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British Columbia Mining

Aboriginal mine training program dodges closure – by Darah Hansen (Vancouver Sun – August 8, 2012)

The Vancouver Sun, a broadsheet daily paper first published in 1912, has the largest circulation in the province of British Columbia.

Ottawa allocates $10 million to train first nations workers in sector
 
Funding will continue for a popular training program that aims to employ British Columbian aboriginals in the province’s booming mining and mineral exploration sectors, an executive with the B.C. Aboriginal Mine Training Association confirmed Wednesday.
 
“Everything is going very well,” said Laurie Sterritt on news the federal government has agreed to put another $10 million into the B.C. AMTA program over the next three years. The program, which was launched in 2010 with a $4.4-million budget, was in jeopardy of closing its doors after a request to federal agencies for more money to continue the work went unanswered.
 
In June, staff members at the program’s Kamloops office were laid off while negotiations for a funding extension continued behind the scenes. Sterritt said office workers have since returned to their posts, with more people expected to be hired as the program expands across the province.

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Cash-rich mining companies prefer buying to building as metal prices decline – by Gordon Hamilton (Vancouver Sun – August 7, 2012)

The Vancouver Sun, a broadsheet daily paper first published in 1912, has the largest circulation in the province of British Columbia.

Rising development costs and softening metal prices are changing the way mining companies view mergers and acquisitions, according to a report released Tuesday by consultants Ernst & Young.
 
Look for less building and more buying, said Richard Crosson, partner in Ernst & Young’s Transaction Advisory Services practice.
Traditional sources of capital such as equity markets are drying up, Crosson said in an interview, leading to less exploration and more mining mega-mergers.
 
Further, resource nationalism is on the rise, with governments seeking a greater share of the mineral wealth, Crosson said. As a result, companies that have grown wealthy during the strong commodities cycle, are being more selective about where they invest. Mergers and acquisitions are more desirable than new developments, he said.
 
“Predicting markets in the uncertain environment we are in right now is difficult, but we see that the conditions exist for a more robust merger and acquisition environment,” Crosson said.

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Natural resource battle only beginning – by Jason Fekete (Saskatoon Star Phoenix – August 4, 2012)

http://www.thestarphoenix.com/index.html

British Columbia’s brawl with Alberta over the Northern Gateway pipeline and refusal to sign a national energy strategy may be harbingers of battles to come over natural resource developments that are driving the Canadian economy but drawing unprecedented criticism for their environmental impacts.
 
The petroleum, forestry, mining and electricity sectors are expected to generate hundreds of billions of dollars of investment and hundreds of thousands of direct and indirect jobs across Canada over the next few decades.
 
The northern Alberta oilsands, British Columbia’s lucrative shale gas plays, petroleum and potash in Saskatchewan, the Ring of Fire mineral deposit in Northern Ontario, Quebec’s massive Plan Nord resource project and offshore petroleum riches in the Arctic and Atlantic Canada — all are part of the country’s eye popping resource bounty.
 
The Harper government has already identified natural resource development as a priority, and recently announced sweeping changes to expedite approvals and allow it to make final decisions on pipeline projects deemed in the national interest.

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[KGHM International and Abacus Mining] Ajax mine: Working to put all the pieces together – by Steve Powrie (Kamloops This Week.com – August 1, 2012)

http://www.kamloopsthisweek.com/

As the Ajax mine battle heats up, it offers an interesting case study in the use of propaganda and rhetoric to persuade we ignorant masses toward particular points of view.

And, because billions of dollars are at stake for a huge multi-national mining company and the quality of life is potentially at risk due to the mine’s location perched on and above Kamloops, emotions and passions are running high.

The “yea-sayers” are accused of seeing only the pot of gold sitting in the midst of environmental armageddon. The “fear-mongerers” with their Chicken Little notions simply don’t understand it’s “jobs, jobs, jobs” that will keep Kamloops moving forward. In the midst of all this, two recent and rather low-key events caught my mind’s eye.

A few months ago, a suggestion by Pierre Gratton, the president of the Canadian Mining Association, that Kamloops has the “potential to become the hub of the mining industry for Western Canada” tweaked my curiosity as it seemed a rather lofty claim.

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National energy strategy must address B.C. pipeline worries – by Christy Clark (Globe and Mail – July 28, 2012)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

CHRISTY CLARK is the Premier of British Columbia.

This week, my government outlined five bottom-line requirements that must be met for British Columbia to consider support of any heavy oil pipeline project, including Enbridge’s Northern Gateway. We know that Alberta’s oil sands are an important resource and getting them to new markets represents a great economic opportunity for that province and our country. But as a premier, I am focused first and foremost on what’s best for my province, and Northern Gateway currently contains far too great an imbalance of risks over benefits for B.C.

British Columbia’s five bottom lines are as follows:

1. Successful completion of an environmental review process. In Enbridge’s case, this means a recommendation by the Joint Review Panel that the project proceed.

2. World-leading marine oil-spill prevention and response systems to protect our coastlines and ocean. With the Enbridge project, British Columbia is taking 100 per cent of the marine risk. We need to make sure we improve our response and resource capacity. That means the federal government and industry are at the table and prepared to step up their support.

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Aboriginal students graduating from post-secondary schools in record numbers – by Michael V’Inkin Lee and Christopher Reynolds (Vancouver Sun – July 15, 2012)

The Vancouver Sun, a broadsheet daily paper first published in 1912, has the largest circulation in the province of British Columbia.

First nations students are attending — and graduating from — post-secondary schools and professional programs like law and medicine in record numbers

Mary Brearly had no idea as a little girl that she would grow up to be an underground miner. “I didn’t know that I could do that, I guess. Nobody had told me,” said the first nations Thompson Rivers University graduate, who earned her processing operations qualifications through the B.C. Aboriginal Mine Training Association in Kamloops last year.
 
Brearly, 27, is part of what the B.C. Ministry of Advanced Education says has been a 25-per-cent surge in post-secondary enrolment among aboriginal youth over the last four years. Statistics from some colleges and universities in B.C. also show that more aboriginal students are completing certificate and degree programs in a broader range of fields.
 
“Ensuring that aboriginal learners have access to post-secondary education and training is essential to fulfilling our labour needs,” said Naomi Yamamoto, the minister of advanced education.

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The eye of the beholder [Barkerville Gold Mines controversy] – by Peter Koven (National Post – July 21, 2012)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Autonomous geologists, hired to analyze mining data, have tons of leeway

When Barkerville Gold Mines Ltd. told investors a few weeks ago that its British Columbia-based project held the potential to cough up 90 million ounces of gold, the first reaction from industry insiders was disbelief. After all, the legendary Timmins gold camp has produced about 70 million ounces, and fewer than 100 million ounces are produced globally each year.

Their second reaction was more of a question: Who the heck calculated those numbers?

It turned out they were derived by Peter George, a veteran geologist at Geoex Ltd. The British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC) has since intervened with many concerns about his work on Barkerville’s Cow Mountain project, and the company remains a penny stock as investors have little confidence in its stated resources. The stock spiked from 81¢ to as high as $1.67 after the report came out, but has since dropped to 77¢.

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Federal agency finds holes in Taseko mine’s draft environmental report – by Dirk Meissner (Vancouver Province/Canadian Press – July 17, 2012)

http://www.theprovince.com/index.html

VICTORIA — Taseko Mines has been ordered to rewrite an environmental impact statement about a proposed gold and copper operation in British Columbia’s central Interior after a federal agency concluded a draft was riddled with gaps, deficiencies and missing information.
 
The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency detailed its complaint in a report earlier this month dealing with Taseko’s controversial, $1.1 billion mine proposal near Williams Lake.
 
“The draft EIS does not meet the requirements of the EIS guidelines,” said the July 6 report. “There is substantial information missing from this draft EIS. The quality of all figures in the draft EIS is very poor.”
 
Williams Lake-area First Nations immediately seized on the report, saying the critical response from the federal agency confirms their view that the proposed project should be rejected. Tsilhqot’in Nation Tribal Chief Joe Alphonse said in a statement First Nations have known from the start the mine could not work.

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Sceptics await 11 million ounce Barkerville Gold approved NI43-101 resource statement – by Lawrence Williams (Mineweb.com – July 11, 2012)

www.mineweb.com

Barkerville Gold surprised the markets with the announcement of very large preliminary indicated gold resource assessments last week, but sceptics are awaiting official confirmation before climbing in.

LONDON (Mineweb) –  One of the surprise stories last week was the announcement by Canada’s Barkerville Gold of an enormous indicated mineral resource assessment on its principal properties in central British Columbia’s Cariboo Mining District which the company said it had to release early once the latest geological assessment was made known to the Board under Canadian stock market regulations. 

 Normally a company would wait for the full NI43-101 report to be approved by the relevant authorities and published, but the preliminary information received from the independent consultants assessing the resource represented such a huge ‘material change in conditions’ that the directors were obliged to report to shareholders as soon as they were made aware.
 
Indeed, the figures presented to the Board by the independent consultants, Geoex, assessed by well-known Canadian geologist Peter George, went a lot further than this estimated 10.63 million ounce indicated resource on the company’s Cow Mountain (also known as Gold Quartz) section. They suggested a geological potential for a massive 65-90 million ounces of gold on the 6.4 km long Island-Cow-Barkerville trend covering three adjacent mountains, all with a prior underground gold mining history.  Barkerville has been assessing mining these with large scale open pits.

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Barkerville in spotlight over gold find – by Peter Koven (National Post – July 7, 2012)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Did Barkerville Gold Mines Ltd. make one of the greatest Canadian gold discoveries in decades? If so, investors aren’t buying it just yet. Until last week, Vancouver-based Barkerville was a little-followed junior mining company on the TSX Venture Exchange, one of hundreds. It is now in the spotlight because of a massive gold resource it reported at its Cow Mountain project in central British Columbia.

Barkerville said drilling at Cow Mountain has uncovered a staggering 10.6 million ounces of indicated gold resources. The company’s press release also stated the “geological potential” of Cow Mountain could be as high as 90 million ounces.

To put it in perspective, the legendary Timmins gold camp has produced about 70 million ounces. Less than 100 million ounces are produced globally each year. It is unusual for a company to use geological potential figures at the top of a press release like that (particularly with such monstrous numbers), and it troubled some experts.

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B.C. Fraser River’s mining history still shaping waterway’s future – by Randy Boswell (Victoria Times Colonist – June 23, 2012)

http://www.timescolonist.com/index.html

British Columbia residents facing a flood emergency this weekend can partly blame 19th-century gold miners for their woes.
 
Two Canadian scientists have shown how the Fraser River — the waterway at the heart of British Columbia’s history, and currently the focus of a flood threat in Abbotsford and elsewhere in B.C.’s Lower Mainland — was significantly altered by 19th-century fortune seekers, whose dumped mine tailings from the Fraser’s gold-rich banks and tributaries accumulated at critical points along the southern course of the river and continue inching toward its Pacific outlet today.
 
The study of the ongoing “geomorphic impact” of 1800s-era placer mining in the Fraser watershed, co-authored by UBC researchers Andrew Nelson and Michael Church and published in the latest Geological Society of America (GSA) Bulletin, argues that present-day flood and fishery management for the 1,375-kilometre river — B.C.’s longest — need to account better for the “legacy effects” of the Gold Rush and carefully distinguish between the pre-1858, “natural” state of the Fraser’s riverbed and its post-Rush condition.
 
Millions of tonnes of gravel flushed into the Fraser by miners as early as 154 years ago have been “accumulating in the river in the Lower Mainland throughout the 20th century,” Church told Postmedia News.

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Coal is big business in B.C. – (Canadian Mining Journal – May 2012)

The Canadian Mining Journal is Canada’s first mining publication providing information on Canadian mining and exploration trends, technologies, operations, and industry events.

Coal is the second most important resource exported from British Columbia next to wood products. But ask someone in the province how well the forestry industry is doing and you’re likely to be faced with an icy stare. Coal is big business as the world­wide demand for coal grows and shows no sign of slowing, particularly in rapidly industrializing and developing economies. Asia in particular is hungry for B.C.’s hard coking coal, used in steelmaking, and almost four years of a soft economy have not slowed the demand.
 
This demand has led to greater interest in British Columbia’s resources from inter­national corporations, including the diver­sified mining giant, Xstrata Coal, which is located in Switzerland, and JX Nippon Oil & Gas (JX), based in Japan. Xstrata and JX recently announced a joint venture to acquire metallurgical coal properties in the Peace River region of northern Alberta. Xstrata Coal British Columbia will retain the significant share of the venture at 75% with JX purchasing a 25% for $435 million.
 
Xstrata and JX will be focusing their exploration and development efforts on three main deposits in the Peace River coal­fields. The 3,800-ha Lossan coal deposit has an estimated resource of 240 million tonnes that was acquired from Cline Mining in 2011. The Sukunka coal deposit, acquired from Calgary-based Talisman Energy in March 2012, is contiguous with the Lossan prop­erty, and has an estimated resource of 236 million tonnes. Finally, Xstrata also acquired First Coal Corporation’s assets, which rep­resented over 100,000 ha of contiguous coal licenses and applications.

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B.C.’s controversial former Britannia mine now serves as museum – by Scott Simpson, Postmedia News (Canada.com – May 13, 2012)

http://www.canada.com/index.html

VANCOUVER — Marshall Tichauer was still in his teens when his father decided it was time for him to make his own way in the world. “I turned 18. My father said, ‘Get a job’ and kicked me out,” Tichauer recalled.

Jobs weren’t difficult to find in the early 1960s. Tichauer lived in West Vancouver. He landed a job just up the highway at Britannia mine, which was still very much the Howe Sound company town it had been in its heyday in the 1920s and ’30s as the largest copper mine in the then-British Empire.

Like many of British Columbia’s major early industrial mines, Britannia got its start after a series of gold rushes that began in the Fraser River system in 1858 before spreading east and north to Rossland and Barkerville.

Those early prospecting opportunities threw open the door to waves of European and Asian adventurers across the British Columbia mainland — mining, not fish, furs or timber, was the catalyst for the settlement of the province.

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One project, one review — one controversy – by Scott Simpson (Vancouver Sun – May 11, 2012)

http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html
 
Federal commitment to streamline the environmental review process gets mixed reviews

Federal commitments to streamline environmental reviews of major resource projects sit well with the mining industry, but not so well with environmentalists, scientists and many other notable Canadians.
 
Miners have been a leading voice in calling on the Harper Conservatives to amend the review process to remove what they believe are needless delays in getting projects vetted by federal regulators.
 
They want duplication of paperwork eliminated, and they want Ottawa to commit its bureaucracy to fixed time limits for reviewing projects and rendering a verdict.
 
That could mean faster turnaround times on projects that typically take a decade to develop from early drilling investigations to operating mines.

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NEWS RELEASE: B.C.’s responsible resource growth to help Canada maintain its reign as a global mining powerhouse

Kamloops region is particularly poised for growth from new projects and expansions
 
KAMLOOPS, BC, May 10, 2012 /CNW/ – British Columbia’s robust and responsible resource sector will help propel the $140 billion in new mining investment expected across Canada over the next five years, says the Mining Association of Canada (MAC). MAC estimates that B.C. has the potential to see more than $30 billion in investment from 30 projects over the next 10 years.
 
“As the third-largest mining jurisdiction in the country, B.C. will be a major contributor to the overall strength of the mining industry, which we expect to remain steady for years to come. That will bring numerous economic benefits and opportunities to British Columbians, while at the same time, help Canada maintain its status as a global mining superpower,” Pierre Gratton, MAC President and CEO, said during a speech in Kamloops on Thursday to celebrate Mining Week in the B.C.-interior city.
 
The City of Kamloops declared May 6-12 Mining Week alongside other celebrations taking place across the province in May to recognize the importance of the industry to the B.C. economy.
 
The mineral exploration, development and mining industry generated $8.9 billion in economic activity in B.C. in 2010, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).  The industry generated more than 21,000 direct jobs, 8,200 of which were at operating mines across the province and paid average salaries of more than $100,000 annually.

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