Arctic Economics

Alaska's gold production is up

Elizabeth Bluemink reports: Alaskan Gold production highest since 1916 (Anchorage Daily News,  November 8, 2009). 

 

Fort Knox mine.  Source: Kinross Gold Corporation.

In  summary:

Alaska produced about 800,000 ounces of gold in 2008 - the largest amount since 1916 ( High as that output is, Alaska currently only accounts for ten percent of U.S. gold production).  Almost all, about 84 percent, came from two mines - the open pit Fort Knox mine near Fairbanks, and the underground Pogo mine near Delta Junction.  About five percent of the gold came from small scale placer mining.

Rent-seeking skews Russian energy investment priorities

Tom Lasseter of McClatchy News reports on the depletion of Russia's oil fields: Russia's oil boom may be running on empty.  According to this report, investments are going into getting more oil out of old fields, rather than into the development of new reserves:

Most of the oil produced after the country's 1998 financial collapse has come from drilling and re-drilling old Soviet oil fields with more advanced equipment — squeezing more black gold out of the same ground — and efforts to develop new fields have been slow or non-existent.

...Valery Tsvetkov, a deputy of the institute of market problems at the state-funded Academy of Sciences, laid out an array of statistics showing what's wrong with Russia's oil industry.

Among them: In 1990, some 17.3 million feet of new wells were drilled looking for new reserves in the former Soviet Union, almost all of them in what's now the Russian Federation. In 2007, about 3.9 million feet were drilled.

Quotes point to the influence of rent-seeking politicians:

Baffin Island Iron

The Baffinland Iron Mines Corporation plans to develop an open pit iron mine on Canada's Baffin Island at a place called Mary River.

Baffinland describes the deposits at Mary River as large and high grade (World Class):

Canada's Diamond Mines

In the last 10 years Canada has become the world's third largest producer of diamonds by value (she was followed Botswana and Russia in 2006).  Production is underway, or imminent, at five mines:

Global warming is reducing the costs of mining in Greenland

Global warming is melting Greenland's ice sheet and glaciers, and reducing the costs of mining there: Greenland's Melting Glaciers Spur Mining  (Lisa Yuriko Thomas, Wall Street Journal, July 17):