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Bob Chesson's avatar

A bit off topic but my former coworker Bob Koehler says hi.

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Richard I Gibson's avatar

Oh, where did you work with him? I was talking to him last week for his birthday!

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Bob Chesson's avatar

I worked with him at the Colorado Oil & Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC -now rebranded as the Colorado Energy & Carbon Management Commission [CECMC]). We had adjourning offices for several years. He worked on the injection well program and I worked in the environmental program.

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Richard I Gibson's avatar

Ah, cool. I worked with him at Gulf Oil, and he also did some things with me when I did the interpretation project on the Former Soviet Union. I lived across the street from him in Golden.

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Bob Chesson's avatar

Ahhh.....if only we had been working on something a bit more interesting like that project.

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Neural Foundry's avatar

The Goldilocks positioning explanation for why mineralization concentrated at Ivanhoe specifically makes more sense than I initially thought. I've seen similar localization patterns in other contact metamorphic settings but never connected it to that combination of host rock composition plus fault conduits plus the right spot relative to erosion levels. The fact that the US produces zero primary tungsten now but was pulling significant amounts from this one site in the 50s is wild given how critical tungsten carbide is for industrial tooling. That dependency shift hapened so quietly.

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Richard I Gibson's avatar

Seems to me that the dependency shift for this and many other things followed on the industrial development of "developing countries" which had the undeveloped resources and cheap labor, and western corporations reached the point where investment there made sense. So costly US mining declined. Would you agree with that?

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