Company May Mine By Submarine In Antarctic

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31234, 5 December 1966, Page 22

Company May Mine By Submarine In Antarctic

The feasilibility of mining, extracting and shipping ores by specially-built submarine from the depths of the continental shelf of Antarctica will be investigated this week. This is the immediate plan of the executive vice-presi-dent of Reynolds Metals (Mr J. L. Reynolds) who has flown to Antarctica. His company is the second largest aluminium manufacturing firm in the United States with sales last year of 760 million dollars. It built the deepest diving submarine in the world, the Aluminaut, which can go down 15,000 ft. One one occasion in the Blake Plateau area the submarine dived to a depth of between 2500 ft and 3000 ft on to a “highway” paved with manganese, iron, copper and nickel.

“We rode along the mineral highway underwater for 23 miles,” said Mr Reynolds. “The submarine is fitted with wheels.” “If we found a deposit of economic value we would design special equipment—a special submarine for mining it,” he said. “We fabricate thousands of aluminium products.” Mr Reynolds said that the Aluminaut had been built by his company at a cost of four million dollars for underwater research, particularly in the mineral field. He said that if Comalco did not take up its option to establish a smelter at Bluff, “we would certainly have a look at it.”

"When 1 come back I’d like to see your power developments and talk with some of your Government officials,” he said.

The price of aluminium in the world, he said, was very good today. Almost all plants in the the world, were running at near or full capacity. “We have the problem of expanding our own production by 50 per cent,” he said. “We hope to complete the expansion by about 1969.” Reynolds Metals, he said, bought its bauxite from Jamaica, Haiti, British Guiana and in the United States. It was looking at bauxite in Australia and West Africa. Mr Reynolds said that his company was working on methods of extracting aluminium from clays, and so were others.

Some clays ran very high in aluminium content.

He doubted whether New Zealand had been carefully explored for aluminiumbearing clays or bauxite. It was not a very expensive ore and most prospectors went looking for something more valuable. By rather a strange contrast, Mr Reynolds is president of the chocolate-coated ice-cream manufacturing organisation known as the Eskimo Pie Corporation. The product was widely sold in the United States and it was also being manufactured in Europe. Mr Reynolds said he was very impressed with the cheapness of New Zealand butter.

He proposed to investigate the possibility of buying New Zealand butter and using it for the production of Eskimo pies outside the United States.