The price of gold may have struggled this week but nothing could spoil the mood for mining giant Newmont Goldcorp as it announced the arrival of Canada’s most high tech gold mine.
Officially opening the Borden Gold Project near Chapleau, Ontario, Newmont Goldcorp President Tom Palmer said: “Electric underground fleet will eliminate diesel particulate matter from the underground environment and lower greenhouse gas emissions. This will help reduce energy costs, protect employee health and minimize impacts to the environment.”
Dubbed “the mine of the future”, Borden will also use Newmont’s line of sustainable and electric mining equipment and feature the mining powerhouse’s state-of-the-art digital mining technologies. It should reach commercial production in the fourth quarter of this year.
In further Canadian mining news, Ximen Mining (TSX-V:XIM) announced that it received an exploration permit for its Providence claim located in southern British Columbia.
“The Providence property covers five historic past-producing mines for silver, gold, lead and zinc,” the company said. “The most significant of these is the Providence mine, which operated intermittently from 1893 to 1973, and produced a total of 183 kilograms of gold (5,884 ounces), 42,552 kilograms of silver (1,368,079 ounces), 183 tonnes of lead, 118 tonnes of zinc from 10,426 Metric tonnes of material.”
According to the Vancouver-based miner, the Providence claim covers 190 hectares in the Greenwood Mining Camp and adjoins the Gold Drop property currently optioned and being drilled by GGX Gold (TSX.V: GGX).
Meanwhile, Small Cap Power published a list of four junior gold stocks making outstanding progress this summer. It picked K92 Mining, the exploration and development firm focused on Papua New Guinea; Gran Colombia Gold, a Canada-based gold producer with its primary focus in Colombia, where it is currently the largest underground gold and silver producer; Mandalay Resources, an emerging gold producer that operates the Costerfield mine in central Victoria, Australia, and the Björkdal mine in Sweden; and Leagold, the mid-tier gold producer with a focus on high-yield targets in Latin America.
Junior gold miners and their shareholders aren’t the only ones who have been enjoying a good year: a Bloomberg report this week suggested that four of the world’s largest individual gold magnates had added $1.8 billion to their fortunes in 2019 so far, principally thanks to the jump in the price of gold and the leveraged effect this has had on gold mining stocks.
Canada’s miners may have missed out on some investment in recent years, however, due to the knock on effect of marijuana legalisation. According to Australian Mining, this butterfly effect saw Canada’s Toronto Stock Exchange Venture Exchange (TSX-V) lose its status as the go-to bourse for listing and investment in the junior mining and exploration, as the speculative end of the investor market diverted to cannabis and cryptocurrencies. Does this suggest, however, that Canadian mining stocks are now better value than their Aussie counterparts?