The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
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While copper may be the new oil of the green energy revolution, a wide variety of industrial minerals and metals found in abundance in Alaska will be needed to build the envisioned low-carbon future. In a 2021 report on the minerals and metals critical to low-carbon energy and transportation, the International Energy Agency estimates that a typical passenger electric vehicle requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional internal combustion engine car and an onshore...
With more than half of Alaska's entire population living within its region, Cook Inlet Region Inc., more commonly known as CIRI, is the most metropolitan of the 12 landholding Alaska Native regional corporations. While CIRI has leveraged its urban position with retail developments such as Tikahtnu Commons, an enormous retail and entertainment center on the outskirts of Anchorage, the Southcentral Alaska regional corporation also has oil and gas, renewable energy, and mining...
It is hard to quantify which is more impressive, the sheer size of the estate owned by Doyon Ltd. or the rich and underexplored mineral potential on the lands owned by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act regional corporation for Alaska's Eastern Interior. Running the breadth of Alaska between the Brooks Range to the north and Alaska Range to the south, the Doyon region blankets a mineral-rich swath of Alaska's Interior that is nearly the size of Texas. Doyon owns 12.5...
Home of the famed golden beaches of Nome that has captured the imagination of millions over the past 120 years, the Bering Straits Native Corporation (BSNC) region covers the Seward Peninsula and coastal lands arcing around the eastern and southern coast of the Norton Sound in the far western reaches of Alaska. While this region may be 300 miles beyond North America's highway system, it has served as a crossroads for human activity for at least 15 millennia and will continue...
A recent agreement between Vital Metals Ltd. and Ucore Rare Metals Inc. marks a major milestone in establishing a complete North American rare earths supply chain with links in Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan, and Alaska. Vital has already established Canada's only rare earths mine at its Nechalacho project in Northwest Territories and is building a processing facility in Saskatchewan to upgrade the high-grade ore into a midstream carbonated product with a mix of rare...
Ucore Rare Metals Inc. Nov. 17 announced that the United States Forest Service has issued a one-year authorization for trenching and bulk sampling at the Bokan Mountain rare earths project in Southeast Alaska. Located on Prince of Wales Island, the Dotson Ridge deposit at Ucore's Bokan Mountain project hosts 4.79 million metric tons of indicated resource containing 31,722 metric tons of total rare earth oxides – 14 lanthanide elements, yttrium, and scandium – plus 1.05 met...
Graphite One Inc. Oct. 13 announced the completion of a 2,052-meter drill program focused on gathering data for a feasibility study on developing a mine at its Graphite Creek project about 35 miles north of Nome, Alaska. A preliminary economic assessment completed in 2017 outlined plans for a mine at Graphite Creek that would produce roughly 60,000 metric tons of 95% graphite concentrate per year and a separate processing facility to refine these annual concentrates into...
Canada is positioning itself as the "global supplier of choice" for the critical minerals and metals essential to tomorrow's technologies, especially the almost unfathomable quantities of raw materials that will be required by a world transitioning to low-carbon energy and electric vehicles. "Demand for minerals and metals continues to grow with an increasing focus on critical minerals – vital in aerospace, healthcare, telecommunications and an array of clean technologies such...
The global transition to electric vehicles plugged into renewable energy sources is powering enormous demand for graphite, the single largest ingredient in lithium-ion batteries. "Graphite demand increases in both absolute and percentage terms since graphite is needed to build the anodes found in the most commonly deployed automotive, grid, and decentralized batteries," the World Bank penned in a 2020 report, "The Mineral Intensity of the Clean Energy Transition." According...
From the advancements of technology during the Bronze Age to the computers and telecommunication systems of today's Big Data Era, tin has been critical to human progress for at least 5,500 years. Sometime around 3500 BC, Sumerians living in modern day Turkey and Iran discovered that mixing a little tin with copper created bronze, an alloy that produced much more durable weapons and tools than those cast from copper alone. This cutting-edge discovery offered a strategic and...
The envisioned green future where every North American is driving a battery-powered electric vehicle charged with renewable energy could be undermined by cobalt, a somewhat scarce and controversial metal that makes lithium-ion batteries better. "Cobalt is considered the highest material supply chain risk for electric vehicles in the short and medium term," the U.S. Department of Energy penned in an April report. This risk has automakers, lithium-ion battery manufacturers, and...
From the transistors in quantum computers that are millions of times faster than their classical counterparts to fiber optic cables that send data at the speed of light, germanium is a little-known semiconductor that is a small but extremely important ingredient in the technologies behind the future of ultrafast computing and communications. Germanium traces its technological roots back to the 1950s, when scientists developed the transistor to replace vacuum tubes in the...
Overshadowed by headline-grabbing rare earth elements, gallium is an underappreciated critical metal that is a vital ingredient in next-generation smartphones and communication networks, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), thin-film solar cells, and medical devices. "The development of gallium arsenide as a direct band-gap semiconductor in the 1960s led to what are now some of the most well-known uses of gallium – in feature-rich, application-intensive, third- and f...
The ability to type, tap, swipe, and scroll your way through articles such as this one from a smartphone, tablet, computer, and now even refrigerators is made possible by indium-tin oxide, which is used as a transparent conducting film applied to virtually every flat-panel display and touchscreen on the market. This thin and invisible layer lying just under the glass senses incoming electrical data triggered by the touch of your fingertip and transforms it into an optical...
Global governments and industries are setting increasingly ambitious targets for the phasing out of fossil fuel-burning automobiles in favor of electric vehicles charged with green energy. Achieving these grand climate objectives, however, is going to require an equally bold strategy to ensure there are plentiful supplies of the new generation of energy minerals and metals critical to building this revolution in the way the world generates and uses energy. The World Bank...
Extremely hard and with the highest melting point of all the metals, tungsten's toughness is legendary. Like many of the other metals that have found their way onto critical mineral lists in Canada, Europe, and the United States, this durable metal is vulnerable to Chinese control. "World tungsten supply was dominated by production in China and exports from China," the U.S. Geological Survey inked in its 2021 mineral commodities report. It is estimated that mines in China...
From jewelry at a black-tie soiree to scrubbing harmful emissions from the exhaust system of a farm truck, the six platinum group metals – platinum, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium, and osmium – are metals that are both precious and critical to the United States and Canada. Extremely rare, durable, and with a brilliance that does not tarnish, platinum and other metals in its group are a treasured choice for high-end jewelry that stands the test of time. Three of the...
Roughly 38,000 metric tons of rare earth concentrates were produced from American soil during 2020, yet the United States remains 100% reliant on foreign countries for its supply of these 17 elements critical to our modern high-tech society – an apparent paradox that speaks to the complexities of these enigmatic metals. The irony of rare earth elements (REEs) begins with their name, which is at the same time a misnomer and accurate descriptor. "All the REEs except p...
An unsung war hero that saved countless American troops during World War II, an overlooked battery material that has played a pivotal role in storing electricity for more than 100 years, and a major ingredient in futuristic grid-scale energy storage, antimony is among the most important critical metalloids that most people have never heard of. While antimony may not be part of the common lexicon, humans have been using this semi-metal for more than 5,000 years. "For example,...
After raising C$10 million earlier this year, Graphite One Inc. is collecting the final bits of data needed for a prefeasibility study that details the company's vision to establish a United States supply chain for the coated spherical graphite used as an anode material in the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles and store intermittent renewable energy. The first segment of this supply chain is the world-class Graphite Creek mine project about 35 miles north of...
While copper did not make it onto the list of 35 minerals and metals critical to the United States, the red metal's criticality to the global transition to renewable energy and electric mobility cannot be overstated. No matter which battery chemistries power tomorrow's electric vehicles, what renewable energy solutions recharge those EVs, or if rare earth magnets are used to generate that electricity and propel those vehicles more efficiently, any path to a decarbonized...
Alaska contains minerals essential to the national defense, renewable energy and electronics industries. Finding those minerals, however, can be difficult in such a vast and geologically challenging state. Hyperspectral imagery can help as Alaska's summer exploration season approaches. The University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute has the only hyperspectral imaging facility in the state at its Hyperspectral Imaging Laboratory created in 2014 as the brainchild of...
Ucore Rare Metals Inc. believes the Biden administration's newly announced strategy to strengthen America's supply chains aligns with its own vision to disrupt China's dominance of the rare earth elements supply chain in the United States. "We are very pleased with the White House's concern for REEs and its efforts to spur the domestic production of critical materials," said Ucore Rare Metals Chairman and CEO Pat Ryan. Based on the feedback from a 100-day American supply...
From a world-class graphite deposit in the Northwest to rare earths on the Southeast Panhandle, Alaska has the potential to offer a sustainable and secure supply to meet the coming explosive demand for the minerals and metals crucial to the renewable energy and electric vehicle sectors in North America and around the globe. International Finance Corporation, part of the World Bank Group, estimates that this shift to low-carbon energy and electric mobility will create nearly...
The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority unanimously passed a resolution authorizing the formalization of a preliminary due-diligence process for a potential US$3 million to US$5 million investment for the development and commercial-scale operation of the rare earths separation facility Ucore Rare Metals Inc. plans to build near the Southeast Alaska port town of Ketchikan. Development of this Alaska Strategic Metals Complex, or Alaska SMC, is the first step towar...
