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Junior Exploration Sector

SolGold’s Nick Mather our Mining Person of the Year for 2018 – by John Cumming (Northern Miner – February 27, 2019)

Northern Miner

Nicholas Mather, president and CEO of Australian junior SolGold, is The Northern Miner’s Mining Person of the Year for 2018 in recognition of his role as the driving force behind the wildly successful grassroots team that has drilled off the world-class Alpala gold-copper deposit at its Cascabel project in Imbabura province in northern Ecuador, with potentially many more discoveries to come in the region.

The past year was a pivotal one for Toronto- and London-listed SolGold. In November 2018, it tabled an updated resource for Alpala that tallied a staggering 2.1 billion indicated tonnes grading 0.41% copper and 0.29 gram gold per tonne, or 0.60% copper equivalent (at a 0.2% copper-equivalent cut-off), plus another 900 million inferred tonnes grading 0.27% copper and 0.13 gram gold, or 0.35% copper equivalent, at the same cut-off. These numbers are based on 133,600 metres of drilling.

That translates to a contained metal content of 8.4 million tonnes copper and 19.4 million oz. gold in the indicated category, and another 2.5 million tonnes copper and 3.8 million oz. gold in inferred.

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Northern Dynasty raises $10 million to develop Alaska Pebble project – by Cecilia Jamasmie (Mining.com – March 13, 2019)

http://www.mining.com/

Northern Dynasty Minerals (TSX:NDM) has entered into a bought deal financing with Cantor Fitzgerald Canada to raise $10 million that will allow the miner to further advance its Pebble copper-gold-silver project in Alaska.

The deal prices the company’s shares at 64 Canadian cents, a 13.5% discount to the stock’s price before the financing was announced.

The Canadian miner has also granted the underwriters an over-allotment option to acquire up to an additional 2.34 million-plus shares, which could raise another $1.5 million.

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Northern miners exploring for investors at Prospectors and Developers conference – by Eric White (CBC News Sudbury – March 5, 2019)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/

More dollars available for mining exploration, but cannabis stocks luring away many investors

Pat Dubreuil is working late nights this week in Toronto. The president of Sudbury-based Manitou Gold is courting investors who might want to inject cash into two potential gold mines in the north.

And at the annual conference of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, that usually means late night conversations over drinks. “Quite a few relationships and deals are built over a good craft beer. That’s the nature of the business,” says Dubreuil.

“You can do the math real quick on the back of a napkin and understand what’s going on and what the plan is.” On top of touting the drilling results from Manitou Gold’s properties near Dubreuilville and Dryden, Dubreuil is also talking of his company’s partnership with artificial intelligence exploration pioneer GoldSpot.

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Junior mining sector facing mass exodus, says Kaiser – by Henry Lazenby (Mining Journal – March 5, 2019)

https://www.mining-journal.com/

About half the current population of TSXV junior miners don’t have enough cash to keep the lights on for another year, investment guru John Kaiser said at PDAC 2019. While junior resource company funding recovered from 2016 to mid-2018, it had since been weak, putting many in the sector on a “path to extinction”.

Kaiser said the cannabis-crypto bubble that had in the past few years sucked the oxygen out of the juniors’ room had now passed and was no longer an excuse. But what exactly would bring investors with risk capital back to resource juniors remained a very complex issue, he said.

Kaiser believes institutional money will not come back to the sector until a distinct multi-year uptrend has become visible, something which in his view is unlikely to happen for metals other than gold in a current macro environment of trade protectionism. This was potentially bad news for “optionality plays” in the short term, he said.

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Canada lithium mining hopeful takes another big hit – by Frik Els (Mining.com – February 18, 2019)

http://www.mining.com/

Nemaska Lithium (TSE: NMX) announced on Monday it has terminated a multi-year supply agreement with Livent Corporation that would cost the Quebec company up to $20m to settle.

The deal with Livent, spun out of US lithium major FMC Corp last year, saw Nemaska provide up to 8,000 tonnes per year (28,000 tonnes in total during the term of the contract) of lithium carbonate starting in April this year.

According to a press released late on Monday, Nemaska told Livent it “might have no option but to terminate” the agreement and repay Livent the USD$10 million the it received in April 2017 “plus a similar amount as a termination fee”.

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Quebec lithium developer’s stock craters after cost blowout – by Amanda Stutt (Mining.com – February 13, 2019)

http://www.mining.com/

Nemaska Lithium’s (TSE: NMX) stock plummeted Wednesday after disclosing it has been forced to revise the budget for the Whabouchi lithium mine and Shawinigan electrochemical plant upward by C$375 million. The company, with a $300 million market cap on the TSX, clawed back some of the early day’s losses, but still closed the day down 35%.

Nemaska, which has also received funding from the Quebec provincial and Canadian federal governments, is building the Whabouchi hard rock lithium mine in the James Bay region and Shawinigan processing plant north of Montreal, aiming to put Canada on the global lithium production map.

Nemaska has already spent over $138 million on the Whabouchi mine and mill, and another $67.3 million for the plant in Shawinigan. The additional funding is largely related to installation and indirect costs, said the company. Direct purchase package costs – mainly equipment – are in line with the original budget.

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Cannabis craze weeds out junior mining field – by Joe Bavier and Barbara Lewis (Reuters Canada – February 7, 2019)

https://ca.reuters.com/

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) – A boom in cannabis investment is siphoning capital away from mining and hitting junior miners hardest, forcing them to up their game and potentially improving the quality of projects in a sector long rife with cowboy speculators.

Canada’s relaxation of cannabis laws culminated in legalization for recreational use in October. Other jurisdictions are following suit or liberalizing their laws on medical or health use, creating an industry that has lured a breed of high-risk, high-return investors.

The world’s top three listed cannabis companies – Canopy Growth, Tilray and Aurora Cannabis – have a combined market value of around $30 billion. And consumers are expected to spend over $7 billion on cannabis products in Canada alone this year, according to Deloitte.

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Many Toronto-listed miners don’t disclose environmental and social info — report – by Staff (Mining.com – January 23, 2019)

http://www.mining.com/

A report issued by the Amsterdam-based Responsible Mining Foundation reveals that many Toronto-listed junior and mid-tier mining companies do not properly disclose environmental, social and governance information related to their mine sites in Australia, Burkina Faso, Canada, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Mexico, Kyrgyz Republic, and Suriname.

The study assessed mine-site-level disclosure by 12 companies and their 31 mine sites located across nine countries and covered 15 key environmental, social and governance issues of public interest, known as ESG.

The average score when it comes to the disclosure of such issues was 11%, with only three of the 31 mine sites surpassing that mean with a score of 25%. “Where companies do publish site-level ESG information, the data is often presented in ways that reduce its usefulness to stakeholders.

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Is Global Atomic Stephen Roman’s next big thing? – by Trish Saywell (Northern Miner – January 21, 2019)

Northern Miner

Serial mine builder and financier Stephen Roman cut his teeth working for Denison Mines Corp. (TSX: DML), the uranium company built by his father. After starting there as a miner at the age of nineteen, he spent the next 25 years at the uranium producer before striking out on his own in 1990-1991.

Roman went on to build several mines in the gold space, the most recent, Harte Gold Corp.’s (TSX: HRT; US-OTC: HRTFF), Sugar mine, in Ontario. Among his other accomplishments: Building the Black Fox mine, now owned by McEwen Mining (TSX: MUX; NYSE: MUX), and selling Gold Eagle to Goldcorp. (TSX: G; NYSE: GG) for $1.5 billion.

But Roman’s interest in uranium never waned. In January 2005 he set up Global Uranium Corp.—now called Global Atomic Corp. (TSXV: GLO; US-OTC: SYIFF)—and decided to focus the company’s exploration dollars on West Africa.

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My Take on Snow Lake: New exploration of previous mine site yields promising results – by Marc Jackson (Thompson Citizen – January 18, 2019)

https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/

Mining is the industry that drives the economy in the Snow Lake area … it has for over 100 years. All of the mines the industry is based on have been in the ground since the Earth was formed; however, it was only when technology allowed mine finders the ability to locate orebodies that they were able to exploit them. As technology continually advances, many of those occurrences mined or explored in decades past are now getting a second look.

This was the case with the Lalor Mine (Chisel Lake Basin) and the Snow Lake Mine (New Britannia and Nor-Acme), but it is also playing a part in the resurrection of exploration on several lithium properties on the east side of Wekusko Lake (Thompson Brother Cluster and the Sherritt Gordon Cluster), as well as the mine that originally brought pioneers to the area early in the 20th century – Herb Lake’s Rex/Laguna.

Back in the 1930s and ’40s, Herb Lake, Manitoba was a prosperous mining town. It hummed with activity and even though it couldn’t be accessed by anything other than boat and a winter road, it was home to between 600 and 700 people.

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Is Canada losing the exploration game?: The hurdles to increased exploration spending in Canada – by Virginia Heffernan (CIM Magazine – January 03, 2019)

http://magazine.cim.org/en/

Canada’s status as the hands-down favourite destination for exploration investment is eroding as mineral deposits become more difficult to access, competition for capital broadens, and regulatory uncertainty continues to irk potential investors.

Over the past decade, Canada’s share of global exploration spending for non-ferrous minerals slipped from 20.5 per cent in 2008 to less than 14 per cent in 2017 before inching back to 15 per cent in 2018, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, which bases its analysis on private sector spending intentions.

Although Canada remains a narrow favourite among individual countries, S&P treats it as a region “for the purpose of continental-scale comparisons.” As such, it has dropped to third place behind Latin America and the “Rest of the World” (mostly Europe and Asia) from second place in 2008.

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Grand Theft Cobalt: Rotterdam – by Kit Chellel and Mark Burton (Bloomberg News – December 27, 2018)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Thieves are pulling off audacious metal heists at Europe’s largest port. They’re even stealing from the Cobalt Jesus.

A group of bankers, brokers, and journalists was huddled outside a dingy warehouse along the Nieuwe Maas River in Rotterdam on a gray morning last January. All around was the industrial sprawl of Europe’s largest port, a landscape of cranes and colorful shipping containers stacked up like Lego bricks, reversing trucks and squalling gulls.

The building was run by Vollers Group GmbH, a logistics specialist based in Germany. One of its managers, Martijn Wijbrandi, led his visitors inside to get high-viz jackets and a safety briefing. We’ve never had a problem with theft, Wijbrandi said, but it pays to be careful.

He pointed out the alarm system, secured by a PIN code. On the warehouse floor, everyone filed past piles of magnesium bricks and bags of coffee to an area walled off by steel sheets that rose almost to the ceiling. A security camera was aimed at the padlocked sliding door.

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Barrick’s no-premium Randgold deal expected to spur more mining M&A in 2019 – by Niall McGee (Globe and Mail – January 1, 2019)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Junior mining companies struggled once again to raise capital in 2018 with
the lowest level of equity issuance in the North American metals and mining
sector in 13 years. To fill the void, many have turned to more expensive
methods of raising capital, including royalty agreements and streaming deals.

Barrick Gold Corp.’s “no-premium” US$6-billion acquisition of Randgold Resources Ltd. is expected to trigger more deal making in the struggling Canadian gold sector in 2019.

During the great commodities boom of the mid-2000s, Barrick and others unveiled splashy multibillion-dollar-premium takeovers only eventually to take massive writedowns. But in September, Barrick broke away from the old model by announcing it will pay merely the market price for Randgold. The deal was warmly greeted by shareholders on both sides as a sensible solution in a difficult market.

“M&A has slowly been re-entering investor consciousness, and we suspect this trend will gain momentum in 2019, especially since there have now been a few successful transactions,” BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc. analyst Andrew Kaip wrote in a note to clients, including the Barrick-Randgold deal as an example.

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SolGold CEO excited by prospects for Ecuadorian copper-gold – by Barbara Lewis (Reuters U.S. – November 22, 2018)

https://www.reuters.com/

LONDON, Nov 22 (Reuters) – SolGold’s coveted Ecuadorian copper-gold prospect may be 20 percent bigger than the mining group said earlier this week, its chief executive Nick Mather said on Thursday.

SolGold, in which Mather has a near 5 percent stake, said on Tuesday that its Alpala project in Ecuador’s Cascabel region was around double the size and grade quality it was known to be in December 2017.

“We think there’s still 20 percent to go,” Mather said, adding he expected it to be around two years before work would start on building a mine at Alpala.

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Site visit: IDM keen on Red Mountain in Golden Trianglev – by Rutendo Munatsirei Mining.com – November 1, 2018)

http://www.mining.com/

STEWART, BRITISH COLUMBIA — Vancouver-based IDM Mining (TSXV: IDM; US-OTC: IDMMF) is steadily advancing its wholly owned Red Mountain gold project in northwestern British Columbia’s Golden Triangle region.

“We are about to have one of the few shovel-ready mines in Canada, and it’s going to do the one thing the mining business hasn’t lately — generate significant cash flow,” IDM president and CEO Robert McLeod tells The Northern Miner on a visit to the project.

Red Mountain stands between the Cambria Icefield and its largest outlet, the Bromley Glacier. From the nearby town of Stewart, it is a 10-minute helicopter ride. Placer mining began in the valley below Red Mountain in the early 1900s, when prospectors were leading Stewart’s first wave of European settlement.

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