July Cornish Mining Sundowner

No big surprises at last night's Cornish Mining sundowner, attended by around 20 regulars on a warm evening at Falmouth's Chain Locker.

The latest mining news from Cornwall is that Cornish Lithium Ltd, which has exploration rights for lithium and other battery metals across a large area of Cornwall, has, in collaboration with consultancy company Wardell Armstrong and the Natural History Museum,  been granted funding for a new study to assess the feasibility of developing a UK supply of lithium.

Cornish Lithium has also turned to crowdfunding to raise £1m,  the initiative going live last Friday. It is one of the first companies of its type to resort to crowdfunding, earning pledges of cash from multiple investors. The campaign will go towards progressing the company’s drilling programme and expanding on-going exploration in the region.

And talking of drilling, 5 weeks ago today Physical Separation '19 ended, and in the late afternoon I took delegates to visit the ruins of Wheal Peevor. As we passed through the village of Carharrack I pointed out the giant drilling rig of the United Downs Deep Geothermal Power Project (Exploiting Cornwall's Geothermal Potential), which had already created the deepest well in mainland UK, at a depth of 5275m and was about to complete drilling of the second well, the injection well.  Two weeks later the well reached the Porthtowan Fault Zone at a depth of 2393m, and now the rig is no longer a familiar site on the skyline.

Preliminary results from the drilling are promising. Both wells intersected the fault at the predicted depth and the temperature at the bottom of the deeper production well is around 190C, which is also as expected. Downhole measurements have confirmed that there are lots of natural fractures and early indications are that the permeability is promising and that all seems set for building a small demonstration power plant and supply power to the grid.

Many of the sundowner regulars have connection with Camborne School of Mines, and I was pleased to hear that CSM is now ranked 14th place in the world for Mineral & Mining Engineering in the recent QS World Rankings for 2019. Congratulations to the 'other CSM' in Colorado for retaining the world #1 position.



Three former CSM Association secretaries, Claire Yelland, Carol Richards and Linda Shimmield with Prof. Frances Wall

 

A reminder that if you are in Cornwall on August 15th, call in at the August sundowner, which commences at 5.30pm at the Chain Locker.

Twitter @barrywills