As 2018 draws to a close, we take a look at the most-clicked stories on our website this year, in descending order (click on the headline to view the full story).
1. Bluestone’s Cerro Blanco takes shape in Guatemala
By Trish Saywell, July 6, 2018
When John Robins, founder and chairman of Kaminak Gold, sold the junior to Goldcorp (TSX: GG; NYSE: GG) for $560 million in 2016, the exploration geologist and entrepreneur let it be known that if at some point the gold major was interested in selling any of its assets, it should let him know.
So when he learned that Goldcorp was planning to divest two projects in southeastern Guatemala — a gold project called Cerro Blanco and an adjacent geothermal energy project — Robins hopped on a flight to Guatemala City to do his due diligence.
What he found impressed him enough to make an offer on behalf of Bluestone Resources (TSXV: BSR) where he holds the post of executive chairman.
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An aerial shot of Hudbay’s processing facilities in Flin Flon, Manitoba, in 2013. Source: HudBay Minerals
2. Commentary: Mining industry in Manitoba is near collapse
By Steven Fletcher, Special to The Northern Miner, Oct. 23, 2018
Mining in Manitoba is vanishing like an early morning fog. The mining industry is near collapse in the keystone province, while I continue to raise the mining crisis in the provincial legislature to no avail.
The Manitoba government’s policy on mining is confused, if it exists at all.
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Maple Gold Mines’ Douay gold project in Quebec. Credit: Maple Gold Mines.
3. Site visit: Maple Gold takes fresh look at Douay
By Trish Saywell, Dec. 22, 2017
AMOS, QUEBEC — Over the last four decades, a series of owners have carved out a resource of nearly three million ounces of gold below the 30 metres of overburden that blankets the Douay project in the Abitibi greenstone belt of northwestern Quebec.
But the structures controlling the distribution of that gold — 2.8 million inferred ounces from 83.33 million tonnes grading 1.05 grams gold per tonne — remains largely a mystery.
“It’s complex structurally — I don’t think there’s been a really concerted effort to try to understand what controls the gold mineralization,” Fred Speidel, Maple Gold Mines’ (TSXV: MGM; US-OTC: MGMLF) new vice-president of exploration, says on a recent tour of the property. Speidel and his colleagues at Maple Gold Mines are determined to find out.
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Escorting a tour of the Rosebel gold mine in Suriname in September 2017: Suresh Kalathil, general manager of the Rosebel mine (front, second from left, sunglasses) and Gordon Stothart, chief operating officer at Iamgold (front, second from right). Photo by John Cumming.
4. Site visit: Iamgold turns around Rosebel in Suriname
By John Cumming, March 28, 2018
PARAMARIBO, SURINAME — Only a few years ago during the depths of the mining industry downturn, Iamgold (TSX: IMG; NYSE: IAG) had on its hands with its Rosebel open-pit gold mine in Suriname an aging, high-cost operation that faced closure in 2018, as costs were projected to rise well above the prevailing gold price. But the intermediate gold producer didn’t give up on the ailing asset and instead embarked on a major operational turnaround that squeezed efficiencies out of virtually every aspect of the business.
This resulted in improved productivity per worker and it dropped all-in sustaining costs (AISCs) at Rosebel from break-even levels or worse to well below spot prices. It also brought millions of gold ounces into reserves and resources.
The Rosebel mine has been transformed into a profitable, cornerstone asset for Iamgold, which also has operating gold mines and major development assets in Burkina Faso, Mali, Quebec and Ontario.
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Largo Resources’ Maracas Menchen vanadium mine in Brazil. Photo by The Northern Miner.
5. Vanadium a ‘metal to watch’ in 2018, Hallgarten’s Ecclestone says
By Trish Saywell, Jan. 3, 2018
Prices for vanadium — a minor metal traditionally used to strengthen steel, and more recently a key component in new battery technology that could store electricity from solar and wind generation — are to rise in coming years, Christopher Ecclestone of Hallgarten & Co. forecasts.
Vanadium pentoxide prices moved from US$5 per lb. at the end of December 2016 to US$12.50 per lb. at the end of July 2017, before closing the year at US$9.50 per lb., and the U.K.-based analyst predicts the price will reach US$13.20 per lb. by the end of 2018, US$15 per lb. by the end of 2019 and US$19 per lb. by the end of 2020.
“Last decade vanadium surfaced as a subject of interest primarily tied to the fortunes of the then-booming steel industry,” he writes in a Jan. 3 research note. “Now vanadium is coming back with a vengeance for its potential in mass electricity storage devices, namely the vanadium redox battery [VRB].”
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Robert Friedland at the Voisey’s Bay nickel-copper-cobalt project in Newfoundland & Labrador.
6. Robert Friedland: Celebrating a lifetime of achievement
By Trish Saywell, April 24, 2017
Over most of the last two decades, the first voice Peter Meredith would hear at the crack of dawn each morning was Robert Friedland’s.
“The phone would ring and he would say: ‘Hi Peter, it’s Robert,’ and I’d think, ‘What a surprise, who else calls me at six in the morning?’”
Meredith, who retired as a partner at auditing firm Deloitte in Vancouver to join Ivanhoe Mines full-time in 1996, says that over the following sixteen years, he was pretty much a seven-day-a-week, 24-hour-a-day guy, to keep up with his boss.
“Robert doesn’t take weekends off and he doesn’t like holidays much … He is a very energetic, driven guy—he knows no boundaries as to how hard he works—so the tone from the top is that you feel like a non-contributor when you aren’t working as hard as he is.”
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Pretium Resources’ Brucejack gold mine in northwest British Columbia’s Golden Triangle region. Credit: Pretium Resources.
7. Pretium’s Ovsenek explains Brucejack ramp-up troubles
By Matthew Keevil, Feb. 1, 2018
VANCOUVER — Shares of Pretium Resources (TSX: PVG; NYSE: PVG) dropped after a Jan. 23 production update for its flagship Brucejack underground gold mine in northwestern B.C.’s Golden Triangle district.
The company’s stock closed at a 52-week low of $9.18 after four days of trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange. It saw 13 million shares traded at press time.
Pretium’s release reviewed the initial six-month ramp up at Brucejack and provided guidance for the first six months of 2018.
The company reportedly produced 152,484 oz. gold at the operation since declaring commercial production in July. During the fourth quarter it milled 271,501 tonnes of ore and produced 70,281 oz. gold.
“The market didn’t give us any leeway, and they’re entitled to do that, but this is all part of the process,” Pretium president and CEO Joseph Ovsenek said during an interview on Jan. 29. “We certainly started out very well, but it’s still a ramp up. You don’t just start up a mine and turn on the factory. It’s much more complicated.”
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8. Agnico Eagle’s Sean Boyd is TNM’s Mining Person of the Year
By John Cumming, Feb. 27, 2018
Sean Boyd
As we look back at the career so far of Sean Boyd — Agnico Eagle Mines’ vice-chairman and CEO, and The Northern Miner’s Mining Person of the Year for 2017 — the opening words of Rudyard Kipling’s poem If come to mind: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs …”
In the context of Boyd leading one of the world’s great gold mining companies, “keeping your head” translates to his playing a vital role in keeping Agnico secure and on track through its relentless growth phase during the tumultuous 2010s.
This all happened while almost all his competitors in the gold industry went through near-corporate-death experiences brought on by construction cost overruns, exploding operating costs, ballooning debt and technical nightmares that led to multibillion-dollar writedowns, asset sales and the swift departures of a string of CEOs, who had been filled with hubris only a few years earlier.
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Rob Bottegal, head engineer of the Acosta Deep Mine for Corsa Coal, overlooks the mine in Jennerstown, Pennsylvania. Credit: Dan Speicher/Pittsburgh Tribune-Review via AP.
9. Editorial: The coming US mining renaissance
By John Cumming, Jan. 3, 2018
While for much of past twenty years there has been a slow withering of the mining industry in the U.S., with the notable exceptions of a few bright spots such as gold mining in Nevada, things are starting to look much more optimistic thanks to a combination of rising commodity prices, an easing of regulatory burdens and a new pro-business atmosphere punctuated by the deep corporate cuts in the U.S. Tax Cuts and Jobs Act pushed through by Republicans as 2017 drew to a close.
One of the first signs of recovery came in the early months of 2017 as coal mines in Appalachia started to reopen and hire new employees in response to the doubling of metallurgical coal prices — reversing a brutal 5-year decline in Big Coal that saw the bankruptcies of most of the country’s largest coal miners in the mid-2010s.
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Pit operations at the Detour Lake gold mine in Ontario. Credit: Detour Gold.
10. Detour Gold slammed by revised mine plan
By Trish Saywell, April 30, 2018
Shares of Detour Gold (TSX: DGC) plunged 30% after the company forecast life-of-mine costs could rise at its Detour Lake open-pit gold mine in Ontario, 300 km northeast of Timmins.
The preliminary cost review — which will be ready in June — puts life-of-mine (2018–2040) cash costs at US$810 to US$850 per oz., up from US$747 per oz. envisioned in the 2017 mine plan.
The new mine plan also delays development of the north pit to 2026, which defers 150,000 oz. gold to beyond the 2019–2023 time frame.
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Standing on the Shymanivske iron ore deposit near Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, from left: Alexander Sobko, environment specialist at Black Iron subsidiary Shymanivske Steel; Matt Simpson, CEO of Black Iron; Lyudmila Reminskaya, consultant on land issues, Shymanivske Steel; Mykola Bayrak, general director of Shymanivske Steel; Pavlo Komarytsky, first deputy general director, Shymanivske Steel; Yana Novikova, general director’s assistant, Shymanivske Steel; and Yevgeny Nikolenko, chief geologist at Shymanivske Steel. Photo by John Cumming.
11. Site visit: Black Iron advances Shymanivske premium iron ore project in Ukraine
By John Cumming, July 2, 2018
KRYVYI RIH, UKRAINE — Political turmoil in mining countries may come and go, but great deposits endure, waiting for better days to be developed. That’s an old mining maxim Black Iron (TSX: BKI; US-OTC: BKIRF) co-founder and CEO Matt Simpson has lived every day since Ukraine’s political crisis erupted in 2014 and put on ice the Toronto-based junior’s shovel-ready Shymanivske iron ore project, which is now coming back to life beside the city of Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine, 330 km south-east of the capital Kyiv.
In events that shook Eastern Europe and reverberate around the world to this day, Ukraine’s bloody Revolution of Dignity began in February 2014, with protests in Kyiv’s Independence Square that culminated in the ouster of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.
In the ensuing weeks, Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea and Russian-backed separatist forces launched a still ongoing civil war to bring Ukraine’s two easternmost oblasts, or provinces — called the Donbass region, 400 km east of Kryvyi Rih — into the neighbouring Russian Federation.
Only a few weeks before, in late January 2014, Black Iron had completed a bankable feasibility study at Shymanivske showing attractive economics for a 10-million-tonne-per-year iron ore mine, producing a premium product with 68% iron content, and low impurities.
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