"Mining and environmental stewardship can go hand in hand," insists Green, a Canadian woman who in early meetings with industry executives was sometimes mistaken for a receptionist -- those days are over now.

The multi-million-dollar Vancouver start-up Formation Capital that she manages is on course for the 2011 opening of the only cobalt mine in the United States in a vast state-owned forest in Idaho.

In her 17th floor downtown Vancouver office, Green could pass for a distinguished academic administrator, a career for which she had trained.

But after a few minutes of listening to her speak, it becomes clear she was destined to be a captain of industry or adventurer.

It is this business acumen that pushed her to quit a dull teaching job to join a small oil and gas firm where she gained valuable technical and financial experience before setting up Formation Capital in June 1988.

It was around then that she met three geologists who would become partners on a new venture. "If you can do everything else, we can find the mine," the geologists promised her. She took them at their word.

She and geologist Scott Bending, whom she would later marry, invested their life savings of 60,000 Canadian dollars (56,000 US) to give birth to the company. Sixteen months later, they went public on the bantam Vancouver Stock Exchange, raising 447,000 dollars (418,000 US).

Over the next five years, the firm would employ only its four founders who would pay themselves modest salaries as they scoured the mountains, staking mining claims.

Echoing the pages of a Jack London novel, they picked through rocks with a hammer in search of mineral deposits.

If a lead looked promising, Green would pull out some paper and plastic poles from her backpack to mark the four corners to the (600 foot by 1,500 foot) plot of land.

Then she would go to the county administration to register the claim.

The process takes several years. Her partners and the investors, who continue to pour up to two million dollars (1.9 million US) annually into the venture without seeing a return on their investment yet, believe in her dream.

"Her perseverance kept this project together while many others would have abandoned it long ago," Laura Skaer, executive director of the US Northwest Mining Association, told AFP.

In 2001, a pre-feasibility study of the Idaho site showed it could turn a profit as a cobalt mine, especially if the miner processed the ore itself.

Green found a refinery that had been seized and offered for sale by a local county to recoup unpaid taxes from its owner.

In 2002 she bought the Sunshine Precious Metals Refinery for 1.2 million dollars (1.1 million US) and started it up again. The plant refines silver, now at a profit, and is worth some seven million dollars (6.5 million US).

Thereafter, new challenges emerged, such as obtaining US authorizations from various agencies, including fisheries officials, to start digging for cobalt in Idaho near a river salmon run.

For strategic reasons and her own personal convictions, she looks for ecologically-friendly solutions. Local environmentalists signed an accord promising not to block the mine.

US authorities recently gave her the ultimate green light to go ahead with the project, and it appears her gambles could be about to pay-off bigtime.

"In the first or second quarter of 2011, we'll be actually taking cobalt from the mine up to the hydrometallurgical plant," she said.

The mine is expected to produce up to 1,500 tonnes of cobalt annually, or about three percent of total worldwide production.

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