Sierra Resource Group Inc. (fka SIRG)

[lmcat]

And thanks to challenges such as declining ore grades, "very complex" permitting and the availability of water and power for processing, the balance between copper supply and demand is razor-thin, said Red Conger, president of Phoenix-based Freeport-McMoRan Americas. The world has about a week of copper stores on hand, Conger said.

Worse still, the industry has fewer workers to wrestle with those challenges. The industry "missed a whole generation of people in the '90s" who decided to go into technology and banking, O'Brien said. Newmont has 500 mining engineers worldwide who are eligible to retire in the next five years. The company could hire every college mining graduate in the United States, and it wouldn't be able to replace those engineers, O'Brien said.

So companies are trying to sell people on the business. O'Brien pointed to a Sept. 18 Bloomberg article noting that 2012 graduates of the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology outearn recent Harvard grads, with a median salary of $56,700, compared to $54,100.

"A mining degree is worth its weight in gold," O'Brien said.

Aside from more workers, faster permitting would help, too, O'Brien said.

"We're asking for speedier regulations, not worse regulations," he said. "We're asking for predetermined regulations that are enforced in ways we know over scheduled time periods. Why? Because we could put people to work here in Nevada if we could open our projects earlier, if we could have more visible regulations and if those regulations were done under legislation."

http://www.lvrj.com/business/golden-days-for-mining-but-convention-panelists-say-things-could-be-even-better-171116911.html