Presenting a refreshed version of TNM Classic

I’m very proud to present our first issue as a monthly publication.

We have several new sections and features that I’d like to draw your attention to.

First, our new mining, markets and metals section is the pride and joy of the redesigned Northern Miner.

In a massive upgrade from our long-running stock tables, we’ve pulled together information from several excellent data sources, including two new ones. The Northern Miner Group’s own Costmine Intelligence (of which Mining Intelligence is a part) provides data for our capital raisings and TNM Drill Down pages highlighting the top assay results for the past month for gold, copper and lithium. MineralFunds.com, meanwhile, provides data for our gold funds and ETF assets pages. We’ve also aimed to package this information in visually appealing ways that we hope you’ll find insightful and useful. And where simple tables are the best way to convey the data, you’ll find that the text is larger and easier to read. We’ve also added more complete commodity pricing and warrants information, and a new Mining Events page to keep you up to date on what’s happening around the world.

Special thanks to all the people who worked tirelessly to bring this section to life, in particular: Adam Berezuk, James Alafriz, Nicholas LePan, and our art director Barb Burrows!

Outside of this data-rich section, which is the centrepiece of the paper, we’ve introduced several new editorial sections that allow for more creativity and flexibility in how we keep you updated on our industry. These include:

• In Brief: News briefs for quick updates, plus a featured infographic of the month and photo of the month. We invite you to submit your entries for Photo of the Month. They can be current or historical — as long as there’s a story behind the image, it’s mining-related, and it’s high-resolution for print.
• In Depth: The traditional features we’re known for that dissect trends and issues, such as our coverage of Argentina’s upcoming presidential election and what it could mean for the nation’s copper and lithium riches.
• People: You’ll find profiles, interviews and awards news in this section.
• Done Deals: Recent financings, mergers, and other agreements of note.
• Project Updates: Covers significant recent movement on key projects — whether permitting, resource updates, or new economic studies.
• Technology & Innovation: We report on developments that could improve discovery rates, recovery rates, or otherwise make mining more efficient.
• Executive Q&A: A fun new spotlight on our industry’s personalities, where we get to know what makes the sector’s leaders tick, what they do in their off time, their pet peeves, and more.

As always, you’ll find our themed sections, as outlined in our online media kit.

We’re eager to hear your feedback about our new direction. Please email me at ahiyate@northernminer.com with compliments, critiques, or ideas for what you’d like to see in future issues.

Mining Person of the Year

Also in this issue, we’ve announced our Mining Person of the Year for 2022 — Sigma Lithium CEO Ana Cabral. We are a bit late this year with our announcement, which has been timed to coincide with our first monthly issue, and our two-day Canadian Mining Symposium in London, U.K. on Oct. 12-13.

Cabral isn’t like many of our past Mining People of the Year, an award TNM first started presenting in 1977. She’s not a geologist or mining engineer, but rather has a banking background in natural resources and in the health sector. She’s also Brazilian — a first for this award. (Incidentally, she’s the fourth woman to earn the accolade — the third since it was renamed in 2005 from Mining “Man” of the Year previously.) But we’ve been impressed by the Sigma story, and Cabral’s drive to build a different kind of company, one that scores high on environmental factors, which are obviously increasingly important to end users in the EV space and their customers. Cabral’s also excelled in bringing the right team together, and in keeping the company on track from IPO in 2018 to plant commissioning in late 2022 and first production this year.

Languishing gold stocks, uranium on the rise

And at press time in late September, following the two major gold focused September events — the Precious Metals Summit in Beaver Creek Colo., and the Denver Gold Forum a week later, the ongoing disconnect between gold prices and gold equity valuations has been on everyone’s minds. In the junior segment of the market, which is our bread and butter, this has seen investors selling companies that deliver good news and depressing any potential share price rallies.

A Sept. 21 report on junior exploration by Haywood Securities summed up the issue nicely: “With gold prices exceeding US$2,000 per oz. three times since March 2021, we still expect gold to move higher over time, although it becomes more difficult to attract new investors into the mining space with T-Bills returning >4% with no risk. New discoveries are few and far between in the mining space, and the explorers still have a role to play in delivering new discoveries for the industry.”

The excitement right now is in uranium, which has risen to over US$65 per lb. U3O8 in September from under US$50 at the beginning of the year, and from 2016 lows of around US$18 per lb. Analysts are predicting this run-up has legs — with New York-based natural resources investing firm Goehring & Rozencwajg predicting prices could triple or quadruple over the next few years, which could see them matching or exceeding their 2007 all-time highs of US$140 per pound.

“For the first time in history, uranium has slipped into a persistent and widening deficit. We believe the results will be dramatic,” company analysts wrote in a Sept. 14 report.