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Roger Day: <br />Now, moving horizontally across the map is a change with significant potential to impact the <br />process design, but potentially the bigger change is in the deeper vertical or stratigraphic <br />section. The core from the Boies Bed is a pretty white marble color. Nearly all the lower <br />nahcolite is a dark brown, nonwhite color. The dark brown is organics. We're moving <br />millions of years deeper down into this formation and the nice white more pure stuff doesn't <br />exist. <br />Jerry Daub: <br />If you're interested, I could send some photographs around. An underground mining <br />operation existed in the central part of the basin at the U.S. Bureau of Mines Experimental <br />Research Facility. It's over closer to where American Soda is. It's the Horse Draw mine <br />site. I worked underground in that mine and mapped it, and photographed all the drifts in <br />1980. There are explanations on the back of the photos. There are pictures of disseminated <br />nahcolite and nodular nahcolite. These photographs also demonstrate that the mine is dry. <br />There's no water at all down there. These will give you the feel for the type of resource <br />that's present in Horse Draw, but those stratigraphic units are also present under the Rock <br />School Lease. <br />Harry Posey: <br />From a food -grade perspective, what problems do you see - that you know of now? <br />Roger Day: <br />There are specifications of all your heavy metals. Marcasite is of concern in the deposit. There <br />is a fair amount of marcasite in the formation. This can be controlled by adjusting injection <br />chemistry. The intent is leaving the heavy metals where the are to avoid a purity or waste stream <br />disposal situation. The sodium chloride was a major concern. At times, the sodium chloride <br />would get out of control and we would have upwards to 10 percent sodium chloride in the <br />solution going around the circuit. We still made food -grade bicarb crystals, because the crystals <br />themselves were pure. The sodium chloride was easy impurity to handle, if most prevalent, <br />because you could just wash it off. Other impurities tending to enter the crystal structure present <br />greater potential risks. Once they were inside the structure, they can not be washed out. <br />Jerry Daub: <br />One thing to keep in mind is the fact that when talking about "cavities," both verbally and in <br />our written material, is really a misnomer. In reality we're not creating a cavity, as such, like <br />White River is creating or some of the domal salt bed operations. They actually mine salt <br />along the Texas Gulf coast and other areas where you actually have a larger, thicker <br />stratigraphic sequence of soluble material. What you are looking at, as the pictures come <br />around, demonstrates the fact that there is about 25- weight- percent sodium bicarbonate in the <br />oil shale matrix. So, if we were able to remove 100 percent of that within a 125 -ft- diameter <br />well, you would still have a matrix remain behind for supporting the overhead material and <br />overburden. When you are done mining, it's really more like Swiss cheese, where the <br />nodules are removed and you have the holes left. You still have that matrix to support your <br />overburden. So, in reality it's not a cavity as you would think of as a total void space. Its not <br />that type of thing. That's very important to consider in the overall scheme of things. <br />6 <br />