BusinessTN

Tennessee Minerals president Gerry Savel eases his Jeep Cherokee up the steep access road his crews have carved into a 140-foot high accumulation of iron fines produced by over 150 years of mining in Copperhill, Tenn. Savel walks from the parked Cherokee to the edge of the site and gazes at the young pines and grasses that again cover much of the site’s vast expanse—made up of at least four different mines—and at the rusting hulk of Intertrade Holdings’ acid manufacturing plant, which has been sold and will be removed to Brazil.

A dramatic uptick in demand for raw materials such as the iron fines for steel production and other uses including fertilizers has brought Savel and his Tennessee Minerals associates to this site in rural Southeast Tennessee.

Tennessee Minerals has contracted with Intertrade Holdings, the owner of the site, to remove the 10-million-ton accumulation of waste products from the area and to sell the iron fines to a suddenly ravenous steel industry both domestically and in China.

“The demand for raw materials world wide is very high right now,” Savel says. “That makes our investment here worthwhile.” Tennessee Minerals has already put $2.5 million into refurbishing the rail line connecting the Copperhill site with a CSX terminal in Etowah, Tenn. Before the 50-acre site is completely removed, the company will have almost $10 million invested. “We replaced 27,000 crossties,” Savel says.

According to Savel, the iron fines will be moved to a central loading yard with one incoming and one outgoing rail line, where the material will be loaded on hopper cars. Tennessee Minerals began shipping some 3,000 tons of the material per day in March, with 6,000 tons of the material per day the target by September. Trains hauling fines from Copperhill to the Etowah terminal will be operated by the Chattanooga-based Hiawassee River Railroad, a commercial subsidiary of the nonprofit Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum.

“The steel industry is really hot right now,” says Craig Brannon of Philadelphia-based FeX Group, one of the owners of Tennessee Minerals.

"While there were some logistics challenges getting the material to market, we’ve had many people help accomplish this,” Brannon says. “The Southeast Tennessee Development District has worked hard to facilitate this project.

Brannon says the price of the materials varies widely depending on intended use. “Prices range from $10 to $25 per ton to possibly as high as $50 to $100 per ton for some specialized applications in the fertilizer industry,” Brannon says.

Since the discovery of copper-bearing ore 162 years ago, the Copper Basin area has seen the rise and fall of dozens of companies created to mine the copper-laden rolling hills. Mixed iron and copper veins with a high sulfur content, some as deep as 600 feet, were mined throughout Polk County from 1843 till mining operations ceased in 1987.

Released sulfur fumes from smelting operations combined with wood cut to fuel furnaces created a fifty-square-mile “moonscape” area around the Copper Basin called by some the largest man-made desert in the United States. Efforts to trap the sulfur fumes created a sulfuric acid industry.

In 2001, the State of Tennessee, the Environmental Protection Agency and Glenn Springs Holdings reached a landmark agreement to redress environmental damage and restore stream quality. The removal of millions of tons of iron fines can only speed the process.