White Gold District Lures Juniors

With the price of gold breaking the US$1,000-per-oz. mark, and the gradual upward trend of gold prices since April last year, the search for new gold targets in Yukon became an increasingly attractive activity during the 2009 exploration season. The new bedrock discoveries and excellent exploration results at Underworld Resources’ White Gold property, south of Dawson City, and Atac Resources’ Rau property, 50 km northeast of Keno City, also helped spark interest in the commodity. In addition, Victoria Gold commissioned a prefeasibility study and a comprehensive project proposal to move closer to open-pit production at the Eagle gold project, which hosts indicated resources totalling 2.69 million oz. gold. Although Yukon exploration activities occurred throughout the classically known Tintina Gold Belt, the area of most intense interest was and continues to be the greatly underexplored Dawson Range area.

Although base metal exploration expenditures were substantial (roughly $30 million) and drilling at the Minto copper mine returned significant results, base metals did not capture the same attention as gold. Many base metal projects in Yukon are conducting environmental, engineering and geotechnical programs in support of scoping or prefeasibility studies. These projects are advancing towards feasibility and will potentially be making production decisions as base metal prices recover.

Exploration costs for 2009 are estimated at $90 million (see Table 1, pg. 9) with gold capturing 47% of spending, silver 23%, copper and copper-molybdenum projects 15%, zinc-lead 11%, tungsten 3%, and other commodities 1%.

Capstone Mining’s copper-gold-silver Minto mine continued as Yukon’s only operating hard-rock mine; however, that will end in 2010 with the Overall, global aluminum production dropped 5.9% to 37.8 million tonnes in 2009.

Rusal curbed its own aluminum production by suspending its “least cost-efficient smelters,” which included three smelters in Russia and one in the Ukraine.

Alumina production was cut at relatively high-cost facilities, such as Aughinish in Ireland and the Zaporozhye alumina refinery in the Ukraine.

Alumina output was also suspended at the company’s Eurallumina project in Italy, and Windalco and Alpart facilities in Jamaica.

The situation for aluminum overall, however, did begin to improve in late 2009 when the revival of developed economies triggered restocking throughout the production chain and boosted demand, the company says.

As for 2010, Rusal is expecting growth in the aluminum market due to rising demand in the automotive and packaging sectors.

CRU expects consumption to grow by 12.6% in 2010 as compared to 2009.

Rusal says should such a positive scenario develop, it would increase aluminum production by 3% this year and alumina production by 7%. It says it could meet such increases at its existing plants.