The National Mining Hall of Fame and Museum announced its selections for the class of 2018 National Mining Hall of Fame inductees. Professor John M. Guilbert was a renowned geologist and professor of economic geology at the University of Arizona; he had a distinguished 50-plus-year career in academia and business. Guilbert, together with J. David Lowell, worked on the most important breakthrough in mineral exploration in the last 100 years, the Porphyry Copper Model. This work, known as the Lowell and Guilbert Model, was used by exploration geologists worldwide over the next four decades to discover hundreds of millions of tons of copper metal and numerous profitable mines.
Dr. Leo J. Miller was a maverick in the mining industry, who believed that active fieldwork, on foot with a rock pick, was indispensable for exploration. He would absorb as much information about an exploration target up front, formulate ideas and then get out into the field to prove up those ideas. His 50-plus-year career included the discovery of the Kidd Creek massive sulfide deposit and the development of the Lee Creek phosphate deposit.
Robert E. Murray worked his way through every aspect of the industry to build one of the largest privately held underground coal mining and river and ocean shipment operations in the world. He is the founder, chairman, president and CEO of Murray Energy Corp. and its subsidiaries.
Douglas B. Silver is considered one of the top thought leaders of the global mining business. Silver founded International Royalty Co. with an approach that proved the royalty model could be wildly successful outside of precious metals and for the lay investor. He continues to create investor wealth at Orion Resource Partners with innovative approaches to mine finance and metal investment.
