Apart from Brazil itself, Canada is the country with the strongest presence in the Brazilian mining industry. Listings on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) and the Toronto Stock Exchange Venture (TSXV) include at least thirty-five companies now active in producing and exploring mining products in several regions in Brazil. Among the hundred largest mining companies in Brazil, ranked in accordance with their 2023 output in value terms, twelve are listed on the two Toronto exchanges. These twelve are active in gold, copper, graphite, lithium, and vanadium. Canadian companies are also active in mineral exploration in Brazil, with their investments focusing on strategic minerals for the energy transition such as copper, nickel, lithium, and rare earths.
Kinross is the foremost Canadian company in output terms. For many years it has been operating an open pit mine at Paracatu, in Minas Gerais, where the ore is reputed to have the world's lowest gold content. Kinross is also Brazil's top gold producer, a position it is expected to maintain for many years into the future. Between now and 2032 it expects to produce an average 540,000 ounces of gold per year.
Lundin Mining is in second place among Canadian companies operating in Brazil. Its Chapada mine, in Goiás, which Lundin acquired from Yamana in 2019, produces copper and gold, on a scale of 45,000 tons a year of copper and 60,000 ounces a year of gold.
Ero Copper comes next, operating through Mineração Caraíba (Ero Caraíba). Its main mine is Pilar, in the municipality of Jaguarari, in Bahia. It also has other, smaller mines in the same state. Ero Copper has plans to expand its activities in the Brazilian mining industry in the next few years, increasing its output to 100,000 tons of copper concentrate, when it brings on stream its Tucumã project now under construction in Pará. Ero Copper is also active in gold mining, operating an underground mine at Nova Xavantina, in Mato Grosso. The ore in this deposit has one of the highest gold contents found anywhere in Brazil. The unit has an output capacity of 60,000 ounces per year.
Pan American Silver, acting though Jacobina Mineração, is Brazil's fourth largest producer of mining products. Its mine at Jacobina in Bahia was acquired from Yamana Gold in 2023 and produced 147,800 ounces of gold in that year. The company is currently investing in improvements to its processing plant at Jacobina, seeking to optimize capacity utilization.
Equinox Gold controls three companies listed among Brazil's top hundred in the mining industry, all three engaged in gold mining: Mineração Aurizona (39th place), Fazenda Brasileiro Desenvolvimento Mineral (49th place), and Mineração Riacho dos Machados (61st place). A fourth company in the group, Mineração Santa Luz, operates in Bahia. In 2023 Equinox Gold's four Brazilian mines produced a total 296,800 ounces of gold, which was more than Equinox produced in any other country. Mineração Aurizona operates in the municipality of Godofredo Viana, in the state of Maranhão, where its current expansion project includes an underground mine. Mineração Fazenda Brasileiro has a gold mine in Bahia, as does Equinox Gold's other company in Brazil, Mineração Santa Luz, in the municipality of Teofilândia, while Riacho dos Machados Mineração has a gold mine in the neighbouring state of Minas Gerais.
Jaguar Mining is another company that mines only gold. It ranks among Brazil's leading producers, acting through Mineração Serras do Oeste. The company's main operating assets are all located in the Iron Quadrangle, in Minas Gerais, among them the Turmalina complex and the Caeté complex, which comprises the Pilar and Roça Grande mines and the Caeté processing plant. The Roça Grande mine has been in temporary maintenance since April 2019. Jaguar also has its Pitangui project in Minas Gerais, acquired from Iamgold in 2023. In that year, the company's overall Brazilian output amounted to 70,702 ounces, a decline from the previous year.
Sigma Lithium, through its subsidiary Sigma Brasil, appears in 48th place in the 2023 ranking of the largest mining companies in Brazil. Sigma was the first Brazilian company to produce battery-grade lithium, operating in the Jequitinhonha River Valley region in northern Minas Gerais, with the capacity to produce 270,000 tons a year of sustainable lithium concentrate. The company has plans to double its output capacity in the course of the next few years and is now working on the engineering for the project.
Aura Minerals is a major gold producer in Brazil, with a 2023 output of 236,000 ounces. Aura currently operates in two states, Mato Grosso and Tocantins. In Mato Grosso it acts through Mineração Apoena, located in the municipality of Pontes e Lacerda. In Tocantins, Aura's Almas project became operational in mid-2023. More recently still, the company has started work on implementing its Borborema project at Currais Novos in the state of Rio Grande do Norte. The investment is budgeted at US$ 188 million (see Overview article). A further project is planned in the municipality of Matupá, in Mato Grosso. Both these projects are for gold mining.
Largo Inc., also with a Toronto listing, is the only company producing vanadium anywhere in the Americas. Its subsidiary Vanádio de Maracás operates in the municipality of Maracás, in Bahia, where it also has an ilmenite plant that processes the tailings from the vanadium mine. Now at the ramp-up stage, the ilmenite plant produced 8,470 tons in the fourth quarter of 2023. Output capacity is approximately 10,000 tons a year of vanadium pentoxide, with a 2023 total of 9,681 tons.
Another Toronto-listed gold producer in Brazil is Serabi, which operates two mines, Palito and São Chico, both located in the municipality of Itaituba, in Pará. Together they produced 33,100 ounces in 2023. Serabi has also formed a joint venture with Vale to explore the geology of the same region in search of copper deposits.
Future producers
In addition to companies with Brazilian mines already in production, numerous others are listed on either the TSX or the TSXV that are either now conducting geological exploration in Brazil or have projects under construction that will shortly be brought on stream as productive mining ventures. Names on this list include Altamira Gold, Belo Sun, Bravo Mining, Cabral Gold, Canada Rare Earth, Cerrado Gold, G Mining, Gratomic Inc., Horizonte Minerals, JZR Gold, Lara Exploration, Lavras Gold, Lithium Ionic, Meridian Mining, South Atlantic Gold, South Star Battery Metals, TriStar Gold Inc., and ValOre Metals.
Altamira Gold has six exploration projects for gold and other metals in the Tapajós region, three of which are particularly significant: Cajueiro, Santa Helena, and Apiacás. Cajueiro holds oxide resources assessed in accordance with NI 43-101 as 850,000 tons at 0.92 grams per ton (indicated) plus 1.67 million tons at 1.12 grams per ton (inferred) and sulphide resources of 4.81 million tons at 1.04 grams per ton (indicated) plus 10.99 million tons at 1.29 grams per ton (inferred). Santa Helena covers an area of 590 square kilometres holding surface deposits with high levels of both gold content (1,72 grams per ton) and copper (0.96 percent). The area is described as highly propitious for the mineralization of porphyry copper. The Apiacás project is located 50 kilometres west of Cajueiro, in the Alta Floresta Belt. This is an assemblage of areas totaling 820 square kilometres. The Apiacás district has historically produced over 1 million ounces of alluvial gold. It is the largest alluvial goldfield in the Alta Floresta Belt.
Belo Sun has been kept waiting several years so far for the licences required to begin work on its Volta Grande project, located at Senador José Porfírio in the state of Pará, where future output is estimated at 205,000 ounces of gold per year with an expected productive lifetime of twelve years (see Overview article).
Bravo Mining, first set up in 2020, acquired in the following year the Luanga project, located in the municipality of Curionópolis within the Carajás mineral province in the state of Pará. Luanga is a deposit of platinum group minerals plus gold and nickel, with a mineralized length of around 8.1 kilometres. Its age and geological environment are said to be broadly similar to those of other PGM deposits and productive mines around the world.
Cabral Gold is developing its Cuiú Cuiú project in the Tapajós region, where two gold deposits have been identified, five kilometres apart, holding total indicated resources (NI 43-101) of 19.8 million tons at 0.87 grams per ton (604,000 ounces of gold) and inferred resources of 19.8 million tons at 0.84 grams per ton (534,500 ounces). Cuiú Cuiú is close to G Mining's Tocantinzinho project, with reserves of 2.06 million ounces of gold, currently under construction, which promises to be Brazil's third largest goldmine.
Canada Rare Earth Corp. has acquired a 52 percent ownership stake in the tailings from the Bom Futuro tin mine, in the state of Rondônia. Seventy million tons of tailings have accumulated over 25 years of tin mining by Paranapanema S.A. as well as by artisanal operators. Marketable minerals that can be economically recovered from the tailings include cassiterite (tin ore), ilmenite, zircon, and rare earths.
Cerrado Gold is focusing, in Brazil, on its Monte do Carmo project, which will mine the Serra Alta gold deposit in the state of Tocantins. A feasibility study estimates an average annual output of 94,797 ounces of gold over the course of a nine-year productive lifetime. The initial capex is budgeted at US$ 186.6 million, including a US$ 155.8 million contingency fund. Initial reserves, proven and probable, amount to 895,000 ounces of gold (16.8 million tons of ore at 1.66 grams of gold per ton). An updated figure for measured and indicated resources is 1,012,000 ounces of gold (18.4 million tons at 1.72 grams per ton) and inferred resources of 66,000 ounces of gold (1.1 million tons at 1.95 grams per ton).
G Mining is concluding work on its Tocantinzinho project, in which it has invested US$ 430 million (see Overview article). The company now has two further areas in view, named Santa Patricia and KRB. The former is an intercept, 102.5 meters long, with a 0.25 percent copper content, in an area where G Mining is surveying a seven-kilometer gold and copper anomaly. KRB shows promising indicators of gold, with a content stated as 1.73 grams per ton of ore.
Gratomic Inc. has two projects in the state of Bahia, where its Zumbi Mineração unit is planning to produce graphite. The bigger of the two is Capim Grosso, cover- ing an area of 426 hectares, where surveys have detected a graphite content at levels ranging as high as 21 percent. Resources are estimated under NI 43-101 rules at 7.9 million tons of ore with an average content of 5.86 percent, corresponding to 466,600 tons of graphite.
Horizonte Minerals, which has two projects in Brazil, is working to achieve its aim of becoming a major world nickel producer, in the form of ferronickel and also of nickel sulphate with cobalt. At the end of 2023 Horizonte halted construction work at its Araguaia project, in the municipality of Conceição do Araguaia, in Pará, pending an extensive review of the project. The plant is expected to have a total capacity of approximately 900,000 tons a year of dry ore, to yield 52,000 tons a year of ferronickel containing 14,500 tons of nickel. Horizonte's other asset is the Vermelho nickel-cobalt project, a high-grade resource that can readily be scaled up, with a long productive lifetime for the mine and a low-cost source of nickel sulphate for the battery industry. Horizonte is now readying a feasibility study.
JZL Gold says its Vila Nova project, in the state of Amapá, holds an estimated 9 million tons of tailings holding an average gold content of 2.7 grams per ton, which translates as 700,000 ounces of gold. The project includes a processing plant with the capacity to handle 800 tons of material per day.
Lara Exploration is now engaged in drilling boreholes to assess the two copper deposits, named Homestead and Cupuzeiro, which jointly form its Cobre Planalto project located within the Carajás mineral province, in Pará. Early findings suggest that Homestead and Cupuzeiro are probably two parts of a single mineralization body. Lara has now started work on assessing the resources. It plans to conduct further technical and environmental research for several more months.
Lavras Gold operates mainly in the municipality of Lavras do Sul, a historic gold mining locality in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. It already has a full infrastructure in place to support its twenty-four known deposits, nine of which are now at an advanced stage of exploration, including seven that were discovered only recently, since mid-2022. One of these is Fazenda do Posto, where the gold content has been assessed at 1.09 grams per ton.
Lithium Ionic has two projects in Minas Gerais. Its Bandeira lithium project, located in the municipalities of Araçuaí and Itinga, both in the Jequitinhonha River Valley, holds reserves of 60 million tons. The company says its underground mine will have the capacity to produce 200,000 tons a year of spodumene concentrate. Its Baixa Grande Salinas project, located at nearby Salinas, is a separate venture (see Overview article).
Meridian Mining is focusing on developing and operating its Cabaçal gold and cop- per project, now at an advanced stage, and also on geological exploration on a regional level in the Cabaçal Belt in Mato Grosso. Cabaçal is a deposit rich in gold, copper, and silver, with the potential to be operated as an independent mine within a 50 kilometer belt. It holds indicated resources of 52.9 million tons with a gold content of 0.6 grams per ton, 1.4 grams of silver per ton, and a 0.3 percent copper content. It includes a higher-grade area close to the surface, thought to justify sinking an initial shaft.
South Atlantic Gold is conducting trial drilling at its Pedra Branca project in the state of Ceará. The 49-hectare property is located on a 50-kilometre shear zone. Drilling has found resources at a depth of around 30 metres, estimated at an inferred 4 million tons at 1.38 grams of gold per ton.
South Star Battery Metals is a Canadian project developer for battery metals acting in the selection, acquisition, and development of short-term projects in the Americas. Its Santa Cruz graphite project, in the south of Bahia, is on course to become the first new graphite producer in the Americas since 1996. The project is currently at its first stage, with a 5,000-ton capacity, but the company is working on a feasibility study with the aim of boosting output to 50,000 tons a year, beginning in 2028.
TriStar Gold has completed a pre-feasibility study for its Castelo dos Sonhos project in the state of Pará, indicating an open-pit mine with an eleven-year productive lifetime. Reserves amount to 1.4 million ounces of gold, with output forecast at an average 121,000 ounces a year over the period. The project would call for a capex estimated at US$ 261 million.
ValOre Metals holds the rights to the Pedra Branca district in Ceará, where it plans to produce platinum-group minerals and gold. An initial estimate of inferred resources, conducted in accordance with NI 43-101 when TriStar first acquired the rights in 2019, found 1,067,000 ounces of PGMs plus gold in 27.2 million tons at 1.22 grams per ton. Three years later, however, ValOre reported a revised estimate that was twice as high, now stating inferred resources as 2,198,000 ounces of palladium plus platinum plus gold, in 63.57 million tons at 1.08 grams per ton.