Gold and Silver – Page 290 – Republic of Mining

Canadian Company: EPA is Evil, Let Us Create Giant Alaska Mine – by Hal Herring (Field and Stream – June 10, 2013)

June 11, 2013

http://www.fieldandstream.com/

There is nothing like a good anti-federal-government advertising campaign to rally support for, well, almost anything. In this time of Internal Revenue Service scandals and accusations that the Environmental Protection Agency has charged so-called “conservative” groups for Freedom of Information Act requests that they handed over to environmental groups for free, the time was ripe for a smart advertising professional to tap in to the zeitgeist and try, yet again, to sell a highly skeptical American public on the Pebble Project—a huge proposed gold and copper mine proposed by two foreign mining corporations to be built on public lands in the headwaters of Bristol Bay, Alaska.

On June 4, Northern Dynasty Minerals, Limited, a Vancouver, Canada-based corporation that owns 50 percent of the Pebble Project, ran an ad in the Washington Post and on various political websites that demands an end to what it calls EPA’s “black box bias” against the mine. The ad also claims that the EPA is manipulating public opinion and denying science in response the results of the EPA’s 14 month-long comprehensive Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment (BBWA) show that the Pebble Project does indeed threaten the greatest salmon fishery on earth (a $500 million industry annually) and the estimated 14,000 jobs that depend upon it, thus industrializing one of America’s wildest and most pristine expanses of public land, which would forever change the culture and economy of the 7,500 people, mostly Native Americans, who now call it home.

I’m not sure what the Canadian mining executives thought the report should have said. Perhaps that Pebble Project would build the first road, first power-generating facility, and first deep-water port in the region to open up mining on tens of thousands of acres of public land in the trackless headwaters of the Nushagak and Kvichak Rivers.

Miners may take more hits from weak gold prices after Newcrest – by Reuters U.S. (June 10, 2013)

June 10, 2013

http://www.reuters.com/

SYDNEY/TORONTO – (Reuters) – The pain is not likely to be over for investors in mining shares after the steepest drop in gold prices in a generation led to a $6 billion asset writedown at Australia’s Newcrest Mining, fuelling speculation of more to come.

A $200 plunge in prices in two days in April heightened fears that gold’s 12-year rally may have topped out.

For nearly a month the price has languished around 1,400 an ounce, which could force more miners to write down the value of their reserves – calculated based on a higher price – and eroding the value of projects, some of which may no longer be profitable.

Gold miners were already struggling with the impact of soaring costs, including higher wages for workers and fuel prices, which have reduced margins and eaten into cash generation.

“We certainly expect we will see further writedowns from other producers as we … get closer to reporting season. It could be a trend,” said David Lennox, an analyst at Fat Prophets.

Newcrest, Australia’s biggest gold miner, said on Friday it would write down the value of mines in Australia, Papua New Guinea and Africa.

UPDATE 1-Kyrgyz MPs set new deadline for deal with Centerra Gold – by Olga Dzyubenko (Reuters India – June 5, 2013)

June 5, 2013

http://in.reuters.com/

BISHKEK, June 5 (Reuters) – Kyrgyzstan’s parliament has set a new Sept. 10 deadline for the government to agree an improved mining deal with Canada’s Centerra Gold or unilaterally cancel the current arrangement.

Centerra, which runs the central Asian nation’s flagship Kumtor gold mine, has come under pressure to revise a deal struck in 2009 after a state commission said it was underpaying the government and had caused “colossal” environmental damage.

Last week, hundreds of protesters forced a brief stoppage to production at the mine, hidden high in the Tien Shan mountains near the Chinese border.

In late February, the legislature gave the government three months to strike a new deal with Centerra, but the government missed a June 1 deadline, saying it needed more time for talks. These include a proposal for Kyrgyzstan to swap its stake in the Toronto-listed company for joint ownership of Kumtor.

After hours of heated debates, the new deadline was adopted by a 65-5 vote. “There are three options. The first is to redraw the 2009 agreements and start working in line with Kyrgyz laws, including taxation,” Economy Minister Temir Sariyev said before the vote.

Osisko Mining Corporation: The golden touch – by Will Daynes(Business Excellence Mining – June 4, 2013)

June 5, 2013

http://www.bus-ex.com/

ADVERTORIAL

Following more than 800,000 metres of drilling and intense preparation, financing and community relations works, in addition to obtaining hundreds of permits and constructing the actual mine, it was in April 2011 that the first gold bar was poured at Osisko Mining’s Malartic mine in Canada.

The pouring of this gold bar represented a sight that had not been seen in Malartic for 28 years previously and what followed a month later was the commencing of commercial production. Today the Canadian Malartic deposit is recognised as being one of the largest gold reserves in production in the country with proven and probable reserves of 10.11 million ounces of gold. In fact this figure continues to grow to this day through on-going drilling on adjacent mineralised zones.

Osisko Mining Corporation, a mid-tier gold producer based in Montreal, Quebec, is a mining company focused on acquiring, exploring, developing and mining gold properties. In addition to the Canadian Malartic gold mine in Malartic, Quebec, Osisko continues its exploration work on the Hammond Reef Project in Northern Ontario, the Kirkland Lake Project in North-eastern Ontario, as well as other projects elsewhere in Canada and around the world.

NEWS RELEASE: Mining Association of British Columbia and the BC Mining HR Task Force Celebrate the Winners of the 2013 BC Mining HR Diversity Award at the Grand Opening of the New BC AMTA Offices in Williams Lake BC

June 5, 2013

June 04, 2013 17:14 ET

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA–(Marketwired – June 4, 2013) – The Mining Association of BC (MABC) and the BC Mining HR Task Force (Task Force) are pleased to celebrate the winners of the 2013 BC Mining HR Diversity Award (HR Diversity Award), sponsored by Ernst & Young. The award was presented to the BC Aboriginal Mine Training Association and New Gold on May 1st, 2013, during BC Mining Week, at the Women in Mining Gala in Vancouver.

The award recognizes that the BC AMTA/New Gold initiative has had a significant, positive impact at the New Afton operation, on its employees, and for nearby communities. “This award is about recognizing work that is being done to create opportunities for people who might not have found their way to our industry otherwise,” said Zoë Younger, Vice President of Corporate Affairs at MABC, and HR Diversity Award co-chair. “One of the neat things about this program is that it can continue to grow, and the approach can be duplicated in communities across BC where mines are opening or operating,” she added.

While each submission had its strength, the joint BC AMTA and New Gold nomination presented the strongest emphasis on encouraging and supporting diversity within the workplace, with tangible results. The metrics associated with the BC AMTA initiative speak for themselves, and their vision in creating a program that provides skills, training and work experience for Aboriginal people in our industry is being duly recognized.

Environment assessment for Alaska’s Pebble mine ‘theatre of the absurd’ – Northern Dynasty- by Henry Lazenby (MiningWeekly.com – June 5, 2013)

June 5, 2013

http://www.miningweekly.com/page/americas-home

TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Dual-listed project developer Northern Dynasty Minerals has filed a 205-page submission with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in response to its call for public comments on the revised draft Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment (BBWA), calling the draft report and the process used to complete it “biased, manipulative and contrary to the EPA’s own guidelines”.

Northern Dynasty president and CEO Ronald Thiessen said the 2013 draft BBWA, released in April, suffers from the same significant shortcomings as the original report published in May 2012 – in particular, that the EPA continued to assess the environmental effects of a hypothetical mine of its own invention, one that did not employ modern engineering standards, environmental safeguards or project-specific mitigation measures and could not be permitted under US or Alaska law.

Despite the fact that the EPA’s “hypothetical mine” was sited at the location of the Pebble deposit, Northern Dynasty believed the BBWA authors continued to refuse to consider the most extensive scientific data set available on the region – environmental baseline data collected by the Pebble Limited Partnership (PLP) at a cost of about $150-million.

Northern Dynasty said the EPA’s failure to fully consider the PLP’s environmental data was contrary to its own guidelines for data quality and was compounded by the fact that the BBWA study authors had never set foot on the Pebble project site.

Centerra mulls offering stake in Kumtor mine to Kyrgyz government amid violent protests – by Peter Koven (National Post – June 5, 2013)

June 5, 2013

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

TORONTO – As it faces a barrage of nationalization threats in Kyrgyzstan, Centerra Gold Inc. is studying a possible solution: giving the government a direct stake in its flagship mine.

Centerra revealed Tuesday that it negotiating a potential transaction with the Kyrgyz government that would convert the state’s 32.7% ownership of Centerra shares into direct ownership of the Kumtor mine through a joint venture.

The talks come amid a major crisis for Centerra. Last week, the Toronto-based miner had to temporarily shut down Kumtor after hundreds of protestors set up a roadblock near the mine and shut down a substation that was providing grid power.

The government later declared a state of emergency as hundreds of protestors clashed with riot police near Kumtor. The mine has since re-opened and the road is now clear again. “Probably by today or tomorrow, we’ll be at full capacity again,” said John Pearson, Centerra’s vice-president of investor relations.

The protestors were demanding that the government’s 2009 investment agreement with Centerra be torn up, with some calling for outright nationalization.

Goldcorp – Éléonore mine: [First Nations] People in partnership in northern Quebec – by John O’Hanlon (Business Excellence Mining – June 4, 2013

June 5, 2013

http://www.bus-ex.com/

ADVERTORIAL

James Bay, a tongue of water licking out between Ontario and Quebec, is by any standards remote. The Cree nation that lives on its shores have staked their claim, not always without difficulty, to such economic development as has taken place in the region, but today the greatest impact on their way of life is undoubtedly mining.

Nobody coming into this area should doubt the need to involve the Cree, as traditional owners of the land, in their plans. Perhaps the highest profile local business to have been developed is Air Creebec, founded in 1982 and today carrying more than 60,000 passengers a year – it’s a wholly-owned Cree enterprise, and its largest customer is Goldcorp, one of the world’s fastest growing senior gold producers, with operations and development projects located throughout the Americas. Goldcorp plans to fly more than a third of that number to its Éléonore project during 2013.

A Canadian company headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Goldcorp employs more than 16,000 people worldwide however one of its most significant current projects is its fast developing Éléonore project located some 200 kilometres inland from the Cree centre of Wemindji on the east cost of James Bay. When it comes into operation in 2014, according to figures from a pre-feasibility study published in 2011, it should be processing 3,500 tonnes of gold bearing ore a day, extracted from an underground resource that is known to have a lot more potential than so far confirmed.

Barrick delays Pascua-Lama mine start again (Reuters U.S. – June 4, 2013)

June 4, 2013

http://www.reuters.com/

TORONTO, (Reuters) – Canada’s Barrick Gold Corp said it would delay the startup of its Pascua-Lama gold mine in Chile and Argentina past late 2014 and that the project would probably exceed its current budget of up to $8.5 billion as a result.

In a filing late with Canadian regulators late on Monday, Barrick attributed the delay to water management work required by Chile’s new environmental regulator.

A Chilean court in April partially halted construction of the project, which straddles the border between Chile and Argentina, to weigh claims by indigenous communities that Barrick has damaged pristine glaciers and harmed water supplies.

Chile’s environmental regulator then put its own halt on work at the gold-silver project in May, citing serious violations.

“While the company is assessing opportunities for potential reductions in certain expenditures, the delay beyond 2014 is expected to result in a related increase in capital cost,” Barrick said in the filing.

While all nonenvironmental work is halted in Chile, construction continues on the Argentine side of the project. The delay is just the latest hurdle for the project, which Barrick has had on its books for more than decade. Last year, the miner pushed back first production by a year and raised its estimate of capital costs by about 70 percent.

Six reasons why the gold rush is over – Nouriel Roubini – by Lawrence Williams (Mineweb.com – June 3, 2013)

June 3, 2013

http://www.mineweb.com/

Professor Nouriel Roubini, never a fan of gold, gives his reasons why he thinks that gold is in a deflating bubble situation and is set to trend lower – perhaps down to $1,000 by 2015.

LONDON (MINEWEB) – As a Devil’s Advocate writing a contrary opinion to those who are convinced that the gold price will soon resume its upwards trajectory, Economist Nouriel Roubini has few equals. Indeed to the ardent gold believer Roubini may well be considered the Devil himself, rather than just an Advocate for the Satanic master.

In his latest opinion on gold, Roubini pulls few punches, although he does condescend at the end that the gold price will be volatile and could still temporarily move higher in the next few years. But he qualifies this in saying that the overall trend will be lower over time as the global economy mends itself. “The gold rush is over”, he says and predicts gold falling towards $1,000 by 2015. The run up in gold from $800 in early 2009 to over $1900 in 2012 “had all the features of a bubble” he says. “And now, like all asset-price surges that are divorced from the fundamentals of supply and demand, the gold bubble is deflating.”

While any number of the bullish commentators on gold take delight in publishing a number of reasons why gold will move upwards, Roubini does the opposite with his six reasons why gold will continue to fall back.

Hundreds storm office of Canadian Centerra mine in Kyrgyzstan, 55 wounded in clashes – by Leila Saralayeva (Associated Press/National Post – June 1, 2013)

June 3, 2013

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

BARSKOON, Kyrgyzstan — Hundreds of stone-throwing protesters besieged a Canadian gold mine in Kyrgyzstan on Friday, clashing violently with riot police and prompting the president to declare a state of emergency.

Over 50 people were wounded and 80 detained in the clashes, authorities said. The protest also triggered widespread unrest in the southern city of Jalal-Abad, where hundreds stormed the governor’s office.

The twin developments threatened further turmoil in this impoverished Central Asian nation of five million, which hosts a U.S. base supporting military operations in nearby Afghanistan. Protesters want the northeastern Kumtor gold mine to be nationalized and the company to provide more benefits.

The mine, operated by Toronto-based Centerra Gold, is the largest foreign-owned gold mine in the former Soviet Union. It accounts for about 12% of the nation’s economy and has been at the centre of heated debate between those favouring nationalization and officials who believe that would deter much-needed foreign investment.

Gowest looks to employ 50 at new mine – by Ron Grech (Timmins Daily Press – June 3, 2013)

June 3, 2013

The Daily Press is the city of Timmins broadsheet newspaper.

TIMMINS – Greg Romain’s involvement with Gowest Gold reconnects him with the city he was born and raised in. The Timmins native, who still has close family here, is the president and chief executive of the company which owns the Frankfield deposit which is about 15 kilometres northeast of the Kidd Creek mine.

Last week, Gowest announced it had signed a “non-binding letter of intent” to process its ore and produce high-grade gold concentrate at Glencore Xstrata’s metallurgical site. The deal is expected to be finalized later this year.

“They have allowed us to come in and use that line which is the old Montcalm circuit,” Romain told The Daily Press. He said there is about $10 million in work and installations required to convert the line for gold ore processing.

The upshot is that it eliminates the need to build a new facility. As a result, Gowest can begin full production two or three years earlier than originally planned. Gowest is looking at starting commercial production in 2015. “If we were doing this from scratch, you’d be talking 2018,” said Romain.

Oddly enough, Romain worked at the very same Kidd metallurgical site for about six or seven summers when he was a student. He worked primarily in the zinc plant, back when it was owned by Texas Gulf.

Kyrgyzstan protesters storm Canadian mining office – The Associated Press/CBC News World (May 31, 2013)

May 31, 2013

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/

Centerra Gold’s electricity cut off after rioters enter transformer unit

Kyrgyzstan has imposed a state of emergency on a northern district after clashes between riot police and protesters over Centerra Gold’s Kumtor mine.

Hundreds of protesters in Barskoon stormed the office of a gold mine run by the Canadian-based company, demanding its nationalization and more social benefits.

Protests at the Kumtor mine operated by Centerra Gold have been going on for several days. Police arrested 80 people Thursday night after several hundred, some on horseback, entered a power transformer unit and cut off electricity to the mine for several hours. That effectlvely prevented the mine from shutting down.

Centerra says the protests are illegal and that it is working with the government and local authorities to resolve the situation. President Almazbek Atambayev imposed the state of emergency and a curfew on Dzhety Ohuz district of the Issyk Kul region until June 10, his office said.

NEWS RELEASE: New Gold Agrees to Acquire Rainy River Resources Growing Gold Reserves by Over 40 Percent per Share

May 31, 2013

May 31, 2013

(All figures are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise indicated)

TORONTO, May 31, 2013 /CNW/ – New Gold Inc. (“New Gold”) (TSX and NYSE MKT:NGD) and Rainy River Resources Ltd. (“Rainy River”) (TSX: RR) today jointly announce that they have entered into a definitive acquisition agreement (the “Agreement”), whereby New Gold will offer to acquire all of the outstanding common shares of Rainy River through a friendly take-over bid. Under the terms of the Agreement, New Gold will offer, at the election of each holder of Rainy River common shares, 0.5 of a common share of New Gold or $3.83 in cash, in each case subject to pro ration (the “Offer”). The Offer represents a premium of 42% over the closing price of the Rainy River shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange on May 30, 2013, the last day of trading prior to announcement of the Offer, and a 67% premium to Rainy River’s 20-day volume weighted average trading price. The maximum number of New Gold shares to be issued will be approximately 25.8 million and the maximum cash consideration will be approximately $198 million. The Offer values the fully-diluted in-the-money share capital of Rainy River, net of Rainy River’s current cash balance, at approximately $310 million.

Transaction Highlights – New Gold

• Accretive on all key per share metrics – gold reserves, net asset value, future production and cash flow
• Adds 4.0 million ounce gold reserve in Ontario, further growing New Gold’s Canadian presence

Kyrgyzstan imposes state of emergency to protect Centerra mine – by Olga Dzyubenko (Reuters U.S. – May 31, 2013)

May 31, 2013

http://www.reuters.com/

BISHKEK – (Reuters) – Kyrgyzstan’s government imposed a state of emergency on a northern district on Friday to protect Centerra Gold’s Kumtor mine from protesters.

Police on Friday cleared away demonstators who had been blocking the road to Kumtor for days and arrested 92 people, Prime Minister Zhantoro Satybaldiyev told a news conference.

A few hours later police used tear gas and stun grenades in clashes with villagers who tried to seize a substation and cut power supplies to the mine, a police spokesman said. Several protesters were hurt.

Hundreds of villagers had blocked the road to Kumtor, in Dzhety Oguz district, on Tuesday afternoon and threatened to move on the mine if the government did not tear up its agreement with the company.

President Almazbek Atambayev imposed the state of emergency and a curfew on Dzhety Ohuz district of the Issyk Kul region until June 10, his office said. “Those who broke the law must be brought to justice in line with the full severity of the law,” it quoted Atambayev as saying during a meeting with security officials.