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 87
At a time when American automakers are looking for potential domestic supplies of the graphite that makes up nearly half of all the materials that go into the lithium-ion batteries powering electric vehicles, Graphite One Inc. offers up details of its plans to develop a mine at its Graphite Creek project in Alaska and processing facility in Washington that would produce roughly 75,000 metric tons of advanced graphite products per year. Earlier this year, S&P Global Platts...
Under a deal announced on Aug. 15, American Pacific Mining Corp. will gain 44.9% ownership of the Palmer zinc-copper-silver-gold-barite mine project in Southeast Alaska through the acquisition of Constantine Metal Resources Ltd. Being advanced under a joint venture between Constantine and Dowa Metals & Mining Alaska Ltd., Palmer hosts 4.68 million metric tons of indicated resource averaging 5.23% (539 million pounds) zinc, 1.49% (154 million lb) copper, 30.8 grams per metric t...
Assays are pending, the unofficial slogan of the 2021 mineral exploration season across Alaska and Canada's North, is a phrase that continues to echo in a void left by the lack of drill results going into the new year. "'Assays pending' has become one of the least popular phrases around the industry this year, given the painfully slow turnaround time at the labs," Tectonic Metals Inc. President and CEO Tony Reda penned in a year-end update on the Vancouver, British Columbia-ba...
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... Full story
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... Full story
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... Full story
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,... Full story
Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd. says the recent 8.1 magnitude earthquake caused substantially less ground movement at the Pebble site than factored in during the designing of the proposed tailings facility for a future mine at this world-class copper project in Southwest Alaska. "We determined the 8.1M earthquake that occurred last month south of the Alaska Peninsula, about 300 miles from our site, create ground acceleration at Pebble that is 20 – 30 times less than the d...
"Please mine more nickel," these four words from Tesla CEO Elon Musk reverberated across the global mining sector and raised awareness of how fundamental nickel is to the lithium-ion batteries powering hundreds of millions of electric vehicles to come off Tesla and traditional automaker assembly lines over the next two decades. "Tesla will give you a giant contract for a long period of time if you mine nickel efficiently and in an environmentally sensitive way," Musk implored... Full story
The United States is heavily dependent on China and other foreign suppliers for its barite, a mineral critical to the petroleum sector. Barite derives from barús, the Ancient Greek word for heavy, owing to an exceptionally high specific gravity for a non-metallic mineral. It is this weight that makes barite a key element to the oil and gas sector and lands the mineral on USGS' critical list. "More than 90% of the barite sold in the United States was used as a weighting agent... Full story
The rapidly accelerating expansion of the electric vehicle and renewable energy sectors is driving enormous new demand for graphite, a major ingredient in lithium-ion batteries. The World Bank forecasts that low-carbon energy technologies, primarily lithium-ion batteries, will require 4.5 million metric tons of graphite per year by 2050, which is about a 500% increase over 2018 levels and a 318% increase over the total graphite produced in 2019. "Graphite demand increases in... Full story
Resting on the eastern fringe of the Misty Fjords National Monument, at the head of Portland Canal, the Southeast Alaska mining town of Hyder survives through a symbiotic relationship with Stewart, a British Columbia mining town that lies just two miles (3.2 kilometers) to the east. Persisting for over a century as a town that identifies more closely with its Canadian neighbor than distant Alaska towns, Hyder found its lifeline being nearly cut off by the coronavirus... Full story
Home of the famed golden beaches of Nome that have 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... Full story
In the westernmost reaches of Alaska lies "Tin City," a mining settlement that all but disappeared except for a lonely radar station looking out over our seas and skies today. Located on the Seward Peninsula's Bering Sea coast, about 90 miles northwest of Nome and five miles southeast of Cape Prince of Wales, Tin City was founded with aspirations as simple and as grand as the name had hoped for it. An all but forgotten camp that had implications far larger than it probably... Full story
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... Full story
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... Full story
Constantine Metal Resources Ltd. June 3 released a preliminary economic assessment for Palmer that outlines an economically robust and environmentally conscientious mine for the volcanogenic massive sulfide project in Southeast Alaska. "This PEA is the most significant milestone for Constantine to date, demonstrating a high-quality project with strong economics and a progressive, environmentally conscious mine design," said Constantine Metal Resources President and CEO...
It is somewhat ironic that the lithium-ion batteries that power the growing number of zero emissions electric vehicles traveling global highways are driving the need for carbon – graphitic carbon to be exact. Despite lithium's top billing, lithium-ion batteries require roughly eight times more graphite. Graphite Creek in western Alaska hosts huge stores of graphitic carbon and Graphite One Inc., the company advancing this project, has initiated a pilot-scale program aimed a...
Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA) continues to be interested in funding the Strategic Metals Complex, or SMC, a rare earth element separation facility that Ucore Rare Metals is planning to develop in Ketchikan, Alaska. In 2014, the Alaska Legislature authorized AIDEA to invest up to US$145 million to help finance the development of a mine at Ucore's Bokan Mountain rare earth deposit on Prince of Wales Island, which is located about 30 miles southwest...
While not the flashiest of the 35 minerals on the United States Geological Survey's critical list, barite plays an essential role in America's energy sector. Barite got its name from the Ancient Greek word for heavy, barús, and it is the high specific gravity that earned this mineral its name that makes it a critical mineral. Added to drill mud, a solution that serves multiple purposes in bore drilling, barite's weight helps maintain the integrity of the drill hole and...
Constantine Metal Resources Ltd. Aug. 13 reported that results from metallurgical testing demonstrate a premium-quality barite concentrate can be produced as a co-product to the copper, zinc, gold and silver found in the volcanogenic massive sulfide deposit at the Palmer project in Southeast Alaska. According to a resource calculated in 2015, the South Wall-RW deposit at Palmer hosts 8.1 million metric tons of inferred resource averaging 5.25 percent (940.4 million pounds)...
Alaska is rich in rare earth, a unique group of elements that are so distinctive that most are placed in their own separate section at the bottom of the periodic table. While scientist have long realized that rare earths possessed distinctive characteristics that set them apart from their fellow elements, it wasn't until the advent of the color television in the 1960s that these unique properties had any sort of widespread practical application. Over the ensuing five decades,... Full story
At least 125 million electric vehicles are expected to be traveling global highways by 2030, which means the world is going to need a lot more graphite in the coming decade and beyond. This is because graphite serves as the anode in the lithium-ion batteries that power these EVs, not to mention the growing number of portable tools and electronics that use the same type of battery. According to Mineral Commodity Summaries 2019, an annual report published by the United States... Full story
While not the flashiest of the 35 minerals on the United States Geological Survey's critical list, barite plays an essential role in America's energy sector. Barite derives its name from barús, the Ancient Greek word for heavy, owing to an exceptionally high specific gravity for a non-metallic mineral. It is this weight that makes barite a key element to the oil and gas sector and lands the mineral on USGS' critical list. "More than 90 percent of the barite sold in the United... Full story
There can be no doubt that April 27, 1973, was an auspicious day in Nebraska, not just because Jason Brune, Governor-Elect Dunleavy's pick to become the Commissioner of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, was borne then and there; but because it was also the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. One does not need to cast horoscopes to recognize that this astrological era is said to be one of harmony and understanding. Nor does one have to know Brune well to... Full story
