TNM’s most-read stories of 2017

It was another fascinating year in the mining industry, and this year’s list of most-clicked stories defies the journalistic convention of “if it bleeds, it leads”, whereby bad news generates the most web traffic.

In the case of Northern Miner readers in 2017, we most wanted to hear stories of successes in the gold industry and in-depth interviews with some of mining’s most accomplished entrepreneurs.

The following are the most-clicked stories on our website during 2017:

 

11. Iamgold CEO Letwin’s passionate keynote on cost control, innovation and gold’s bright future
OCTOBER 26, 2017

The following is a transcript of the keynote speech by Stephen Letwin, president and CEO of Iamgold (TSX: IMG; NYSE: IAG) at the inaugural Progressive Mine Forum presented by The Northern Miner on Oct. 23 in Toronto.

What I want to do is take you through a little bit of my history and hopefully share a little bit of my experiences particularly as they tie in to innovation.

I’m 62 years old. I was born in southern Ontario and raised on a farm and went to school in Ontario. I spent my first couple of years with Procter & Gamble here in Toronto, and then at the tender age of 26 I got headhunted to Calgary, Alberta, and I went to work for a fellow that 95% of you won’t know. Maybe some of you do, or remember he was sort of the Elon Musk of the oil days. His name was Jack Gallagher.

So at 26 I went to work for Jack Gallagher, who was building at that time Canada’s and in fact North America’s largest oil and gas business: Dome Petroleum.

Unfortunately Jack lost his job, lost his company within three years of me getting there — not that I was tied to that, hopefully.

But Jack made the mistake that many of us tend to make, and continue to make, around debt and innovation. I’m going to tie those things together in a little bit.

To read more, click here.

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10. The Northern Miner podcast – episode 70: The unabridged Robert Friedland session
AUGUST 14, 2017

This week we’re running a full interview session with mining legend Robert Friedland, who received The Northern Miner’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the Canadian Mining Symposium in London, U.K., in May 2017.

Group Publisher Anthony Vaccaro questions Friedland on what technologies might disrupt mining, and which minerals might see rising demand based on trends in electric vehicles and power.

To read more, click here.

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9. Top 10 Canadian-based gold developers
JULY 20, 2017

Gold exploration and development is enjoying a boom again, and Canadian juniors are leading project advancement at home and abroad.

The following are the top-10, Canadian-headquartered gold companies that are developing projects but not yet in commercial production, ranked according to market capitalization in mid-July. Gold royalty and streaming companies are not included in the list.

To read more, click here.

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8. Keith Barron back on the hunt for riches of Ecuador’s Lost Cities
MARCH 24, 2017

The remarkable story of Aurelian Resources and its discovery of Fruta del Norte — a blind gold deposit the company’s geologists found in the Cordillera del Condor in southeastern Ecuador — is one for the history books.

The narrative begins with Keith Barron, an exploration geologist who cofounded Aurelian in 2001, listed the company on the TSX Venture Exchange in 2003, and, along with Stephen Leary and Patrick Anderson, discovered the multimillion-ounce gold deposit in 2006, selling it two years later to Kinross Gold (TSX: K; NYSE: KGC) for $1.2 billion.

Perhaps less well known is that at the time of the discovery, Barron had been looking for two famous gold-mining areas in the country, which historic Spanish documents and maps from the 16th and 17th centuries referred to as “Sevilla del Oro” and “Logrono de los Caballeros.”

To read more, click here.

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7. Video: Fireside chat with Lukas Lundin
MAY 25, 2017

 

Lukas Lundin, chairman of the Lundin Group of Companies, was one of the distinguished speakers at The Northern Miner’s Canadian Mining Symposium in London in early May. In a fireside chat with Gianni Kovacevic, executive chairman of CopperBank, Lundin shared his views on a range of themes, including commodities, his group’s energy and metals businesses, and China’s dominant role in commodities markets.

To read more, click here.

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6. Robert Friedland: Celebrating a lifetime of achievement
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.”

To read more, click here.

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5. Financier Stephen Dattels banks on lithium
MARCH 17, 2017

Many people in the industry will remember Stephen Dattels as the founder of UraMin, a company he set up in 2005 to develop uranium properties in Africa, and which he sold in 2007 to Areva for $2.5 billion in cash. The legendary top-of-the-market deal made Dattels, his partner Michael Beck and their shareholders very rich.

But the mining financier has hit other home runs since kicking off his career in mining at Barrick Gold (TSX: ABX; NYSE: ABX), where he was one of the company’s key executives — and reportedly Peter Munk’s protégé — from 1982 to 1987.

To read more, click here.

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4. Roundup 2017: Goldcorp scouts out investments in juniors
FEBRUARY 7, 2017

VANCOUVER — Goldcorp (TSX: G; NYSE: GG) is looking to invest $100 million in a portfolio of junior explorers that have early stage projects with district-scale potential, Goldcorp president and CEO David Garofalo said during a presentation at this year’s Association for Mineral Exploration Roundup convention in Vancouver.

The investments would be made through private placements, rather than acquiring positions in the open market, and preference would be given to companies focused on the Americas, he added.

To read more, click here.

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3. Nolan Watson, Alicia Woods win inaugural ‘Young Mining Professionals of the Year’ award
FEBRUARY 6, 2017

The Young Mining Professionals (YMP) — a non-profit group with chapters in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal — has awarded its inaugural, annual YMP Awards to Nolan Watson, president and CEO of Vancouver-based royalty firm Sandstorm Gold, and Alicia Woods, founder of Covergalls, which specializes in women’s work wear, and general manager of Marcotte Mining Machinery Services in Sudbury, Ontario.

The YMP Awards, presented in association with The Northern Miner, are intended by the YMP to “recognize two young mining professionals, a male and a female, who over the past year, and during the course of their careers, have demonstrated exceptional leadership skills and innovative thinking to provide value for their companies and shareholders, as well as for themselves.”

To read more, click here.

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2. Snapshot: Six gold juniors developing high-impact projects around the world
MARCH 29, 2017

With gold prices holding above US$1,200 per oz. and money flowing back into earlier-stage exploration and development projects, gold juniors are poised to make progress at projects around the world this year. Here is a look at six such companies.

To read more, click here.

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1. John Felderhof’s new life after Bre-X

DECEMBER 26, 2012

 

AN ISLAND IN THE PHILIPPINES — John Felderhof looks much thinner than when we first met at the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada convention in 2010.

The weight loss could be from the heat and humidity of the Philippines, where the 72-year-old lives in a house with a single beaten-up air conditioner in his bedroom.

Or it could be the stress of writing his memoirs — a project he started about a year ago at the urging of a handful of his nieces and nephews. When we met in June he was about to start the Bre-X chapter — which he has left for last.

Felderhof says it has taken him 15 years to figure out how the salting was done at the Busang deposit in the Indonesian jungle of Borneo (using gravity concentrate and not alluvial gold, contrary to published technical reports), and he believes he knows which of the company’s employees were behind it, but he refuses to make their names public.

“I know what it’s like to be accused,” he tells me. “It’s easy to accuse and destroy a person’s life, but I have no proof, so I won’t accuse them. I’m not going to point fingers at anybody.”

To read more, click here.