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Thomas F. Torries: A Tribute
 The field of mineral and energy economics has lost an important teacher, scholar, and leader. After a heroic decade-long battle with cancer, Thomas Felix Torries died quietly at home in the company of his family on April 3, 2001.
Tom was an admired professor, a highly respected consultant, and a recognized researcher. His strong leadership ability led to his election as President of the Mineral Economics and Management Society, and to his appointment as Chairman of the Natural Resource Economics Program at West Virginia University.
A keen and thoughtful observer, Tom could always be trusted to provide sound insights into problems, big and small, to friends, students, and colleagues. It was always a pleasure to encounter Tom. His positive outlook and high spirits were contagious. These wonderful qualities persisted through a long struggle with cancer and heart disease. His love of fishing provided great support during those difficult years. This simple pleasure was for him a great gift. The freedom he felt to arrive a little late to the office on a sunny fishing morn was liberating as well for his colleagues and friends, allowing them like Tom to see the more important priorities in life. His death as a result is a severe personal as well as professional loss to those who knew him.
Tom received his bachelor's in petroleum geology in 1961, and his master's in geology in 1963, from Mississippi State University. He earned his doctorate in mineral economics in 1972, from Pennsylvania State University. Tom took great pride in the relationships he maintained with so many of his fellow graduate students and professors from his days at Penn State.
It was at Penn State that he undertook the first of many successful efforts to use mineral-economic principles to solve practical problems. Working for a local contractor, he devised techniques to optimize the provision of aggregates. Tom then turned the work into an impressive Ph.D. thesis.
He then moved on to the Stanford Research Institute where he conducted market studies between 1973 and 1977. From early 1977 to late 1979, he served as the Vice President of Marketing for the Tesoro Coal Corporation in Kentucky, a subsidiary of the Tesoro Petroleum Corporation in Texas. He sold deep and strip mining coal to electrical utilities from Ohio to Georgia. His colleagues fondly recall that Tom could formulate and execute complex coal contracts, while remaining helpful and friendly to all those around him.
Tom then moved into a lifetime involvement in economic analysis of mineral industry trends. He created Torries and Associates in 1979, a consulting firm providing a variety of geological and economic services to the mineral and energy industry. He continued to run this company until his death in 2001. From 1981 to 1994, he also was vice president of NICKDATA Inc., Toronto, Canada; Tom's partner in this venture was Ilmar J. Martens. A major product of this company was its yearbook of global nickel supply and demand data that was widely used in the industry. Tom took great delight in the many friends he had in the various countries that he visited to collect nickel data.
In 1983, Tom joined the faculty of West Virginia University in the Mineral Economics Program in the College of Mineral and Energy Resources. When the Mineral Economics Program was merged with the Agricultural Economics to create the Agricultural and Resource Economics Program in the Division of Resource Management in WVU's Davis College, Tom went along. He received the Division's Outstanding Service Award in 2001.
While at WVU, Tom conducted research on West Virginia coal taxes, electricity exports from West Virginia, electric power demand and price analysis, mineral project evaluation, and engineering cost analysis related to minerals investment and finance. In particular, he attempted to clarify many of the misunderstandings involved in project evaluations. Notable, too, was his design of computer software that enabled geologists, engineers, and economists to correctly pursue such evaluations. In this regard, he taught special short courses in conjunction with meetings of the Society of Mining Engineers.
He also took pride in his book Evaluation of Mineral Projects - Applications and Misconceptions, published by the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration in 1998. This book demonstrates how probabilistic analysis can implement risk preference theory, how competitive cost analysis can be employed, how net present value techniques should be modified, and how option pricing can be integrated into the evaluation process. He was amused by the many comments the book generated on the web and attempted to address all
queries as conscientiously as possible, usually charming his critics with his polished sense of humor.
Tom was a born teacher who lectured clearly and spent many patient hours with his students. Among the courses he liked most to teach, were energy economics, mineral economics, mineral finance including project evaluation, and computer software methods. The stimulation that he provided to students is reflected in a sample of the Master and Doctoral theses he directed. They include: A Comparative Cost Analysis of International Steam Coal Trade in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Coastal Markets; Evaluation of Mineral Projects Using Simulation and Expert Systems; The Impacts of the Reappraisal Program for Mineral Rights in West Virginia; and A Simulation Approach for Economic Assessment and Risk Analysis of a CO2 Miscible Flooding Process in West Virginia.
Whether or not Tom was serving as Department Chairman, he had a great personal interest in students. He and his wife, Nancy, would twice a year host faculty-student social events. He always devised the menus and usually cooked some of his favorite Cajun dishes. Although Tom never entered any formal chili cooking competitions, he obviously would have won a few. He devised a Texas chili recipe using venison rather than beef, a result that his students and friends admired and relished.
Besides being a strong teacher and leader, Tom was also the economist's economist. Natural resource economics and indeed all of economics, he would contend, needs to maintain a proper balance - some theorizing, some empirical modeling of behavior, all coupled with a good understanding of economic institutions. The last area requires a greater effort than most current economists are willing to exert. Tom's contribution was to focus on the reality of mineral and energy industry conditions, making all of us conscious of their relevance.
Tom was a member of the Mineral Economics and Management Society, the Society of Mining Engineers, the West Virginia Coal Mining Institute, and the Mining and Metallurgical Society of America.
He was born May 18, 1939, in Washington, D.C. He is survived by his wife of 21 years, Nancy; a daughter, Lynda, and two sons, Thomas Daniel and Mike and wife Susan; five stepchildren and spouses; and 15 grandchildren.
As Tom's life drew to a close, despite the many years he spent fighting cancer, or perhaps because of them, he maintained his positive outlook and calm acceptance of all the good and the bad that life can bring. His spirit truly is an inspiration to all of us.
Walter C. Labys, Professor and longtime friend of Tom and Nancy Torries
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