 60,000 wet tonnes (about 33,000 cubic metres) a year for the next 35 years, and aside from paper production and expansive drilling fluids, it services secondary markets as a binding agent in animal feeds and in other specialist industries. It is quarried in the Harper Hills, then transported to Coalgate for processing. The deposit, established by Hughey Brothers in the early 1960s, was developed by Lime and Marble (L&M) later in that decade, then changed hands a couple more times before being acquired by Transform in 2006. It’s an unusual deposit in that it was formed as an alteration product of mafic igneous rocks, rather than from siliceous volcanic ash falls and ash fall tuffs as is the case with most bentonites.
Q&M Vol.6 No.5 October-November 2009 All articles on this website are copyright to Contrafed Publishing Co. Ltd. |