The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Sorted by date Results 1 - 9 of 9
The unseasonably, interminably, unspeakably cold spring that is delaying mineral exploration and development work in Alaska this year is being mimicked by a financial chill that is affecting Alaska exploration efforts just like it is the rest of the world. Not to put too fine a point on it, but from a mineral exploration standpoint, Alaska is shaping up to be as dead as a doornail this summer (ever wonder where that saying came from ... but I digress.). How dead? Try this statistic on for size: Of the 49 exploration projects...
The second draft of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Bristol Bay Assessment strengthens the notion that Pebble and other copper deposits in the Bristol Bay watershed are at risk of losing mining habitat due to the salmon population found there. After spending about a year studying the area of Southwest Alaska where the enormous Pebble copper-gold-molybdenum project is located, EPA released the initial draft of the Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment in May, 2012. Based on...
With a marketing campaign seemingly designed to send investors and their money running, Contango ORE Inc., also known as Core, may be the most unconventional mineral exploration company working in Alaska. A presentation posted on the company's website in 2011 provides a sense of the explorer's unabashed frankness: "It would be truly exciting if Core owned gold or REEs (rare earth elements) - we sadly do not - we are an exploration company i.e. a pure and simple...
Each year about this time, the sun begins to shine like never before, the rivers rise and the ice melts, the daylight hours grow longer, and miners across Alaska bend their shoulders to their avocation. While it is true that the endless problems we all face don't go away; nonetheless, they seem to take their place as a part of the background noise with which we have to deal while getting on with the real business of life. Somehow, despite the unending bickering in Washington,...
Scotiabank's Commodity Price Index, after losing significant ground in late 2012, started 2013 on a stronger note, climbing 3.8 percent in January before slipping 0.9 percent a month later, Scotiabank Vice President, Economics Patricia M. Mohr told a capacity crowd at 2013 Nunavut Mining Symposium in April. The annual gathering, held April 8-11 in Iqaluit, NU, the northern territory's capital, attracted 500 delegates, matching the record attendance reported for the symposium in 2012. Mohr, a commodity market specialist at...
There is a reason why Nunavut has one of the fastest-growing economies in Canada: mining. With one operating gold mine at Meadowbank, two projects on the verge of startup at Hope Bay and Mary River , five projects advancing through the environmental assessment process at Meliadine, Back River, Hackett River, and the Izok corridor, and exploration activities continuing across all three regions in 2013, there's little wonder that Nunavut's "time has come." That's the word from Matthew Spence, director general of the Northern...
The story of the Meadowbank Mine in central Nunavut continues to be a tale of challenges met and obstacles conquered. From the hour that its development was conceptualized in the middle of the past decade, the gold at Meadowbank has delivered a succession of hurdles for its developers - first Cumberland Resources and then Agnico-Eagle Mines Ltd. - to clear. Agnico-Eagle acquired Cumberland in April 2007 in an all-share acquisition valued at C$710 million. In 2010, the gold producer brought Meadowbank into commercial...
Following a rising chorus of junior companies touting impressive exploration programs on mineral prospects across Alaska that reached its crescendo in 2011, a deafening silence is resonating across the Far North expanse in 2013. And in the junior mining sector, no news is bad news. Mineral exploration expenditures in Alaska, which were a meager US$23.8 million in 2001, climbed to US$347 million by 2008. The "Great Recession of 2008" tightened the equity markets, resulting in...
The Government of British Columbia's push in recent years for mine exploration and development in the northern region of the province is slowly bearing fruit. An early plum is Thompson Creek Metals Co. Inc.'s Mount Milligan copper-gold mine in north-central B.C., which is rolling toward startup in August and commercial production in the fourth quarter. Terrane Metals Corp., a subsidiary of Thompson Creek, reports that construction of the 60,000-metric-tons-per-day open pit mine, which is located 155 kilometers (about 96...
