The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Sorted by date Results 1 - 17 of 17
Mining can return to being a sunrise business in British Columbia, the province's Energy and Mines Minister Richard Neufeld said in unveiling a broad plan to build on the industry's recent recovery after a long slump through the 1990s. He said mining has "come a long way in the past few years" and the new plan will "help to ensure that the resurgence of this historic and vital industry continues in the long term " In the 10 years after 1991 the number of operating mines in British Columbia dropped from 28 to 13 and...
Pele Mountain Resources, a junior exploration company, says it has discovered two large diamond-bearing zones in northern Ontario. Exploration at the Festival diamond project is being financed by gold producer Goldcorp, which has an option to acquire up to a 60 percent interest and is best known for its Red Lake gold mine in northern Ontario and its current bid to take over Vancouver-based Wheaten River Minerals. Goldcorp is itself a takeover target by Nevada-based Glamis Gold, which has urged Goldcorp shareholders to reject...
Management and employees at the Red Dog zinc mine near Kotzebue expect a decision from the National Labor Relations Board in February on holding a union election there. The mine's electrical workers have asked to join the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, but owner Teck Cominco opposes the move. The company believes the group of 16 electricians is too small to unionize by itself. "The company would prefer the workforce to stay non-union, but at the end of the day it's up to the employees," Red Dog's general...
The finders of Newfoundland's huge Voisey's Bay nickel deposit are cashing in their royalty interest for C$180 million and 1 million shares of a new mining royalty company. Christopher Verbiski and Albert Chislett, the prospectors who uncovered the deposit in 1993, are selling their wholly owned Archean Resources to International Royalty, which filed a preliminary prospectus earlier this month. Archean holds a 2.7 percent royalty on the Voisey's Bay property, where Inco is scheduled to start operations in 2006, producing 100...
The age of claim staking - with all of its excitement, intrigue and even hand-to-hand combat - is over in British Columbia. Now you can acquire mineral rights without even leaving your office. The provincial government has joined two other Canadian provinces, Quebec and Newfoundland, in abandoning the centuries old tradition of actually driving stakes into the ground to mark out a claim and introduced the computer and an Internet connection. Currently, the smallest claim in British Columbia is about 40 acres and costs about...
Gold mining companies are reacting cautiously to the latest spikes in gold prices in valuing their assets, unsure where the U.S. dollar is headed, an annual survey by Pricewaterhouse-Coopers has concluded. Ignoring a peak of close to $460 an ounce in December, 43 international firms have settled on an average $366 an ounce for reserves and $379 an ounce for carrying values, an increase of 9 percent over a year earlier. Ten companies included in the survey declined to settle on a price for 2005, reflecting their view that...
De Beers and Inco, world powers in the diamond and nickel industries, have linked up to explore for gems and base metals on Baffin Island in Canada's Far North. The two companies signed a precedent-setting, two-year agreement Jan. 19 to share exploration data and possibly property rights. Each is entitled to a 100 percent ownership of any discovery of either's core commodity: Diamonds for De Beers and base metals for Inco. Ownership of any other type of mineral find would be shared equally. De Beers, which has one diamond min...
Sarah Hurst has been selected as the editor of North of 60 Mining News starting with the February issue. Hurst has more than 15 years experience as a journalist and editor. Most recently she was editor of Russian Far East News; before that she was chief sub-editor with BBC Monitoring in Azerbaijan, editor of Beijing Journal and in the mid-1990s a reporter at the St. Petersburg Press, a weekly Russian newspaper where she specialized in politics. Hurst covered the 1995 Duma elections, meeting prominent politicians including...
Drilling for diamonds is getting under way at Shulin Lake, 47 miles northwest of Anchorage. This year's $1 million drill program is a joint venture between Calgary-based Golconda Resources (51 percent), Shulin Lake Mining and Shear Minerals. The program got the go-ahead after microdiamonds were found at the property in hole 22, the last one drilled in 2004. Last year's reinterpretation of an airborne magnetic survey undertaken in 2000 showed that this hole was at the edge of two of the most prominent anomalies. The...
A recent Dow Jones report puts a slightly more definite timetable on what NovaGold Resources has been telling Alaskans for the last year: That it's getting ready to make the leap from explorer to mine operator when it starts production at what will be both its first producing mine and the Seward Peninsula's first hard rock gold mine since World War I. NovaGold President and Chief Executive Officer Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse told Dow Jones in late January that if all goes according to schedule the company's Rock Creek project...
When Andrew Olson first came to Alaska from Sweden, in February 1907, he had to hike the 400 miles from Valdez to Fairbanks. Mining pioneer David Strandberg paid Olson $7 a day to shovel dirt and gravel into sluice boxes and pan for gold. In 1938 his Goodnews Bay Mining Co. was handling more than a million cubic yards of dirt in a season and more than a million dollars worth of platinum. By the time Olson retired, in 1970, he could make the trip back to his homeland in just 24 hours. Olson saw and contributed to all the...
Homer Electric Association and Northern Dynasty Mines Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd., will conduct a joint initiative to review the feasibility of a phased power development plan for the Pebble gold-copper-molybdenum deposit near Iliamna in southwestern Alaska. The association and the company agreed to jointly assess the technical, economic and environmental feasibility of a phased development approach for delivery of electrical power to construct and operate an open pit mine at Pebble, Nort...
Full Metal Minerals plans an "aggressive" exploration program in southwest Alaska this summer, having signed a second agreement with a Native corporation, the Vancouver-based company said Jan. 22. The second agreement is with Bristol Bay Native Corp. to explore approximately 565,000 acres of the southwest Alaska Peninsula. It follows an agreement last year with the Aleut Corp. to explore on the Port Moller property in the Aleutian Islands chain. "By aggressive we mean we're not just going to sit back, we'll be doing soil...
Robert Buchan, the president and CEO of Toronto-based Kinross Gold, has announced that he will step down following the company's AGM on April 27 and assume the role of non-executive chairman. Buchan, 57, who is from Scotland, founded Kinross in 1993. After he oversaw a merger with TVX Gold and Echo Bay Mines a decade later the company became the world's seventh-largest gold producer. In Alaska Kinross owns and operates the Fort Knox and True North mines near Fairbanks. "Starting Kinross in 1993 with 25,000 ounces of annual...
Mining, of course, is the oldest profession in Alaska. In the late 19th century the "fancy ladies" followed the miners up to outposts like Juneau and Nome, and then came the lawyers. A motley crew of Alaska mining history buffs told entertaining stories at a panel discussion in Anchorage on Nov. 4, but they also had a serious message about the way disputes over mineral rights necessitated the writing of laws for this unruly territory. The first attempts at mining in Alaska took place under Russian rule, after Tsar Nicholas I...
A new mining company has staked out a future in Alaska with the acquisition of the Shorty Creek prospect near Livengood. Select Resources, formed last December, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bakersfield, Calif.-based Tri-Valley. Gold Range Ltd., a private exploration firm headquartered in Fairbanks, has leased its Shorty Creek claims to Select Resources, Tri-Valley announced Jan. 5. Neither company disclosed details of the financial arrangement. Indications of mineralization at the 34-square-mile Shorty Creek prospect...
In a rebound year for Canadian coal, it was no surprise that Grande Cache Coal topped the performance list of companies that made initial public offerings in 2004. Bolstered by a threefold rise in the price of metallurgical coal, the Alberta-based company posted a 523 percent share gain after going public in May and reaping total proceeds of C$57.2 million. It easily outpaced the rest of the IPO field, with second place going to Blizzard Energy, an oil and gas exploration and production junior, which posted a 102 percent...
