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Welcome back to your weekly mining news recap, where we catch you up on some of the news you may have missed. This week’s headlines include Alamos Gold completing the expansion of its Young-Davidson mine complex, Lundin Gold restarting its Fruta del Norte gold mine in Ecuador and Wood Mackenzie reporting that metals production will need to halve emissions by 2040 to meet Paris Agreement goals.

B2Gold’s new solar project at its Fekola mine in Mali will produce an added 30 megawatts of power for the site and be one of the world’s largest off-grid hybrid solar and heavy fuel oil plants. Once completed, the solar plant is expected to save the company $9 million per year, reduce processing costs by more than seven per cent and decrease heavy fuel oil usage by at least 13.1 million litres and CO2 emissions by 39,000 tonnes each year. While construction is currently on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is expected to be completed within six months of restarting.

Enduro Metals has released drill results from the exploration program at its Newmont Lake project in northern British Columbia and announced new gold drilling targets. The company reported results of 144 metres of 3.18 grams per tonne of gold from drill core that was unsampled by the project’s previous operator. As the company’s technical review states that only 19 per cent of the total core has been examined, it plans to re-examine previous holes in the project’s NW zone and new gold targets, as the results suggest there is extended mineralization in the area.

Alamos Gold has completed the lower mine expansion at its Young-Davidson mine complex in northern Ontario. The company has commissioned the Northgate shaft at the complex, as well as the underground crusher and conveyor system, which it undertook in order to access deeper ore that was not accessed in previous operations. The expansion will increase production to an estimated 8,000 tonnes per day overall, increase the complex’s average annual output to over 200,000 ounces of gold and increase the mine life by 14 years.

Barrick Gold announced that its subsidiary, Barrick PD, has given a dispute notice to the Papua New Guinea government over its decision to not extend the lease of the Porgera mine. The government announced in April that it would not extend the mine’s lease due to social and environmental concerns, which Barrick PD argues is in violation of the country’s bilateral investment treaty with Australia as well as international law on foreign investment. The company has stated that if the dispute is not resolved through consultations or negotiations, it will refer the dispute to the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes.

Lundin Gold has restarted operations at its Fruta del Norte gold mine in Ecuador, more than three months after operations were suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company stated that the mine’s mill is processing ore from a stockpile, and estimates that it will produce up to 3,500 tonnes of ore per day over the next two months. The company also released its outlook for 2020, estimating that the mine will produce between 150,000 and 170,000 ounces of gold and that the company’s total gold production for 2020 will reach between 200,000 and 220,000 ounces.

Baffinland Iron Mines and the Qikiqtani Inuit Association have signed a new agreement for Inuit oversight of the company’s Mary River mine in Nunavut worth over $1 billion over the life of the mine, as reported by CBC. The legally binding agreement gives the Qikiqtani Inuit Association more authority over the mine’s environmental impacts, and includes an Inuit stewardship program for all communities impacted by the mine. The agreement is meant to address previous concerns over the company’s expansion plan for the mine, which includes building a railway, and the company says that the benefits outlined in the agreement are contingent on the plan moving forward.

Research and consultancy group Wood Mackenzie has released a new report which states that emissions from metals production will need to halve by 2040 in order to meet the Paris Agreement’s decarbonization goals, as reported by Mining.com. The report proposes raising the price of carbon dioxide per tonne to US$110 by 2030 to put more pressure on the mining industry to meet emissions goals and adopt technological changes. According to the report, increasing electrification and investor pressure through ESG principles will also help accelerate emissions compliance.

Wesdome Gold Mines has announced the results from the ongoing exploration program at its Eagle River mine in northern Ontario, suggesting extended mineralization of more than 1,000 metres underground. Results from drilling at the mine’s Falzon zone include 314.4 grams per tonne of gold over six metres, 68.4 grams per tonne of gold over 2.3 metres and 68.4 grams per tonne of gold over 2.3 metres. The company has said it will conduct more drilling in 2020 to try to better define the mineralization zones in the area.

Alberta’s provincial government is looking to enact a workaround for sand mining operations following a decision by the Alberta Court of Appeal in May which ruled that sand was a mineral, as reported by CTV News. The ruling determined that large-scale sand-mining operations would be regulated as quarries, which have more complex approval processes, rather than pits. The decision affected approximately 500 applications asking for pit authorization. The government’s proposed legislation, Bill 31, would allow sand mining to be regulated as before and would allow those applications that have been stalled to resume.

A newly published journal article says that spreading rock dust, a mining byproduct, on half of the world’s farmland could remove two billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air each year, as reported by The Guardian. The technique, known as enhanced rock weathering, works due to chemical reactions that capture greenhouse gases into carbonates as rock particles degrade. Researchers behind the article state that basalt, which many mines already stockpile, is the most efficient rock type to capture CO2.

RPMGlobal has acquired Revolution Mining Software, a mine scheduling optimisation company, and its flagship schedule optimisation tool (SOT), as reported by Global Mining Review. SOT, which was developed based on research by Laurentian University’s Mining Innovation, Rehabilitation and Applied Research Corporation (MIRARCO), is a program that helps miners improve productivity by optimising a mine’s schedule according to its net present value. The company has also acquired Revolution Mining Software’s Attain and SurfaceSOT software solutions.

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