Pebble is one of the world's richest undeveloped gold-copper-moly-silver deposits.

Pebble is one of the world's richest undeveloped gold-copper-moly-silver deposits.

Pebble deposit developer Northern Dynasty Minerals this morning announced the purchase of Mission Gold, David Lowell's vehicle for developing the Alto Parana titanium project in Paraguay.

Lowell, an accomplished mine finder who literally wrote the book on copper porphyry deposits with the Lowell-Guilbert Model, is Mission Gold's chairman and CEO.

With Mission Gold comes $9 million in cash and a dream team of mining investors: directors and shareholders include Lukas Lundin, Lowell's business partner Catherine McLeod-Seltzer, David De Witt and Marcel de Groot of Pathway Capital, and Sandstorm cofounder David Awram. Northern Dynasty will sell Alto Parana.

The Mission Gold team will now join the quest to develop one of the world's largest copper-gold-molybdenum deposits, just as a report by former U.S. Senator and Secretary of Defence William Cohen identified serious flaws in the Environmental Protection Agency's "pre-emptive" veto of the Pebble project on environmental grounds.

More than US$750 million has been spent advancing the rich project, much of that by Anglo American, which abandoned the project in 2014. But Pebble has been bogged down for years by controversy and environmental concerns.

Measured and indicated resources at Pebble total an estimated 57 billion lbs of copper, 70 million ounces of gold, 3.4 billion lbs of moly and 344 oz of silver. There's a further 37M oz of Au, 24.5B lbs of Cu, 2.2B lbs of moly and 170M oz of Ag in the inferred category.

A Hunter Dickinson company, Northern Dynasty's executive chairman is Bob Dickinson and its president and CEO is Ron Thiessen.

Mission Gold is the second junior Northern Dynasty has snapped up for its treasury - on Sept. 1 it bought Cannon Point Resources, a Frank Giustra shell with $4.7 million in cash.

On Sept. 22, Mission announced it had terminated an option to acquire 75% of the El Petate property in Hidalgo, Mexico from Prospero Silver. The company had been trading at its cash value prior to today's announcement.

Related: Northern Dynasty's last stand | CEO.CA

SKEENA RESOURCES
In other junior mining news, Ron Netolitzky's Skeena Resources announced new high-grade intercepts at its Spectrum property in the northwestern B.C.'s Golden Triangle.

Hits included 11.4 metres grading 16.73 g/t gold, including 2m grading 81.8 g/t. The news comes days after Skeena acquired the neighbouring GJ property from Teck and NGEx Resources.

Ron Netolitzky, Skeena's Chairman commented: "The high-grade sections in hole S15-043 from the southern portion of the Central Zone are arguably our best yet and represent a step out to the south from hole SP14-009. The deposit appears open for resource expansion to the south. In the middle of the Central Zone, we have encountered broad intervals of near-surface porphyry gold-copper mineralization with deeper higher grade intervals consistent with the historic drilling results." Mr. Netolitzky continued, "At the north end of the Central Zone, we need to do more work to understand how the high-grade gold zones are controlled. Our near-term objective remains to establish a high-grade gold resource by the end of Q1 2016 and these latest results take us another step towards achieving that goal."

Netolitzky will give a company update at 11:10 a.m. today at the Subscriber Investment Summit in downtown Vancouver. Here's the full agenda.

NR: Skeena intersects 11.4m grading 16.73 g/t Au

PRETIUM RESOURCES
Pretium Resources, which is developing the high-grade Brucejack underground gold mine to the south of Spectrum, also came out with some exceptional intercepts this morning. The gold-rich hits were from a regional exploration drilling program surrounding the Brucejack deposit.

Intercepts included 2,100 g/t Au over 2.05 metres, including 8,600 g/t over 0.5 metres, and 137 g/t over 0.5 metres.

Stop by at chat.ceo.ca, the investment conference in your pocket, for live updates from today's CEO.CA's Subscriber Investment Summit in Vancouver.