The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
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Trilogy Metals Inc. July 3 provided an update on the US$18.2 million of activities being carried out this year across its roughly 353,400-acre Upper Kobuk Mineral Projects in the Ambler Mining District of Northwest Alaska. The largest portion of this program, in terms of dollars spent during 2019, is an 8,000-meter drill program aimed at upgrading and expanding the copper-cobalt resource at Bornite. At a cut-off grade of 0.5 percent, the open-pit portion of Bornite hosts 40.5...
In the famous words of Sherlock Holmes, the game is afoot! After seasonally slower news from Alaska's mining industry in March and April, the dam has broken with over two dozen Alaska mining project news releases issued in the last month. Including those projects moving forward that have not released their 2019 plans, Alaska has become a very busy place under the sun. All of our major metal mines reported strong performances in the first quarter, several of Alaska's most...
Trilogy Metals Inc. May 20 reported that permitting for the proposed road to provide surface access to the Ambler Mining District is slated for completion this year. The 211-mile Ambler Mining District Industrial Access Project (AMDIAP), the official name of this transportation corridor, would connect the Ambler Mining District to Alaska's contiguous highway system. This surface access is a key piece of infrastructure needed to begin realizing the vast potential of this...
Teck Resources Ltd. April 22 reported that extreme winter weather forced a closure of the Delong Mountain Transportation System road that connects the Red Dog Mine in Northwest Alaska to the concentrate storage facility at the port for an extended period during January and February. As a result, the concentrator at Red Dog was idled for 20 days due to limited concentrate storage capacity at the mine site. Due to the downtime, the mill at Red Dog processed 887,000 metric tons...
Alaska Miners Association April 10 released "The economic benefits of Alaska's mining industry," a report put together by the McDowell Group that details roughly $1.26 billion in direct economic benefits from Alaska's mining sector during 2018. Healthy paychecks being brought home to more than 60 communities across Alaska is mining's biggest single economic contributor to the state. Alaska's mines, development and mineral exploration projects paid roughly $459 million to some...
As is usually the case this time of year, the mining industry is awash in backward-looking statements designed to allow for more accurate forward-looking statements. Prime among them is one of my favorites, S&P Global's annual "World Exploration Trends 2019", a summary of what happened industry-wide in 2018 and what it may portend for the mining industry in 2019. The study predicts that global exploration budgets will increase again in 2019, although by a smaller amount, with...
The value of non-fuel metals produced in Alaska and the United States during 2018 were similar to 2017, according to Mineral Commodity Summaries 2019, an annual report published by the U.S. Geological Survey. Alaska mines produced roughly $3.44 billion worth of non-fuel minerals last year, down nearly 3 percent from the US$3.53 million in 2017. This slight drop is largely due to lower output from the two largest mines in the state – Fort Knox and Pogo. The roughly 1.4 b...
When it comes to attracting mining investment, Alaska, British Columbia and all three Canadian territories rank among the top 20 jurisdictions in the world on the Fraser Institute Survey of Mining Companies 2018. This report asks industry professionals from around the globe to score mining jurisdictions based on their mineral endowment and various policy topics important to mining. "The mining survey-now in its 21st year-is the most comprehensive report card on government...
Those of you that attended the recent Cordilleran Roundup Convention in Vancouver can attest to the exuberant, upbeat atmosphere that pervaded the conference and was very much in evidence at the standing-room only festivities at our annual self-hosted Alaska Night meet and greet. But digging down under this veneer of optimism, many of the junior explorers and most of the producers admitted to their expectations of challenging times in 2019. Putting words to this apparent...
The Red Dog Mine has been a gamechanger for the more than 14,000 Iñupiat shareholders of NANA Corp., the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) regional corporation that owns the world-class Red Dog deposits in Northwest Alaska that are the source of around 5 percent of the world's new zinc supply each year. The revenues from shipping out more than 1 billion pounds of zinc annually, along with healthy portions of lead, silver and minor amounts of germanium, has served...
NANA's growing portfolio of businesses provide services to the mining, petroleum, commercial, and federal business sectors in 15 countries on six continents. NANA companies have been structured to evolve quickly-to embrace new technologies and game-changing capabilities-with the aim of exceeding the needs and expectations of NANA's customers. Here is a list of NANA companies that provide a variety of services to Alaska's mining sector: Tuuq Drilling, LLC provides drilling...
Teck Resources Ltd. Feb. 12 reported that the Red Dog zinc mine in Northwest Alaska produced 583,200 metric tons (1.29 billion pounds) of zinc during 2018, a roughly 8 percent increase over the 541.9 metric tons (1.19 billion lb) of the galvanizing metal produced in 2017. The operation also produced 98,400 metric tons (217 million lb) of lead last year, which is down about 12 percent from the previous year. During the fourth quarter, Red Dog produced 160,100 metric tons (353 m...
NANA Jan. 19 announced the hiring of two key executives heading into the new year – Sarah Lukin now serves as senior vice president and chief administration officer at NANA Regional Corp., and Kevin Aubertin joins NANA's Commercial Group as the president of Tuuq Drilling. Lukin, who officially began her tenure at NANA on Jan. 7, will provide strategic leadership in a broad range of functions, including leading external and government affairs, corporate communications, c...
Alaska boasts what many consider the most successful Aboriginal land claims settlement on Earth – a solution that has not only turned out to be a cultural success, but a brilliant business move for the more than 140,000 Alaska Natives and an economic boon for the state that covers the resource-rich lands these industrious and innovative peoples have called home for millennia. Signed into law by U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1971, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, comm...
As the year waned, Alaska's mining industry reported some of the last of its 2018 seasonal field results while the University of Alaska and state of Alaska released some current and projected state-wide economics. At the same time, some macro-economic data was released for the global mining industry. Combined, these figures show a mix of encouraging and not so encouraging trends facing the Alaska mining industry. At the global scale, things for the mining industry are looking...
WESTERN ALASKA Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd. announced that it had finalized a surface right of way agreement with Alaska Peninsula Corporation for use of that latter's lands for the construction and operation of transportation infrastructure associated with the Pebble copper-molybdenum-gold project. Alaska Peninsula Corporation is an Alaska Native village corporation with extensive land holdings proximal to the Pebble site and more than 900 shareholders, many of which live...
As Alaska's mining industry nears the end of another hectic year during which metals prices and investor sentiments rose and fell as precipitously as the world's major stock exchanges, the industry is naturally looking into its crystal ball trying to anticipate what the new year will bring. EY Global Mining and Metals does this sort of forecasting by putting out an annual "risk radar" for mining and metals. The idea is to find out what the industry perceives as the top ten...
Following a couple of quiet months where Alaska's mining industry focused on its work, the last month has seen an explosion of new info come out regarding that effort, some of it profound in its potential immediate, near-term and long-term implications. For example, one of Alaska's largest mines was sold to a new owner at a surprisingly low cost per ounce. The results of a robust new preliminary economic analysis were tabled by an advanced gold-silver exploration project...
With a melting point of 5,756 degrees Fahrenheit and a heat-stable crystalline structure, rhenium is extremely resistant to both heat and wear. This durability makes it a vital element in superalloys used in jet and industrial gas turbine engines. "The high-temperature properties of rhenium allow turbine engines to be designed with finer tolerances and operate at temperatures higher than those of engines constructed with other materials," the United States Geological Survey...
While not the flashiest of the 35 minerals on the United States Geological Survey's critical list, barite plays an essential role in America's energy sector. Barite derives its name from barús, the Ancient Greek word for heavy, owing to an exceptionally high specific gravity for a non-metallic mineral. It is this weight that makes barite a key element to the oil and gas sector and lands the mineral on USGS' critical list. "More than 90 percent of the barite sold in the United...
Cobalt is a critical safety ingredient in the cathodes of lithium-ion batteries powering the ever-increasing number of electric vehicles traveling global highways and a plethora of cordless electrical devices. "Globally, the leading use is in the manufacture of cathode materials for rechargeable batteries – primarily lithium-ion, nickel-cadmium, and nickel-metal-hydride batteries – which are used in consumer electronics, electric and hybrid-electric vehicles, energy sto...
Since investing roughly US$70 million to acquire a 28 percent stake in Novagold Resources Inc. in 2009, American billionaire Thomas Kaplan and his Electrum Group of companies have taken a keen interest in some of the more intriguing mineral exploration companies and projects in Alaska and across Canada's North. Kaplan, an Oxford-educated historian that began investing in natural resources in the 1980s, knows that gold has served as a currency throughout mankind's written histo...
Thanks to its own rich mineral endowment, Australia is a juggernaut in the world of mining, especially across the Southern Hemisphere. Over the past couple of years, however, a growing number of Aussie mining companies are looking north to Alaska, another minerals-rich land way north of the Equator. At least four Aussie juniors – White Rock Minerals Ltd., PolarX Ltd., Nova Minerals Ltd. and Riversgold Ltd. – and three Australia-based metals producers – South32 Ltd., North...
Despite over four decades of working with the mining industry in Alaska, my travels rarely brought me to the northwest part of the state and my opportunities to interface with residents have been embarrassingly few and far between. Recently, however, I have had occasion to pay a lot more attention to that part of the world. As a part of my remedial experience, I have had occasion to immerse myself in Willie Hensley's beautiful memoir about his life and the Iñupiaq of Kotzebue....
With US$17.5 million invested into the Upper Kobuk Mineral Projects (UKMP) in 2018, Trilogy Metals Inc. took major strides in achieving its goal of beginning to develop the vast mineral potential that the world-class Ambler Mining District in Northwest Alaska has to offer. Arctic and Bornite, the two most advanced deposits at UKMP, host roughly 8.9 billion pounds of copper, 3.6 billion lb of zinc, 626 million lb of lead, 77 million lb of cobalt, 770,000 ounces of gold and...
