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
Coping with the unexpected is a challenge facing Teck Cominco in Alaska this summer, as both its Pogo Mine project near Delta Junction and the Red Dog Mine near Kotzebue encounter the unexpected. Construction of the Pogo gold mine is rapidly moving toward completion in time for an early 2006 startup. But workers are grappling with poor ground conditions in underground development at the project. The mine, 85 miles southeast of Fairbanks, is estimated to contain 7.7 million tons of ore that should yield just under a...
I have had numerous people ask me the same question over and over again for the last month - "What's going on in Alaska; everyone is so quiet?" My response has been and remains the same - everyone is too busy breaking rocks, drilling holes or crushing ore to be bothered with new releases and grandiose public announcements. After all, it is high summer in the high north, a time of seasonal frenetic activity that makes the lot of us look and feel like a mouse in a habitat wheel! Despite the fact that a dozen or so companies...
The Kamchatka peninsula in Russia's Far East was off-limits to mining in the Soviet era. Exploration took place, but no mines were built because Kamchatka - a short hop across the Bering Sea from Alaska - was home to numerous military bases. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a group of geologists and investors formed a company, KoryakGeoldobycha, KGD, hoping to take advantage of the region's vast mineral potential. But they had to fight to prevent some of it from being closed again: this time because of the creation o...
The UK's Trans-Siberian Gold is blazing a trail as one of the first foreign mining companies to operate in the Kamchatka region of Russia. Trans-Siberian is developing the Asacha and Rodnikova gold deposits, just outside the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, and plans to have a producing hard rock mine by the end of 2006. The process hasn't gone altogether smoothly, but Trans-Siberian is determined to proceed, unlike Kinross Gold, which departed Kamchatka when faced with environmentalists' roadblocks. After four years of...
Where has never been a diamond mine in Alaska, but that may change if Golconda Resources has anything to do with it. The Calgary-based junior, in partnership with Shear Minerals and Shulin Lake Mining, is exploring for diamonds at the Shulin Lake property in central Alaska. Diamonds have been found across the border in Nunavut and Northwest Territories. But in Canada, diamonds are brought to the surface in kimberlite pipes, igneous structures that rise due to their high temperature and the extremely high pressures that exist...
Chief Ranger Pat Murphy has a dream. Restore the bunkhouse at the historic Independence Mine, north of Anchorage. Bring visitors to stay there overnight and watch old movies in the building's 90-seat theatre on the first floor. In the morning, take them to the mess hall and serve a huge miners' breakfast, loaded with calories. Then give them an underground tour of a mine that was one of Alaska's largest gold producers before World War II. Murphy is the kind of active guy who is likely to achieve his dream. Driving around the...
At an Anchorage scoping meeting on Aug. 16, Bob Schneider, manager of BLM's Fairbanks District Office, invited public comments on the criteria for bureau's planning effort for the southern portion of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. As part of the south NPR-A plan the Bureau of Land Management intends to assess the potential for hard rock mining and coal leasing, and the possible impacts of these activities, Schneider said. In recent years BLM has issued land use and activity plans for northeast and northwest NPR-A and...
If Lucky Shot lives up to its name, it could net Vancouver, British Columbia-based junior Full Metal Minerals millions of dollars. But the chances are slim. Less than 1 percent of exploration projects eventually develop into operating mines, according to Full Metal's vice president, Rob McLeod. Still, McLeod hopes that this or one of his company's other Alaska projects will be as lucrative as Pierina in Peru, which his cousin Catherine McLeod-Seltzer discovered and sold to Barrick Gold for a not-so-small fortune. The Lucky...
In the far north, one Canadian firm is trying to do for sapphires, emeralds and rubies what explorers did for diamonds in the 1990s. True North Gems, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based mining company formed in 2001, is pursuing three advanced exploration projects for precious gemstones, two in Canada and a third in nearby Greenland. "True North's efforts are a direct spinoff of Canada's success in the diamond trade," said President William Rohtert, who heads the company's exploration team. "Canada, in the last few years,...
