KAT Exploration Inc (KATX)

[ShortonCash]

“For example, Western Mining was very short of funds when it made the discovery. In fact, the company’s first exploration base in Adelaide was the garage of a home at Flagstaff Hill.”

http://www.longwallconference.com.au/ajmnews/december/december-23-10/featured-products/new-books-on-olympic-dam-and-koolyanobbing

The Olympic Dam Story
Extract from Chapter 6: Reinventing the search for copper
© 2010 David Upton

http://theolympicdamstory.com/Extract-from-the-book.php

By 1969, Western Mining had run hard without success for a number of years at three major copper exploration projects — Moonta, Warburton and Fortescue.

Total spending on the search for copper, including Tarraji River, had climbed to $21 million in today’s terms, a huge expense for a company that had only begun to earn significant profits in1968 with the start of its nickel operations

“The thing that Australia was short of at that time was copper. As I had spent a lot of time working on copper mineralisation, it seemed like a good topic to study. Western Mining was producing nickel, and a lot of its customers wanted copper as well.

“The study would relate those losses and gains to the types of alteration minerals and then use those alteration minerals to set constraints on the hydrothermal ore-forming system. From there, the study would rig a generalised model of copper occurrence that could be applied in exploration in the future. That was basically the aim at the very beginning.”

The PhD study focused on the chemical reactions when magnetite in basalt altered to hematite. Both are forms of iron ore, but have very different physical properties. Magnetite is magnetic, hematite is not; magnetite can hold copper in its crystal structure, but hematite cannot. So what happens to the copper and associated minerals when basalt is altered from magnetite to hematite by extremely hot, mineral-rich waters?

If Haynes succeeded, he would establish for Western Mining a radically different model for finding copper deposits. It was exactly the kind of new science on which the company had built its reputation and its rising wealth.

Western Mining certainly had no doubts about the value of Haynes’ findings. Haynes says everything possible was done to keep his research from the prying eyes of competitors. While there were limits to the restrictions that could be placed on access to a taxpayer-funded PhD, Western Mining was able to keep Haynes’ research findings under wraps until 1974. It effectively managed a two-year head-start on any competitors that might want to throw their own exploration funds behind the breakthrough science that Haynes had developed at ANU

http://www.raremetalblog.com/2011/01/mother-lode-of-hostility-uranium.html

The problem was the company had found within a very complex ore body, along with its copper, gold, silver and other minerals, considerable levels of uranium. It could not realistically produce copper and gold without also digging up the uranium.