The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
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A hardener of the steels that have been helping to make Fords tough for more than a century and an element with unique properties that make it the key ingredient in enormous batteries to store intermittent wind- and solar-generated electricity, vanadium is a critical metal with many valences. It is vanadium's chemical valences that make this alloying metal an ideal ingredient in the redox flow batteries that scientists and governments see as the ideal large-scale storage...
Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd. April 28 announced its subsidiary Pebble Limited Partnership is preparing crews and equipment for its 2022 field program at the Pebble project site in Southwest Alaska. While disputes over the initial denial of mine permits by the Army Corp of Engineers in November 2020, then leading to the EPA's decision to reinitiate the process of making a Clean Water Act Section 404(c) determination in September 2021, Northern Dynasty has opted to continue...
May 10, 2022, celebrates the ninth annual Alaska Mining Day. Established in 2013, Alaska Mining Day was created through legislation sponsored by Sen. Cathy Giessel, R-Anchorage, "to recognize and honor the intrepid individuals and industry that played an enormous role in settling and developing the territory and the state that continue to contribute to the economy of the state." Why May 10? On this day in 1872, the General Mining Act of the United States was approved – w...
Since World War II there may not be a more urgent time to produce Alaska's rich mineral resources. Our nation's immediate defense needs and commitment to clean energy all require a healthy, vibrant mining industry to give our country the security of domestic critical mineral production and the bridge to future clean energy technologies. Crisis brings clarity, and quickly subordinates ideology to real-world practicality. Today we see our globe reeling under the actions of...
This past week the Biden Administration released a document ineptly entitled "Fundamental Principles for Domestic Mining Reform." It would have been more accurately called "Eleven Ways to End Mining in America." It is not difficult to understand why an East Coast boy from Delaware (or maybe Scranton) would have no affinity with the American mining industry. Among other things, Mr. Biden probably could not identify three distinctions between a jackleg and a jackass, other than...
With diamond prices climbing while global production is expected to remain flat through 2027, the outlook for diamond explorer North Arrow Minerals Inc. is shining bright. The company Feb. 22 reported progress at its projects across Canada, including work undertaken in 2021 at its advanced diamond project in Nunavut. North Arrow said processing of a 2,000-metric ton bulk sample extracted in 2021 from its Naujaat diamond project located on the Melville Peninsula is about...
In a move criticized by a wide swath of Alaska policymakers and trade organizations, the Biden administration has filed a motion to reverse the federal authorizations for a proposed 211-mile road to the mineral-rich Ambler Mining District in Northwest Alaska. "You would think President Biden would want to improve access to American sources of copper and other strategic minerals that are needed in our combined efforts to increase renewables. Instead, actions like this only...
When Vital Metals Ltd. purchased the rights to mine the mineral resources in the upper zones of the Nechalacho rare earth project from Avalon Rare Metals Inc. in 2019, the Australian junior hit the ground running. And the rest is history. Literally. In July, Vital Metals became the first company to produce rare earth minerals in Canada – a country known to host vast undeveloped quantities of this suite of coveted elements. Vital is also only the second company to mine rare e...
In 1951, Life Magazine (remember "Life"?) dubbed the New York Times the "Old Gray Lady" "by way of acknowledging its special marks: starch conservatism and circumspection." How things have changed! The punster in me, however, simply says "that's life." While Life no longer lingers on, the Old Gray Lady has taken on a life of its own. No longer burdened by conservatism and circumspection, the Times perpetually searches out new and different ways to attack the innovative. Most r...
Innovation Metals Corp. Jan. 4 reported that the RapidSX rare earths and critical minerals separation technology it developed for use at Ucore Rare Metals Inc.'s planned Alaska Strategic Metals Complex (Alaska SMC) and other applications is on pace to be ready for commercial adoption and implementation via revenue-producing licensing agreements by the end of 2022. This includes the completion of a demonstration plant at its commercialization and development facility in...
A recent agreement between Vital Metals Ltd. and Ucore Rare Metals Inc. marks a major milestone in establishing a complete North American rare earths supply chain with links in Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan, and Alaska. Vital has already established Canada's only rare earths mine at its Nechalacho project in Northwest Territories and is building a processing facility in Saskatchewan to upgrade the high-grade ore into a midstream carbonated product with a mix of rare...
The $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act brightens an otherwise gloomy outlook when it comes to federal policies that impact Alaska and its mining sector. "I believe this is truly historic for our state," Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said during a Nov. 17 address at the Alaska Resources Conference. While the massive infrastructure bill passage was chalked up as a political win for President Joe Biden, the billions of dollars to be invested into upgrading and...
With such incredible technologies at mankind's disposal today, it is easily forgotten the ingenuity and sheer gumption that our predecessors brought to solving some of the more rigorous and demanding jobs that construed early development. The ever-present wheel, hand tools, weaponry, and beyond, the plethora of devices humanity has created, only expanded into breathtaking and mind-numbing concepts our forebearers could never fathom. Areas such as animal husbandry, agriculture,...
Canada is positioning itself as the "global supplier of choice" for the critical minerals and metals essential to tomorrow's technologies, especially the almost unfathomable quantities of raw materials that will be required by a world transitioning to low-carbon energy and electric vehicles. "Demand for minerals and metals continues to grow with an increasing focus on critical minerals – vital in aerospace, healthcare, telecommunications and an array of clean technologies such...
The global transition to electric vehicles plugged into renewable energy sources is powering enormous demand for graphite, the single largest ingredient in lithium-ion batteries. "Graphite demand increases in both absolute and percentage terms since graphite is needed to build the anodes found in the most commonly deployed automotive, grid, and decentralized batteries," the World Bank penned in a 2020 report, "The Mineral Intensity of the Clean Energy Transition." According...
Fortune Minerals Ltd. Sept. 23 announced the start of a 3,000-meter resource expansion and exploration drill program at its Nico cobalt-copper-bismuth-gold project in Canada's Northwest Territories. Nico hosts 33.1 million metric tons of proven and probable reserves averaging 0.11% (82 million pounds) cobalt, 0.14% (110 million lb) bismuth, 0.04% (27 million lb) copper, and 1.03 grams per metric ton (1.1 million ounces) gold. This unique mix of critical, precious, and base met...
The envisioned green future where every North American is driving a battery-powered electric vehicle charged with renewable energy could be undermined by cobalt, a somewhat scarce and controversial metal that makes lithium-ion batteries better. "Cobalt is considered the highest material supply chain risk for electric vehicles in the short and medium term," the U.S. Department of Energy penned in an April report. This risk has automakers, lithium-ion battery manufacturers, and...
Though it is tough to distinguish the nearly identical properties of niobium and tantalum in nature, at the workplace, one of these critical twin metals typically dons a hardhat and boots to work in the construction and energy industries while you are more apt to find the other working in the high-tech sector. Their differences, however, are subtle, and their careers sometimes overlap. "The leading use of niobium is in the production of high-strength steel alloys used in pipel...
Overshadowed by headline-grabbing rare earth elements, gallium is an underappreciated critical metal that is a vital ingredient in next-generation smartphones and communication networks, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), thin-film solar cells, and medical devices. "The development of gallium arsenide as a direct band-gap semiconductor in the 1960s led to what are now some of the most well-known uses of gallium – in feature-rich, application-intensive, third- and f...
Amongst the rarest of the stable elements on the periodic table and an important ingredient in the emerging thin-film solar panel sector, tellurium embodies what it means to be a critical metalloid – an element that possesses the properties of both a metal and non-metal. "Most rocks contain an average of about 3 parts per billion tellurium, making it rarer than the rare earth elements and eight times less abundant than gold," the United States Geological Survey wrote in a 2...
"Please mine more nickel," these four words from Tesla CEO Elon Musk reverberated across the global mining sector and raised awareness of how fundamental nickel is to the lithium-ion batteries powering hundreds of millions of electric vehicles to come off Tesla and traditional automaker assembly lines over the next two decades. "Tesla will give you a giant contract for a long period of time if you mine nickel efficiently and in an environmentally sensitive way," Musk implored...
Roughly 38,000 metric tons of rare earth concentrates were produced from American soil during 2020, yet the United States remains 100% reliant on foreign countries for its supply of these 17 elements critical to our modern high-tech society – an apparent paradox that speaks to the complexities of these enigmatic metals. The irony of rare earth elements (REEs) begins with their name, which is at the same time a misnomer and accurate descriptor. "All the REEs except p...
An unsung war hero that saved countless American troops during World War II, an overlooked battery material that has played a pivotal role in storing electricity for more than 100 years, and a major ingredient in futuristic grid-scale energy storage, antimony is among the most important critical metalloids that most people have never heard of. While antimony may not be part of the common lexicon, humans have been using this semi-metal for more than 5,000 years. "For example,...
From electric vehicles plugged into renewable energy to smartphones connected to 5G networks, new technologies take advantage of the special properties of a suite of critical minerals and metals that are often rare and in short supply. In addition to the rare earths, cobalt, lithium, and other technology metals that capture headline attention, this list includes even more obscure mined materials such as gallium, germanium, scandium, and tellurium. While scarce, these critical...
A heavy reliance on imports for a long list of minerals and metals critical to American supply chains could be a stumbling block for the Biden administration's ambitious "Build Back Better" agenda. "From the largest infrastructure plan since the Eisenhower interstate highway system, to an aggressive plan for a national energy transition, the Biden administration's agenda will require an immense amount of minerals," National Mining Association President and CEO Rich Nolan...
