The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
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For nearly two decades, the Fort Knox Mine in Interior Alaska has been a steady low-cost gold producer for owner, Kinross Gold Corp., and an economic driver for the nearby city of Fairbanks. A new technical report, however, outlines a mine plan that begins winding down operations in 2017. It is an important reminder that this Interior Alaska mine has an expiration date. Including the 387,285 ounces recovered in 2014, Fort Knox has produced 6.35 million oz of gold since the...
It is high summer in Alaska and the mining industry is busy breaking rocks, drilling holes, collecting baseline data, making upgrades to mine facilities and producing metal and coal across the state. The effects of declining prices for metals are starting to be felt at the operating metal mines and except for a few projects, the exploration sector continues to wallow in the doldrums, which have plagued the industry since 2013. That said, the tire-kicking of earlier this...
Freegold Ventures Ltd. is testing the idea that a large and previously unrecognized porphyry deposit could lie beneath its Shorty Creek property in the Livengood Mining District of Interior Alaska. Earlier this month, the exploration company raised C$1.35 million to fund a 3,000- meter drill program that could provide definitive evidence that various zones of copper, gold and molybdenum found across the 26,000-acre Shorty Creek land package are actually pieces of one porphyry...
Mineral exploration spending in Alaska will likely struggle to top US$80 million for 2014, a dramatic fall from the US$365.1 million pinnacle reached in 2011. "The din of mineral industry activity that is normally a part of the summer months in Alaska is decidedly muted this year as the global mining industry attempts to lift itself off the bottom of a plus-18-month-long slump," Avalon Development President Curt Freeman opined in a June column written for Mining News. Unlike 2...
More gold and silver at lower costs is a common theme for the Greens Creek, Kensington and Fort Knox mines in 2015 and an important component of keeping these operations economically viable for their respective owners - Hecla Mining Co., Coeur Mining Inc. and Kinross Gold Corp. "Cost control is always a priority and ensures that operating mines can succeed even during downtimes in commodities cycles," said Karen Mathias, managing consultant, Council of Alaska Producers. This...
Kinross Gold Corp. July 29 reported that its Fort Knox Mine in Interior Alaska produced 116,061 ounces of gold during the second quarter of 2015, a 40 percent jump over the 82,673 oz recovered during the first three months of this year. Kinross attributes the output to higher grade mill material and the seasonal impact of warmer weather on heap leach performance. Lower fuel and power costs, combined with the higher mill grades and more ounces sold, has driven down the cost...
I recently returned from the Geological Society of Nevada's once-every-five-years Symposium in Reno and was surprised to learn a number of things regarding Alaska, despite the symposium's tight focus on the Great Basin of the western United States. First off, mineral exploration guru Brent Cook presented information suggesting we have reached and are "bumping along" the bottom of the current metals market slump. Reminded me of an overloaded fixed-wing aircraft bumping down the...
With a mild winter for most of Alaska behind us and an early spring in progress over much of the state, spring fever has once again laid its grip on the mining industry. A number of exploration and development programs are slated for the summer season, suggesting the mining industry has finally started to rise from the three-year miasma that has gripped it worldwide. A couple of macro-scale items also are pointing toward a more robust industry. The U. S. Geological Survey's...
Northern Empire Resources Corp. has laid claim to Richardson, a 52,000-acre gold property in Alaska's Interior and has formed an alliance to begin exploring a segment of this vast parcel. Northern Empire is a prospect generator with early-stage gold properties in Alaska and Nunavut and a silver property in Mexico. The company was formed as part of a restructuring of Prosperity Goldfields Corp., a Nunavut-focused exploration company headed by Adrian Fleming. As part of a re-org...
Slipping metals prices and investors' ongoing reluctance to risk venture capital in the junior mining sector is hitting Alaska's mineral exploration sector hard; and the Far North state is not the only mining jurisdiction reeling from this one-two punch. "After another year of strong headwinds in 2014, and with lower demand and overproduction continuing to depress metals prices, the mining industry's outlook for 2015 is unpromising at best," SNL Metals & Mining wrote recently...
Sonoro Metals Corp. March 11 said it has signed a letter of intent to enter into an option agreement to acquire a 60 percent interest in Northern Empire Resources Corp.'s 7,840-acre Hilltop Gold project located some 70 miles south of Fairbanks. To exercise the option and earn a 60 percent interest in Hilltop, Sonoro must spend C$3 million on exploration activities to advance the exploration-stage project and issue 1 million Sonoro shares to Northern Empire by the end of 2019....
Amid the volatile metals markets that have become the norm in the past year, miners, developers, explorers, prospectors and investors met in Vancouver at the end of January for the annual Cordilleran Roundup mining convention. The mood was decidely positive, and having seen a lot of "whistling in the cemetary" at this convention in the past, I know the difference between false bravado and contagious optimism. Perhaps it was the stabilization of copper prices after a nine month...
Galvanized by higher zinc prices and strong production at Teck Resources Ltd.'s Red Dog Mine, the value of Alaska's mineral production topped US$3 billion for the fifth year running. Larry Freeman, chief of Minerals Resources at the Alaska Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys, told an audience at the AME BC Mineral Exploration Roundup that production of zinc, lead and silver - all metals produced at Red Dog - climbed in Alaska during 2014. Gold production, on the...
Plummeting oil prices have put Alaska residents and Alaska miners in the same boat. Suddenly, it's less expensive to top off the tank of an SUV or a haul truck, but the state budget, fueled by oil revenue, is teetering on the edge of an estimated $3.5 billion deficit. That's $10 million a day for 2015. "We know Alaska is experiencing a significant drop in revenue - the price of oil has dropped more than 50 percent over the past six months," Alaska's new governor, Bill Walker,...
Several events have dramatically affected Alaska's mining industry in recent weeks, underscoring critical links between Alaska and the global economy. First came bad news for newly-elected Gov. Bill Walker: The plunge in world oil prices pushed Alaska's coming-year budget projections about $3.5 billion into the red. The ripple effect of this was a slashing of everything not required and one of the cuts, temporarily at least, was state funding of the Ambler District Road....
TSX: FVL President and CEO: Kristina Walcott Vice President, Exploration and Development: Alvin Jackson Freegold Ventures Ltd. has a portfolio of four gold exploration properties in Alaska. In recent years, the company has focused its exploration primarily on Golden Summit, a 6-million-ounce bulk-tonnage gold project located roughly 20 miles (32 kilometers) northeast of Fairbanks and four miles (seven kilometers) from Kinross Gold Corp.'s Fort Knox Mine. The Dolphin-Cleary zone at Golden Summit has an indicated resource of...
KGC: NYSE / K.TO: TSX Chairman: John Oliver Chief Executive Officer: Paul Rollison Chief Operating Officer: Warwick Morley-Jepson Kinross Gold Corp. continues to carry out robust exploration at and around its Fort Knox gold mine in Interior Alaska, while quietly investigating other prospects around the state. When Kinross began mining at Fort Knox in 1996, the deposit had 4.1 million ounces of proven and probable gold reserves; going into 2014 the mine continues to boast 2.86 million ounces of gold contained in 183.11...
In an industry eager for even a scintilla of good news, a recent report from industry analyst SNL Metals & Mining recently gave the good-news-starved industry a bit of hope. SNL's article, titled, "Too early to start celebrating a recovery in the sector," indicated that although the downward trend in mineral exploration has not broken yet, the market has stopped down-grading mining equities, with a modest gain in market capitalization since its most recent low in mid-2013....
At the same time as the EPA is pushing forward on its planned precedent-setting, pre-emptive, pre-permit veto of the Pebble project and the tailings dam failure at the Mount Polley mine in British Columbia, former Gold Fields Ltd. Chief Geologist Rael Lipson published an eye-opening summary of where porphyry copper-gold projects like Pebble, Mt. Polley and dozens of others around the world fit into the future of gold production. The article, appearing in the July 2014...
Alaska's natural gas is increasingly replacing diesel as the fuel of choice for mines and mining projects across the Far North State and Yukon Territory. At roughly 37 trillion cubic feet, Alaska is awash in natural gas; however, some 35 tcf of these known reserves are isolated in the Arctic oil and gas fields of the North Slope. The balance, located in the Cook Inlet basin that stretches southwest from Anchorage, has been developed primarily to serve consumers in the...
At the recent Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada meeting in Toronto, Dr. Richard Schodde, managing director of MinEx Consulting, presented some key factors which affect the time span between a mineral discovery and start-up of commercial mining. The study reviewed about 3,500 nonferrous metal deposits discovered between 1950 and 2013. Dr. Schodde's findings suggest that only 45 percent of all discoveries made since 1950 have turned into mines. The rate is...
FAIRBANKS - The Arctic International Mining Symposium in Fairbanks afforded Interior Alaska mines the opportunity to provide an update on the latest developments at local operations. While the mines touted individual achievements in 2013 - record gold at Fort Knox, new discoveries at Pogo and a new deposit at Usibelli - a commitment to and appreciation of people was a common thread spun through messages from all three operations. "Without the people you might as well shut the...
NovaCopper Inc.'s 2013 exploration program has added another 2.6 billion pounds of copper to the resource at the Bornite project in the Ambler mining district, swelling the size of this Northwest Alaska deposit to 6 billion lbs. of the red metal. Bornite is one of many deposits and prospects that make up the Upper Kobuk Mineral Projects, a long-term partnership forged between NovaCopper and NANA Regional Corp. in 2011. The alliance combines Bornite and a number of other...
The over-all mood at the recent Cordilleran Roundup mining convention in Vancouver, B.C. was more restrained than in previous years, but also more realistic due in large part to the prolonged downturn in risk capital mining markets. It seems the industry has transitioned from the denial stage accompanying the declines of 2013 to an acceptance and determination stage that always precedes a return to market vitality. In a recent public release by financial giant Ernst and...
If you believe what you see in the press, Alaska's mineral industry was recently given a Christmas gift that trumps even the high-grade anthracite coal that most Alaskans were dreaming of during the last 40-below cold snap. The Alaska Dispatch reported on a recent presentation at the fall 2013 meeting of the American Geophysical Union titled, "Critical Metals in Western Arctic Ocean Ferromanganese Mineral Deposits," by James Hein, a senior scientist at the U.S. Geological...
