The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Sorted by date Results 26 - 50 of 151
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...
Iliamna Natives Ltd. (INL) May 15 is pleased to announce that it has reached an agreement with Pebble Limited Partnership to provide transportation corridor access on INL lands to support the operation and construction of the proposed Pebble copper-gold-molybdenum mine in Southwest Alaska. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) corporation for the Village of Iliamna said this long-term agreement is a commitment to advance the Pebble project in a technically feasible,...
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...
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...
An early spring coupled with low snow fall in many parts of Alaska have combined to enable companies large and small to start their summer field programs early this year. As expected, competition is stiff for people, drills, helicopters, heavy equipment and related services, awarding those who committed budgets early and penalizing those who did not or could not commit early. For the first time in half a decade, projects with money at hand may not be able to get the services t...
As we transition from 2017 into 2018, the weight of evidence pointing to a long-awaited mining industry up-tick is being trumpeted from every financial institution, brokerage house and mining pundit across the globe. For example, RBC Capital Markets' newly released "2018 New Year Preview" has this to say: "We are in the mid-stages of a stock market recovery and the early stages of an economic cycle recovery. Gold is already in a phase where it out-performs other financial...
The Pebble Partnership Dec. 22 submitted permit applications for the Pebble Mine project to U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, initiating the project review process under the National Environmental Policy Act. With roughly 56.8 billion pounds copper, 70.4 million ounces gold, 3.4 billion lb molybdenum and 343.6 million oz silver in measured and indicated resource, Pebble hosts both the largest undeveloped copper and undeveloped gold resource on Earth. While a deposit of this size...
Extremely rare, yet a vital ingredient to emerging solar panel technologies, tellurium is the epitome of 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 2015 report on this critical metalloid. "Grains of...
After two years of legal wrangling, Pebble Limited Partnership and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have traded the courtroom floor for a negotiating table to resolve differences that would likely influence the viability of developing a mine at the world-class Pebble copper deposit in Southwest Alaska. In 2014, the Pebble Partnership filed a suit action in federal district court in Alaska, alleging that EPA violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act by working...
The owners of Alaska’s five large metal mines – Sumitomo Metal Mining Pogo, Hecla Mining Company, Kinross Gold Corp, Teck Resources Ltd. and Coeur Mining Inc. – accounted for nearly half the US$92 million of exploration spending in the state during 2014 and similar investments by these companies is providing solid footing for the Far North state’s mineral exploration sector this year. Avalon Development President Curt Freeman said he is seeing more mining majors shopping for d...
Pebble Limited Partnership and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are on the cusp of reaching a settlement of the longstanding legal dispute over the federal agency's attempt to use Section 404 (c) of the Clean Water Act to place pre-emptive restrictions on permits needed to develop a mine at the Pebble copper-gold-molybdenum project in Southwest Alaska. The federal court where the lawsuit was being heard granted a stay of proceedings until May 4 to provide Pebble and...
Earlier in November, the Alaska Miners Association held its annual convention and trade show in Anchorage and as always, the well-attended convention overlapped with election Tuesday. While the lead up to, and results of, the national and state elections were hot topics throughout the week, one comment I heard from a colleague on the morning after the elections distilled the feelings of a lot of people at the conference. When asked what he thought of the election results, he...
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...
If you have ever played or followed sporting events, you are probably familiar with that bizarre and often game-changing event known as the "change of momentum". This is when the team that was on the ropes suddenly comes to life and often roars to victory, putting smiles on the faces of coaches, fans and bookies alike. Well, unless I am mistaken, the Alaska mining industry has been the beneficiary of just such a change of momentum over the past month. After taking head shots...
In a framework agreement announced on Dec. 18, First Quantum Minerals Ltd. was revealed as the major mining company that will complete the Pebble Limited Partnership. "We have made good progress in the partnering process and are very pleased to be in advanced-stage discussions with First Quantum, an industry leader in mine development and management," Ron Thiessen, president and CEO, Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd., currently the sole owner of the Pebble Partnership. While the...
Three world-class deposits in Alaska – Pebble, Donlin Gold and Livengood – are far enough advanced to be considered beyond the exploration stage but not quite ready to break ground on development. Together, these three colossal deposits host more than US$160 billion worth of gold – with Pebble adding nearly another US$200 billion worth of copper, molybdenum and silver at today's metals prices. The jobs and revenue generated from developing operations to mine these three global...
With the opening late last month of a public comment period for the environmental impact statement on the proposed Ambler Mining District Industrial Access Project, I am cautiously optimistic that this time, Sisyphus will get the boulder up the hill. As a lowly graduate student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks back in 1979, I helped a crew from Anaconda Minerals color township-size blocks on a huge paper map of the Brooks Range. At the time, Anaconda and numerous other...
With winter programs winding down and summer efforts rapidly ramping up, it is becoming clear that 2017 will be a much more vigorous year for the Alaska mining industry than the 2013 to 2016 period. For example, my internal estimates are already pushing $75 million for exploration activity alone and a significant number of projects that have announced exploration plans have not yet announced budgets for 2017, so that number is likely to rise. Compare this to estimates of less...
If there is anyone still on the fence wondering if the minerals industry has started a recovery from the doldrums of the past four years, this month’s mineral industry activity in Alaska should settle the question with authority. During the past month, we have seen two merger/acquisitions occur, one by Solitario Exploration & Royalty Corp., which acquired Zazu Metals Corp. and its interest in the Lik lead-zinc-silver deposit. Then we also had Coventry Resources acquire V...
In a framework agreement announced on Dec. 18, First Quantum Minerals Ltd. was revealed as the major mining company that will complete the Pebble Limited Partnership. "We have made good progress in the partnering process and are very pleased to be in advanced-stage discussions with First Quantum, an industry leader in mine development and management," Ron Thiessen, president and CEO, Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd., currently the sole owner of the Pebble Partnership. While the...
As the Alaska mining industry prepares for and kicks off exploration, development and production activities for 2017, the question on everyone’s lips at the recent Cordilleran Roundup mining convention in Vancouver, B. C., was the same: “Have we seen the bottom of this down cycle?” While signs of life were seen for short periods during the 2008 to 2015 period, the reality was an overall downward spiral of commodities prices and global demand. However, in a recent editi...
Healthy price gains for zinc and copper this year, and gold rocketing through the US$1,300-per-ounce threshold on Aug. 28, is good news for Alaska's mining sector. Together, zinc and gold account for more than 80 percent of the value of metals mined in Alaska - silver and lead account for most of the balance. Copper, on the other hand, is set up to play an important role for the future of mining in the state. Gold rockets above $1,300 Entering 2017 at US$1,151/oz, gold made...
In early November, the Alaska Miners Association will hold its annual convention in Anchorage. Unlike the past four or five years, the excitement surrounding the convention this year is palpable due to the steady increase in exploration, development and production activities in Alaska in 2017. Clear signs of the industry's long-awaited revival include the fact that 11 new project acquisitions have taken place in 2017, half of which involve companies that are newcomers to the...
The world's mining industry has once again transmogrified itself in the face of changing global metals markets and investor expectations. In a recent Reuters report, several companies, including Newmont Mining Corp., Goldcorp Inc. and Yamana Gold Inc., were singled out as having taken steps to bring smaller, leaner, lower output projects into production to avoid the cost over-runs which have plagued the large multibillion-dollar projects in recent years. The same large mine...
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...
