The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
Sorted by date Results 176 - 200 of 224
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...
Thanks to recent progress in development of several major projects in 2014, the outlook for diamond mining in Northwest Territories is suddenly a lot brighter. This is especially good news for the territory's mining industry, which is largely dependent on the production of diamonds now and in the foreseeable future. This point was driven home most forcefully in "Measuring Success 2014: NWT Diamond Mines Continue to Create Benefits," a report recently released by the NWT & Nunavut Chamber of Mines. An update of a January 2013...
The mining industry has been a pillar of the Northwest Territories' economy for more than 80 years. A strategic approach to manage resources in the territory is creating a new investment climate and opportunities for responsible resource development. In addition to being the largest private sector contributor to the NWT economy, the mining industry is also the largest private sector employer. As new mining and exploration projects emerge, it is essential to keep environmental sustainability and social responsibility top of...
After ushering in devolution in concert with implementing the first phase of a well-reasoned mineral development strategy, the Northwest Territories is eager to attract new mineral resource investment in 2014 in hopes of building on an uptick in exploration activity in recent years. "The Canadian North is the next frontier in mining and mineral development and nowhere is this more evident than in the NWT," said NWT Industry, Tourism, and Investment Minister David Ramsay. Home to the third-richest diamond resources in the...
WHITEHORSE, Yukon Territory - Quieter streets, emptier skies, shorter business hours and closed shops here are sure signs of tough times in the mining industry. Hours away by helicopter, one can find bare-bones exploration camps and skeleton staffs sprinkled like the occasional grain of visible gold across remote mountain vistas, which also reflect the return to the frugal times of the past. In the wake of more than two years of scarce capital, mineral exploration activity is a shadow of the booming times the territory...
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...
Kivalliq, located northwest of Hudson Bay and sharing a border with the Northwest Territories and Manitoba, is the heart of Nunavut's gold country. This central region of the territory is also the home of Nunavut's sole operating mine, Meadowbank. The region's diverse geology hosts a number of mineral occurrences and deposits, particularly gold, uranium, nickel, platinum group elements, base metals, rare earth elements, and diamonds. In 2013, exploration activity in the Kivalliq Region primarily involved gold and uranium,...
With devolution around the corner and a well-reasoned mineral development strategy in place, government and industry officials in Northwest Territories are making a concerted effort to alert the world to the mineral resource and investment opportunities to be found in Canada's Far North, especially in the jurisdiction that boasts the third-richest diamond resources in the world. In addition to three operating diamond mines and the sole tungsten producer in the West, NWT currently has six well-advanced mine projects working...
After two seasons of exploration, Prophecy Platinum Corp. envisioned building a conventional, diesel truck-shovel open pit mine at its 64.5-square-kilometer (25 square miles) Wellgreen Project in southwestern Yukon Territory. The junior released a preliminary economic assessment in 2012 that happily outlined plans for a 32,000-metric-tons-per-day operation with a 37-year of mine life. With initial capital expenditures of C$863 million and an average strip ratio of 2.57:1, the company anticipated producing a suite of highly...
For those of you that could not attend, the annual Alaska Miners Association Convention and Trade Show was well-attended, with most people pleasantly surprised by the strong turnout. Compared to a year ago, more companies are planning to get back in the field with exploration and development programs in 2014, a sentiment making up one of the few bright spots in a recent IntierraRMG resource sector exploration summary. This report and a similar snapshot of the exploration...
The ongoing scarcity of venture capital available to junior companies coupled with a retreat in metals prices has landed a one-two blow that sent mineral exploration spending in Alaska plunging for the second straight year. A handful of big-budget projects scattered across Alaska, though, is softening the hit to exploration spending across the Far North State during 2013. Mineral exploration expenditures in Alaska, which were a meager US$23.8 million in 2001, topped US$365...
Northwest Territories continued to benefit in 2013 from a recent surge of exploration interest. A vast expanse of mountains, forests and tundra that is roughly two-thirds the size of Alaska, the territory covers 1.17 million square kilometers (431,162 square miles). "We have, in the North, what the world wants - what emerging markets need," Northwest Territories Premier Robert "Bob" McLeod told an audience at a Prospects North gathering in Yellowknife Sept. 11. "We are the third-largest diamond producer in the world. In...
There is a reason why Nunavut has one of the fastest-growing economies in Canada: mining. With one operating gold mine at Meadowbank, two huge projects on the verge of startup at Hope Bay and Mary River, five projects advancing through the environmental assessment process at Meliadine, Back River, Hackett River, and the Izok corridor as well as exploration activities continuing across all three regions of the territory in 2013, there's little wonder that Nunavut's "time has come." "Mining has the best potential to create...
A new preliminary economic assessment has stripped away the idea of underground mining as the only means to recover the copper, zinc, lead, silver and gold from the volcanogenic massive sulfide deposit at the Arctic deposit. Instead, the scoping study has encouraged NovaCopper Inc. to favor an open-pit mine scenario as it advances the Northwest Alaska project towards a pre-feasibility study. "We think this (PEA) demonstrates that the open-pit is a viable alternative; and I...
Among the dozen or so companies that are advancing mineral-rich deposits in Nunavut this year, none has more going on inside and outside of the territory this summer than Glencore Xstrata plc. Xstrata plc, owner of the Hackett River silver-zinc project located in western Nunavut, merged with Glencore International plc in late May to become one of the world's largest mining and trading companies. The US$30 billion deal created a mega-entity that employs nearly 200,000 people in 50 countries around the globe to generate full...
You say the world's frontiers have all been conquered, and Nature's riddles have all been solved? Don't tell that to Darnley Bay Resources Ltd. The Toronto-based junior is celebrating two decades this summer of working to unravel one of Earth's most intriguing mineral mysteries. The puzzle lies deep beneath the earth's surface in Canada's Far North in what potentially may be the strongest isolated gravity anomaly in the world and certainly, in North America. Located near Paulatuk, Northwest Territories on the Arctic coast,...
There is a reason why Nunavut has one of the fastest-growing economies in Canada: mining. With one operating gold mine at Meadowbank, two projects on the verge of startup at Hope Bay and Mary River , five projects advancing through the environmental assessment process at Meliadine, Back River, Hackett River, and the Izok corridor, and exploration activities continuing across all three regions in 2013, there's little wonder that Nunavut's "time has come." That's the word from Matthew Spence, director general of the Northern...
There's nothing like getting an early start, especially when it comes to mining exploration in Canada's Far North. Literally, there's nothing like the 2013 program that Prosperity Goldfields Corp. kicked off in late February at its Kiyuk Lake Project to the east in southern Nunavut nor the 2013 field campaign launched about the same time by Kaminak Gold Corp. at the Coffee Gold Project in Yukon Territory. In a year when many mining companies are having to scrape together enough exploration funds to even mount a field program...
Fortune Minerals Ltd. is advancing two mineral projects involving three different jurisdictions of Canada and doing much of it with the same timeframe. On the heels of development of its Nico gold-cobalt-bismuth-copper project in Northwest Territories, Fortune is also targeting commercial production at the Arctos Anthracite Project, formerly Mount Klappan Anthracite Coal Project, in Northwest British Columbia within the next four years. Management is shooting for the last half of 2015 and the first quarter of 2016 for...
I finally found something I have been thinking about for a long time but had not seen discussed in detail. We have all seen summaries of the declining rate of discoveries for new mineral deposits and have heard about the steadily increasing cost of production, now at a record US$727 per ounce, according to GFMS' Gold Survey 2012. What I really wanted to know was the replacement cost of an ounce or a pound of metal. Let's take gold for example: If I am a producing mine and I just produced an ounce of gold, what is the cost of...
A challenging economic climate in 2012 failed to impede growth in mining activity in Northwest Territories. As miners struggled to fund their work programs, numerous companies managed to plow ahead in the wake of regulatory improvements, advancing projects that could bring even more robust times to the territory's mineral resources sector. The Northwest Territories, one of Canada's three northern territories, is sandwiched between Yukon Territory to the west and Nunavut to the east. With a land mass of nearly 1,347,150...
The Northwest Territories has been closely linked with the mining industry ever since B.A. Blakeney, a prospector on his way to the Klondike, staked the first gold mining claim here in 1898. And although the focus has shifted from gold to diamonds, the industry remains at the forefront of any discussion regarding the NWT's economic well-being: the territory produced over C$2 billion in total mineral shipments in 2011, a staggering total for a jurisdiction which has a population that barely exceeds 40,000 residents. Although...
Northwest Territories, a vast expanse of mountains, forests and tundra, has been slower to experience the surge in mineral exploration and development activities that has swept across Yukon Territory and Nunavut in recent years. But the mining industry is turning its attention to the 1.17 million square kilometers (431,162 square miles) Arctic land - roughly two-thirds the size of Alaska - that lies in between. Permits have been issued for new areas of exploration and claims are being staked in places where such activity has...
In a long overdue step to bring Alaska into the 21st Century, state and federal agencies met in late June to discuss collaborative funding strategies for Alaska's Statewide Digital Mapping Initiative, an enterprise designed to create Alaska's first high-quality digital topographic map. The roundtable was convened by Alaska Lt. Gov. Mead Treadwell and the Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, U.S. Department of Interior. Alaska remains the only state in the United States...
More than 30,000 people attended the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada Convention held in Toronto March 4 - 7, breaking last year's attendance record of 27,714 participants from 120 countries. The annual convention, currently in its 80th year, attracts investors, analysts, mining executives, geologists, prospectors and international government delegations from all over the world and represents a tremendous networking and educational opportunity for the industry. The gathering's Trade Show and Investors...
