>>9907582 lb
Metals?
What metals? Not specified but perhaps important.
I found an analysis of coal beds in that area and there are a lot of trace elements in various amounts. The thing is, these may be in the coal because they came from neighboring rocks. And some beds are high in phosphate, so it makes me wonder if the other trace elements in the coal might be more concentrated in the phosphate.
Now, here is another point. Let's say there is a valuable metal in the phosphate rock, but it's concentration is only 25% of what would be economically viable. It needs to be more than 30%.
But wait!…
What if you take away the phosphate and that is 25% of the rock. When you analyze the leftover, you now have a 33% deposit of your metals. I think this is what was discovered.
Some of the trace elements in the coal beds are rare earth elements. Including Thorium which is a metal, and Gallium used in high speed electronics, and Vanadium and Titanium. If you are thinking PHOSPHATE then all that rock is just waste, even if it still has some phosphate in it too. You just have your eyes on the plentiful easy to recover phosphate and forget the rest.
This is why the USA needs more education in The Systems Approach where you see everything as a system of interacting components. Here we had rock, processing like crushers and solvents and settling ponds. But the leftover is not waste. It is just the stuff that should be deal with in the NEXT STEP. If you would analyze that stuff you might see that it is more valuable to the people who own the stuff to process the leftovers and get some nice metals out. Minerals are owned by the people… you just have a licence to extract them.