The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
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Roughly 74 percent of U.S. Bureau of Land Management-administered lands in Alaska's Eastern Interior region will be off limits to mining, according to the preferred resource management plan published July 30 by the federal land manager. BLM is responsible for the management of 6.5 million acres in the federal government's Eastern Interior planning area, a roughly 30-million-acre, triangle-shaped expanse of eastern Alaska that stretches from the Yukon Territory border to a...
Caught between an updraft caused by dwindling supply and the gravity of slowing growth in global demand, zinc prices seem to have reached a cruising altitude above US$1 per pound. Recent closures of two large zinc mines - Century in Australia and Lisheen in Ireland - wiped out more than 600,000 metric tons of the world's annual supply of the galvanizing metal. Analysts expected these looming supply deficits to send zinc prices soaring well above US$1/lb. in 2015. While the...
Constantine Metal Resources Ltd.'s plan to expand exploration at its copper- and zinc-rich Palmer project near Haines has ruffled the feathers of some members of the Southeast Alaska community. A much larger group, however, are hailing this mineral explorer for its high ethical and environmental standards and commitments to the community. "As a lifelong resident of Southeast Alaska, one who is committed to the future health of our environment and industries, I support this pro...
International Tower Hill Mines Ltd. has taken another step along the road to engineering the ideal mine for its Livengood gold project located some 70 road miles northeast of Fairbanks, Alaska. In 2013, the company published a feasibility study outlining a 100,000-metric-tons-per-day operation that would average 577,600 ounces of gold annually, or 8.1 million oz. over an estimated 14-year mine life. The project, however, was estimated to cost about US$2.8 billion to develop...
Barrick Gold Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. have formed a partnership that will likely influence every facet of Donlin Gold, a world-class mine project in Alaska on pace to go into production in 2022. The collaboration, announced Sept. 12, aims to apply Cisco’s cutting-edge digital expertise to Barrick’s current and future world-class gold mines. At this envisioned 21st Century gold mine, shift supervisors are quickly apprised with real-time updates and videos delivered to a han...
Landslides of earth and avalanches of debt are burying WestMountain Gold Inc.’s hopes of exploring and developing its high-grade Terra gold project in Alaska. The latest setback for the company, which has been generating modest cash-flow by sampling high-grade gold veins at Terra, was a physical landslide that buried this bulk-sample area under roughly 25,000 tons of rock and debris. Fortunately, WestMountain had already pulled crews off of the mountainside sampling area d...
With a new top executive and financial backing from one of the most respected investors in the mining space, Redstar Gold Corp. is taking a fresh look at Unga, a high-grade gold property that is home to Alaska’s first hard-rock mine. Going into 2016, Redstar appointed Peter Ball as president and CEO of the company, filling a void left by Ken Booth, who served as the company’s interim top executive for about a year. Ball brings more than 25 years of experience to Redstar, inc...
Peak Gold is raising the bar for high-grade gold deposits in Alaska. In fact, the gold grades this joint venture has reported from summer drilling at its Tetlin project in eastern Interior Alaska are so remarkable that near-surface, minable widths of quarter-ounce-per-metric-ton-gold cut at the project's Peak zones are overshadowed by numerous 13-meter-plus intercepts of more than 1.5 oz./t gold. One such example of this eclipsing effect can be found in TET16272, one of 19...
Great American Minerals Exploration Inc. has closed a landmark option agreement with Sumitomo Metal Mining that consolidates the Monte Cristo and Uncle Sam gold properties into a single 55,465-acre project about 40 miles west of the Pogo Mine in Interior Alaska. GAME, as the company is commonly known, is no stranger to the Pogo region. In fact, the privately held Nevada corporation staked its first claims there in 1997 and has held onto a position in the area ever since. This...
Anniversary celebrations, golden milestones and rising metals prices are providing Alaska's metal miners with plenty to cheer about in 2016. Roughly 1 million ounces of gold will be mined in Alaska this year, when you tally the amount of the precious metal produced at four of Alaska's large metal mines – Fort Knox, Pogo, Kensington and Greens Creek – and the placer aurum produced at the family-scale operations across the state. Fortunately for all these miners, gold shot up...
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...
Kinross Gold Corp. celebrated two milestone events at its Fort Knox Mine in 2016, the seven-millionth-ounce of gold poured and the 20-year anniversary of this Interior Alaska operation. Seeking to extend its current operations with near-mine exploration is one of Kinross' primary objectives. "Kinross' exploration is focused on brownfield projects around existing operations, and we continue to look for ways to further extend our operation," Fort Knox General Manager Eric Hill said. "We believe Alaska is an attractive mining...
Established in 1891, Hecla Mining Company has survived two World Wars, the Great Depression and numerous crests and troughs of a cyclical metals market that has sunk many of the silver miner's contemporaries over the past 125 years. Over this century-plus span, the Idaho-based miner has grown adept at navigating tumultuous markets in a way that enables the company to be well-positioned for smooth sailing in calm waters. "We have operated through many price cycles; from recessions and depressions to boom times, and it is a tes...
Sumitomo Metal Mining Pogo LLC - a joint venture between Japanese firms Sumitomo Metal Mining Company (85 percent) and Sumitomo Corp. (15 percent) -budgeted roughly US$10 million to continue to expand upon the high-grade gold zones at and around its Pogo Mine in Interior Alaska in 2016. This follows a US$15 million program in 2015 that further defined and expanded East Deep, North and South Pogo, three zones of high-grade gold mineralization adjacent to the current underground workings at the high-grade underground mine....
Coeur Mining Inc. continues to improve operation performance at Kensington while seeking out and developing higher grade deposits at the Southeast Alaska mine. The 12,400-acre Kensington property is divided into two blocks - Kensington and Jualin - that trace their roots to two historical mines discovered at the turn of the 20th Century. The Main and Raven deposits, located in the Kensington block, hosted 560,000 ounces of gold in 2.83 million short tons of proven and probable reserves averaging 0.198 oz./ton gold at the end...
Pretium Resources Inc. is on pace to fire up operations at its bonanza grade Brucejack gold project in the fourth quarter of 2017. Upon reaching commercial production, the high-grade underground operation at Valley of the Kings is expected to produce 7.27 million ounces of gold over an 18-year mine life, or roughly 404,000 oz. of the precious metal annually, according to a feasibility study completed in 2014. Aiming to upgrade the confidence of resources to be mined during the first three years of operation, the company...
With the goal of finalizing a feasibility study for its Red Mountain project in northwestern British Columbia by early 2017, IDM Mining Ltd. completed roughly 5,300 meters of underground during an initial phase of 2016 drilling during aimed at upgrading and expanding the gold-silver deposit identified there. In April, the company published an updated resource for the project located 15 kilometers (nine miles) northeast of Stewart that includes 1.64 million metric tons of measured and indicated resource averaging 8.36...
Colorado Resources Ltd. owns or has options on five properties that blanket more than 1,000 square kilometers of northwestern British Columbia. The junior’s 2016 exploration focused primarily on KSP, a property the company is optioning from Seabridge Gold Inc. (Seabridge acquired the property as part of its June purchase of SnipGold Corp.) In June, Colorado kicked off drilling at the Inel zone at KSP, where the company’s surface geological work, along with a review of historical drill logs, indicate at least three more tha...
With a goal of bringing more gold into the mine plan for its Eagle Gold project, Victoria Gold Corp. ratcheted up exploration at its Dublin Gulch property in central Yukon Territory. This work focused on Olive-Shamrock, a pair of zones about 2,500 meters northeast of the main Eagle Gold deposit that had no resource estimate going into 2016. The company said Olive and the adjacent Shamrock deposit have the potential to enrich Eagle project economics by adding higher-grade ore, increasing flexibility in mine planning and...
Many were skeptical of Ucore Rare Metals Inc.’s claims that it had identified a technology that would revolutionize the way the notoriously tightly interlocked rare earth elements are separated. Less than two years later, however, the mineral explorer turned innovator has quieted some of this doubt by separating the most critical rare earth – dysprosium – from a solution derived from its Bokan Mountain REE project in Southeast Alaska. Ucore achieved this feat with the help...
While junior miners have not fully healed from the wounds inflicted by the brutal bear market of the recent past, the Canadian branch of PricewaterhouseCoopers sees improved vital signs for the sector. "It's too early to call it a recovery, but there might be light at the end of the tunnel for the Canadian junior mining sector" PWC wrote in "Signs of Life", its 2016 junior mine report. One such promising sign is that the market cap of top 100 junior mining companies on the TSX...
What does a name say about a company? Management of NovaCopper Inc. feels that its corporate moniker does not say enough about the diversity of metals present in the high-grade deposits encompassed by its Upper Kobuk Minerals Projects in the Ambler mining district of Northwest Alaska. Arctic, the most advanced UKMP deposit, actually hosts more zinc than it does copper. And, while copper remains the dominant metal in terms of value, zinc supply shortages are closing the price...
After a particularly long and painful bear market for the mining sector, the more than 25 percent surge in gold prices since the beginning of the year is lifting the share price of mining and mineral exploration companies in Alaska. “It has been five very long years and hopefully this a start to what is going to be a good run,” Greg Beischer, president and CEO of Millrock Resources Inc., told an audience at a recent Alaska Miners Association meeting in Anchorage. While gol...
Is the impasse between Pebble Limited Partnership and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over the potential development of the world-class Pebble copper deposit in Southwest Alaska about to be resolved? Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd., currently the sole owner of the Pebble Partnership, believes the standoff will likely be over by January if an ongoing lawsuit between Pebble and the EPA runs its full course, and possibly sooner if the parties come to an agreement outside of...
A group of the world's largest mining companies have taken the lead in protecting World Heritage sites and are pushing for global governments to follow suit. "The conservation of World Heritage sites is a collective responsibility we all share, and ICMM wants to see more movement from governments to protect them," said Tom Butler, CEO, International Council on Mining and Metals. ICMM is a coalition of 23 global mining companies that include names familiar to Alaska's mining...
