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The costs of drill steel, rock bolts and grinding media, used to crush or grind material, could increase by as much as 10 to 20 per cent with the tariffs in place, according to Jennifer Leinart, president of Spokane-based CostMine, a consulting service that estimates mine costs.

Grinding media can account for as much as 18 per cent of a mill’s operating costs, Leinart said.

“If you tack on a tariff, it ends up being a bigger proportion of your operating costs,” she said.

For junior mining companies, those costs can add up in an already difficult financing environment. Nevada Copper, for instance, raised around $380 million in December through a combination of equity and streaming, but had to re-engineer its mine plans to target higher grade deposits of copper first, and scale back its design for an additional open pit copper mine it plans to build.

Gili said his company does not use steel as intensively as some other companies, but it will as it prepares to build a plant to process ore from its underground mine into copper concentrate.

“That’s going to be like a point loader, a single point in which we consume a lot of steel, and so that is a major concern from us — will there be any major effect on steel prices in the U.S.?” he said.

Although steel is still only a marginal cost, “when you’re tight for cash,” it will amount to a lot of money, said Gili.

And yet, some executives from major mining companies said they would take the uncertainty surrounding steel from current U.S. trade policies in exchange for the tax breaks and friendlier regulatory regime they’re expecting under the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.