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Toronto miner Noront ready and raring to go while competitor Cliffs in mothballing mode.
KOPER LAKE—The guys have just finished a Chinese food lunch and are parked in front of the TV, riveted to men’s Olympic hockey, Canada vs Finland, in the Esker Camp recreation room.
Next door, a young chef cleans up the cooking show-worthy kitchen — complete with icemaker in the dry camp — and preps for the usual Friday night feast. This time it’s prime rib, which they alternate with steak and shrimp every other week.
“We don’t mess around here,” says the burly manager on Cliffs Natural Resources’ half of the exploration camp, which sits on land claims owned by Toronto rival Noront Resources.
Only a handful of miners from both companies are left at the remote Northern outpost now that drilling has stopped, so the vibe is collegial — particularly since Cleveland-based Cliffs dropped the bombshell three months ago that it was shelving its massive chromite mining project here in the Ring of Fire mineral belt.
Up to 200 miners worked here a couple years ago, operating drill rigs that dug a kilometre underground for core samples to prove the grades of mine-worthy ore. Now a dozen men share an awkward co-existence in a virtual ghost town, the whirling snow substituting for tumbleweed.
While the U.S. firm is in mothballing mode, Noront is loading up on fuel and other supplies as it gears up to start construction next year on its Eagle’s Nest nickel-copper-platinum mine – bumping Cliffs as the most likely to finally tap into the metals-rich region touted to be the next Sudbury basin.
It’s Noront CEO Alan Coutts’s first visit to Esker Camp since last fall, so affable camp manager Randy Oinonen actually shaved for the first time in weeks. The temperature is minus 27 degrees and the dry Arctic air emphasizes the frozen isolation of the James Bay lowlands that brings anything but a burning Ring of Fire to mind.
“We have a real sense of pride that we’re a Canadian company starting a mining district up here,” says Coutts, a geologist who left the executive suite at international nickel giant Xstrata last year to take the helm of the penny stock firm listed on the TSX Venture Exchange.
The junior is the largest claim holder in the crescent-shaped Ring of Fire region, a world-class mineral deposit valued at $60 billion that prospectors stumbled on while looking for diamonds in the district heavily explored by De Beers. Instead they discovered North America’s first commercial-level resource of chromite — necessary in making stainless steel and coveted by metals-hungry China — along with a vast store of base and precious metals.
It’s been a lifelong goal for Edmonton-born Coutts and his right-hand man Paul Semple – chief operating officer who grew up in New Liskeard — to see a mining project all the way through from prospecting to operations: the geologist’s ultimate prize.
“I’m a Northern Ontario boy and I have worked on projects around the world. At this stage in my career — getting involved in a project of this scale in the North, with the potential for some great positive impacts — is very exciting for me,” says Semple.
Nothing in the mining world moves fast or runs smoothly. So geologists like this Toronto team are a pretty patient bunch, knowing it takes years to get most projects off the ground. Over a two hour-charter flight, the duo tell story after story about crazy times exploring for metals around the globe, with Semple’s former team in Russia trying to win over locals with western belt buckles — then realizing they didn’t own belts.
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