The owners of a proposed metal mine in Lake Clark National Park say the project continues to gather momentum as they prepare to conduct more site work this year. The company driving the mine briefed Kenai business owners on the project last week.
If all goes according to plan, Fairbanks-based Contango Ore hopes to start mining metals from the west side of Cook Inlet by the end of the decade. Proponents say the mine is an untapped resource of critical minerals, but some worry about how the industrial activity will impact the surrounding wilderness.
Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse, the company’s CEO, says he first visited the area in the 1980s as a geologist.
“It's five metals,” he said of the mine, speaking at the Kenai Chamber of Commerce and Visitor Center. “It's gold, silver, zinc, copper and lead, all of which are on the different critical metals lists from different sources.”
Contango Ore is an established Alaska mining operation. The company owns 30% of the Manh Cho gold mine near Tok and the Lucky Shot project near Willow. But the company’s Johnson Tract project is unique. The mine is in the middle of Lake Clark National Park, near the base of Mount Iliamna.
The actual mine sits on roughly a 20,000-acre carveout that’s owned by the Cook Inlet Regional Native Corporation, or CIRI.
The corporation acquired the land through an exchange with the federal government as a condition of the landmark Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.
“They gave up rights to the park and preserve, but they kept the Johnson Tract project as a place that they can hopefully eventually make some money,” Van Nieuwenhuyse said.
CIRI has led some of the exploration at the Johnson Tract mine site, including with Contango Ore. The association says the project is an opportunity to “responsibly develop mineral resources” in a way that benefits shareholders, respects the environment and preserves the land.
Part of the project agreement Contango has with CIRI says the company must also perform an ethnography study – basically, how the project will interact with the area’s indigenous communities. Contango’s enlisted an Anchorage-based firm to conduct that study and lists the Kenaitze Indian Tribe and the Salmatof Tribal Council as among the groups it will work with in 2026.
Even though the project area is privately owned, getting materials in and out of the site requires moving through public land. That means various parts of the project need to go before groups like the National Park Service, the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and others.
Van Nieuwenhuyse says Contango still has a ways to go before it starts taking any metals out of the ground. Work this year will continue to focus on environmental studies needed to advance permits. Those permits correspond to either mining operations or site access.
“We still have more exploration work to do so we're not making any mining decisions anytime soon,” he said. “It'll be a couple of years – at least a couple of years from now. We are in the middle of the permitting process for a number of aspects of developing the mine.”
Johnson Tract is also newly organized under an Obama-era program that aims to bolster the federal permitting process for large infrastructure projects. The project was admitted into the program in December, which Van Nieuwenhuyse says puts the project on a federal dashboard with the goal of improving organization and ensuring it advances efficiently.
Under Contango’s proposed schedule, mining would start in 2029. This year, Van Nieuwenhuyse says they plan to build a road up to the mouth of the mine.
Some worry about the mine’s environmental impacts.
Dorien Coray attended Van Niewenhuyse’s presentation in Kenai. Her family has owned a bear photography and fishing operation on the west side of Cook Inlet since the mid-1980s. The business is at the mouth of the Johnson River, about 12 miles away from the river’s headwaters near the proposed mine.
“I think there's worry about water quality for the Johnson River itself, obviously. I mean, we've got acid rain, acid mine drainage, but also just turbidity,” she said. “I mean, there's going to be trucks, there's going to be industrial activity, you know. It's going to affect the water quality and also the wildlife.”
Coray also says Contango is being disingenuous about the mine’s purpose. Though Johnson Tract is being billed as a polymetallic source of rare earth minerals, most of the deposit is gold.
“It's a gold mine, because that's where the money is at, and that's what's driving the push to get it developed, is the cost of gold,” she said. “And gold does definitely have some uses, but it's not the most useful critical mine.”
During a brief back-and-forth at the Kenai meeting, Van Nieuwenhuyse pushed back on Coray’s claim.
“All the central banks are buying gold,” he said. “Why are they buying gold? Because they don't believe in the dollar anymore. Because we're $37 trillion in debt and counting. So before you diss gold as a vanity medal – I just heard it called that recently – I think it's disingenuous to say that it's not important, because it is damned important.”
Van Nieuwenhuyse says Contango is being mindful of the environment. He says they’re working to fill data gaps in prior studies of the area’s endangered beluga whales and they’re able to tap into the National Park Service’s extensive data on the area.
Plus, Contango’s signature mining model shifts a lot of the heavy industrial work away from the actual mine site.
Contango uses what it calls a direct shipping ore model to process mined material. Van Nieuwenhuyse says it’s how the company gets mining projects into production more quickly. Mined material is packaged and shipped offsite to an existing facility. That means no material mills, storage facility or power plant at the mine site.
Van Niewenhuyse says not every mine is a good candidate for Contago’s direct shipping ore model. But Johnson Tract is. That’s because of the high quality of the resource and the area’s proximity to water, which he lists among the cheapest forms of transportation.
