A view of the Stikine River near Wrangell and Petersburg. The river is downstream of many Canadian mines in the Alaska transboundary watershed.
In order to pool resources and spread out the risk, they’ll then seek out joint-venture partnerships for the claims. These partnerships give a major or mid-tier miner the ability to earn interest in exchange for funding drilling. Most of those companies in the region are publicly traded, and actually generate very little revenue. The EIA report found that a lot of the top 20 claim-holding companies in the transboundary watershed region operate at a deficit and generally have a negative trend in their stock price.Well, these companies certainly make money. But their small-time investors? That’s a different story.
So, the model does turn a profit — even when they’re not turning out much gold. Owners and principal investors are making millions of dollars a year, and using it to drill hundreds of miles of new holes.A fraction of a fraction. According to the Association for Mining Exploration, only about one in 10,000 exploration projects actually becomes a mine. And most of that risk falls to — like I said — small-time investors and Canadian taxpayers.