The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
The mining newspaper for Alaska and Canada's North
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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...
Aleut Corp. is committed to promoting economic opportunities for its more than 4,000 shareholders while preserving the traditional culture and values developed from living in a ruggedly beautiful stretch of Alaska. From the community of Sand Point on the Alaska Peninsula to Attu near the western end of 167 named Aleutian Islands extending more than 1,000 miles off Southwest Alaska, the Aleut Corp. region forms a boundary between the Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea. This...
The Bristol Bay region is home to two resources that beyond a doubt earn the moniker "world-class" – an annual run of sockeye salmon that is second to none and Pebble, the largest undeveloped copper and gold deposits known to exist on Earth. These world-renowned resources, however, have stirred up controversy in this Oklahoma-sized region of Southwest Alaska, as many of the roughly 7,400 Bristol Bay residents are concerned that mining the copper, gold, molybdenum, rhenium, and...
President Richard M. Nixon signed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) in 1971, exactly 230 years after Captain Vitus Bering's Second Kamchatka Expedition finally sighted land in Alaska offshore from what is now Mount Saint Elias in 1741. In the years between, the 70,000 or so Unagan (Aleut), Sugpiaq, Yupik, Inupiat, Athapascan, Tlingit, and their descendants began to experience extreme changes brought on by Russian and American firepower, disease, religion,...
"Less than a year after the formal transfer of Alaska from Russia to the United States, there was formed under California law a corporation named the Alaska Commercial Company. Its home office was in San Francisco, but its activities were to center in Alaska, where it soon became a power in the land. Indeed, at sometimes and places it was the only effective power." This an excerpt from a piece written by Frank H. Sloss in July 1977 for The Pacific Northwest Quarterly titled,...
CopperBank Resources Corp. Feb. 14 announced the termination of its option on the Pyramid and San Diego Bay copper projects on the Alaska Peninsula. Pyramid, a large porphyry copper-gold-molybdenum deposit about 25 miles north of the community of Sand Point, is on private lands owned by Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) regional and village corporations. Aleut Corp., the ANCSA regional corporation for the majority of the Alaska Peninsula and Aleutian Islands, owns...
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...
As the rest of the country suffers through the Dog Days of summer, Alaska is approaching the end of a topsy-turvy summer season that saw unseasonably hot, dry weather in some parts of the state during some parts of the summer, while other parts of the state have seen record rainfall and unseasonably early snowfall. Gold prices have skyrocketed over the $1,500 per ounce mark and silver prices have moved strongly up, now trading at a one-year high. However, copper and zinc are a...
Redstar Gold Corp. Aug. 22 renewed its lease for the Unga project on islands just off the Alaska Peninsula and plans to resume exploration of the high-grade gold project later this year. Aleut Corp., an Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) regional corporation, owns the mineral rights to most of Unga. Two ANCSA village corporations, Shumagin and Unga, own much of the surface estate on this island. More information on Aleut Corp can be found at Aleuts Ring of Fire...
Aleut Corporation is committed to promoting economic opportunities for its more than 4,000 shareholders, while preserving the traditional culture and values developed from living in a ruggedly beautiful stretch of Alaska. The Alaska Peninsula and 167 named Aleutian Islands extending more than 1,000 miles off Southwest Alaska that make up the Aleut Corp. region form a border between the Pacific Ocean and Bering Sea. This geologically young island arc is part of the Pacific...
The Bristol Bay region is home to two resources that beyond a doubt earn the moniker "world-class" – an annual run of sockeye salmon that is second to none and Pebble, the largest undeveloped copper and gold deposits known to exist on Earth. These world-renowned resources, however, have stirred up controversy in this Oklahoma-sized region of Southwest Alaska, as many of the roughly 7,400 Bristol Bay residents are concerned that mining the copper, gold, molybdenum and other m...
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...
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...
CopperBank Resources Corp. June 5 announced plans to complete at least 1,500 meters of drilling at its Pyramid copper-gold-molybdenum project in Southwest Alaska. The Pyramid project covers 94,830 acres of Aleut Native Corporation lands on the Alaska Peninsula. This property hosts 122 million metric tons of inferred resource averaging 0.41 percent copper, 0.1 grams per metric ton gold and 0.021 percent molybdenum. While completed by a reputable engineering firm in 2013, CopperBank is not treating this historical estimate as...
CopperBank Resources Corp. sees the need for copper rising sharply as the world shifts to renewable energy sources and believes its Pyramid porphyry copper-gold-molybdenum project on the Alaska Peninsula ideally suited to help fill that demand. CopperBank was founded by self-proclaimed "realistic environmentalist" Gianni Kovacevic, who drove a Tesla Model S sedan across North America last year to raise awareness about the symbiotic relationship between the mining and green...
Mineral exploration spending in Alaska hit an apex of US$365 million in 2011, but as venture capital for mining explorers dried these expenditures plummeted 78 percent to US$80 million in 2015. However, rising gold prices and a loosening of venture capital in 2016 seems to have marked an end to a painfully long bear market for mining explorers in Alaska. “After taking head shots for the past four years, the industry suddenly came to life over the past month, with new budgets,...
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...
The year just past was many things for the mining industry, but one of the bright spots came from the Mine Safety and Health Administration, an agency not known for awarding happy faces or gold stars. In 2016, the mining industry experienced only 25 deaths in U.S. mines, the lowest level ever recorded. This, despite the industry having more than 330,000 miners working in 13,000 mines across the country. The leading cause of death in both coal and metal/nonmetal mines was...
CopperBank Resources Corp. May 12 reported the closing of a C$1.4 million non-brokered private placement that included the issuance of 17.5 million common shares at C8 cents each. In April, CopperBank announced plans to carry out a roughly US$750,000 exploration program at Pyramid, a copper-molybdenum-gold project on Aleut Corporation lands on the Alaska Peninsula. The program, slated for mid-2017, is expected to include 1,500 meters of drilling. The company's objective is to expand the current resource at Pyramid in advance...
The summer solstice has come and gone, but the Alaska mining industry has paid little attention to the decreased amount of daylight because it is high summer in the high latitudes, time to be out completing work programs that have been in the planning since last fall. Exploration drilling programs have sprouted in the Brooks Range, Interior, Alaska Range, Southeast, Southwest and the Alaska Peninsula. In addition, the sounds of tire-kicking are being heard over a wide area of...
At a recent mining industry panel discussion at the Western States Land Commissioners Association meeting in Anchorage, I was asked if the recent upturn in activity in the Alaska mining industry was a function of commodities prices or a growing worldwide recognition of Alaska's enormous mineral potential. I answered that I thought neither factor was driving the Alaska mineral industry revival: commodities prices have been steady or rising slowly over the last year and...
The Alaska mining industry continued its increased pace of activities in August, even as the first hint of autumn starts to be felt across the state. Metals prices were relatively stable with increasing demand for zinc and gold, the two metals that generate the most revenue from Alaska's operating mines. Wood Mackenzie is forecasting a 3 percent increase in global refined zinc demand in 2017 to 14.7 million metric tons. With refined zinc production limited to a 2 percent...
With a new management team in place, roughly C$2 million of cash in the bank and an improved understanding of its high-grade gold mineralization, Redstar Gold Corp. is preparing to launch an early 2015 drill program at its Unga project, found in the Aleutian Arc of Southwest Alaska. Unga - where Redstar's 2014 surface exploration program grabbed rock samples with grades of up to 401 grams per metric ton gold and 266 g/t silver - is a high-grade gold property that encompasses...
The nearer your destination, the more you slip sliding away." As 2014 quickly slip-slides away, these normally melancholy lyrics by Paul Simon take on a surprisingly upbeat meaning for Alaska's mining industry. Unlike watching most years slip by, seeing 2014 in the rearview mirror will bring a smile to most in the mining industry, not only in Alaska, but worldwide. This was our third consecutive year of declining commodities prices, near-zero investor interest and the...
