Mining & Resources
Montage Gold’s Koné Mine Runs 3 Months Ahead of Schedule
Montage Gold’s mill installation at its flagship Koné project finished three months ahead of schedule. So did the classification area. The company says 81% of an $885 million construction budget is already committed, and first gold is still on track for the fourth quarter. Koné Construction Runs Ahead of Schedule as Montage Nears First Gold…
Founders Metals Drills One of Its Strongest Holes Yet at Antino
Wheaton Precious Metals, IAMGOLD, Torex, and Artemis Gold all reported record quarterly production, cash flow, or earnings this week, the kind of results that come from years of infrastructure and ounces already in the ground. A tiny explorer in Suriname does not have any of that yet. What it does have, as of this week,…
Canada Nickel Wins Crawford Approval, Extends Loan for Third Time
Canada Nickel received the first mining approval issued under Canada’s amended Impact Assessment Act on July 31, an approval the company says clears the way toward $70 billion in GDP contribution over the life of its Crawford project. Three days earlier, the same company extended a bridge loan for the second time this year, paying…
America’s Antimony Push Gets a Pilot Plant. One Junior Is Already Finding More
The U.S. Army and Idaho National Laboratory opened a modular pilot plant in Idaho Falls built to process antimony, a mineral used in ammunition, batteries, and flame retardants that the United States currently gets almost entirely from China and Russia. A day earlier, a small New Brunswick company reported another round of high-grade antimony assays…
Evolution Mining Pays a 60% Premium for Carnaby
Evolution Mining agreed to pay a 60% premium to swallow a copper explorer it didn’t need to buy outright. In British Columbia, a different backer chose the opposite move: keep funding a junior’s drill program rather than acquire it, and one of those holes just returned 200 grams of gold per tonne over half a…
Three Juniors Extend Deposits: Chile, Ontario, and Peru
A drill hole is supposed to end. Sooner or later the bit passes out of the mineralized rock and into something barren, and that is usually where the story stops. This week, three companies kept hitting rock worth reporting almost as long as they kept drilling; in Chile, in Ontario, and in Peru, the numbers…
Barrick Takes 9.9% Stake in Kingfisher as Mount Polley Output Falls 64%
Barrick Mining agreed to buy a 9.9% stake in a junior explorer that has never produced an ounce of anything. The same week, British Columbia gave a different company permission to raise its tailings dam higher at the site of the worst mine disaster in Canadian history, on the same day that company reported its…
Goliath Expands Bonanza Zone, Revival Gold Hits Mercur Gold
Visible sulfides in a fresh drill core tell an experienced geologist most of what a lab will eventually confirm, weeks before the assays arrive. In British Columbia’s Golden Triangle, that visual read alone was enough to extend a known gold zone by 750 metres this week, with the market reacting before a single sample reached…
Hudbay Closes Arizona Sonoran to Build Third-Largest North American Copper Hub
Copper futures are up approximately 8% year to date. Gold is down 7% from the same starting point, and down $1,380 from its January all-time record at $5,405. Hudbay Minerals closed its acquisition of Arizona Sonoran Copper on June 24, creating what it describes as the third-largest copper district in North America. On June 23,…
Four Junior Miners Advance as Gold Hits Eight-Month Low Then Surges
Gold hit an eight-month low mid-week and then added two percent in two sessions. The June nonfarm payrolls report, released Friday July 4, came in at 57,000 jobs against a forecast of 110,000. The worst print in four months was enough to knock rate hike bets from 67 percent probability to roughly 50, push the…
