Asia Mining – Page 143 – Republic of Mining

Uranium deal with India signals new era, Modi tells Harper – by Les Whittington (Toronto Star – April 16, 2015)

April 16, 2015

The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Trade, energy, the environment, security, and culture are expected to be among the issues Harper and Modi will discuss during the visit.

OTTAWA—Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi kicked off his visit to Canada by signing a uranium supply deal with Ottawa he says signals a new era in cooperation between the two nations.

At a joint press conference on Parliament Hill with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Modi said the agreement that will see hundreds of millions of dollars worth of uranium exported to India from Saskatchewan annually “is a mark (of Canada’s) trust and confidence” in his country.

“And this is going to take forward our relations,” Modi told the media, adding that uranium for India’s civilian nuclear program will help his country address global warming through “clean energy” and thus allows India “to give something to the world.”

Harper, who will accompany Modi to Toronto and Vancouver during the Indian leader’s three-day visit, agreed the uranium sales deal will end the lingering tension arising from India’s use of Canadian equipment to develop a nuclear bomb in the 1970s — which Harper said created “an unnecessarily frosty relationship for far too long.”

NEWS RELEASE: Sale of Canadian Uranium to India Denounced by International Experts at the World Uranium Symposium

April 16, 2015

QUEBEC CITY, QUEBEC–(Marketwired – April 15, 2015) – About 200 international experts and delegates of the World Uranium Symposium this morning denounced the sale of Canadian uranium to India, a country that maintains an arsenal of nuclear weapons and has never signed the United Nations’ Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). By signing such a deal on the eve of the NPT review conference to be held in New York City in two weeks’ time, Canada is undermining and discrediting the key international treaty prohibiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

“Canada’s attitude sends a terrible message to the international community regarding the necessity for all countries to respect and to reinforce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,” said Arielle Denis, Director of the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

“India’s nuclear weapons program is very active, as demonstrated by a series of nuclear test explosions. Moreover tensions between India and Pakistan, a country with its own nuclear arsenal, are running very high. The attitude of Canada is irresponsible and alarming,” according to Shri Prakash, one of several participants from India at the World Uranium Symposium.

“Despite rules specifying no military use of Canadian materials, some uranium from Canada could well end up in Indian bombs,” said Dr. Gordon Edwards of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility. “At the very least, Canadian uranium will free up more Indian uranium for weapons production purposes.”

Cameco’s first deal with India gives it access to the world’s second-fastest-growing consumer of uranium – by Jonathan Ratner (National Post – April 16, 2015)

April 16, 2015

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

The numbers certainly aren’t mind-blowing on Cameco Corp.’s five-year agreement to provide 7.1 million pounds of uranium to India through 2020.

The deal is only estimated to be worth $350 million and it’s small when you consider that the Saskatchewan-based miner sells about 33 million pounds of uranium annually.

But it’s not the size of the deal that prompted investors to push the stock up 7.56 per cent on Wednesday. What excites them and Tim Gitzel, Cameco’s chief executive, is the opportunity that has now opened up.

“This was more than a uranium buy-sell agreement,” Gitzel said in a telephone interview. “It was really a marking of a new relationship between Canada and India via Cameco. The pounds here aren’t enormous, it’s really the importance of being able now to deal with the Indians and bid into their market.”

Canada banned uranium exports to India in the 1970s after the country used Canadian technology to build nuclear weapons. But the countries put what Prime Minister Stephen Harper called an “unnecessarily frosty relationship” behind them on Wednesday, building on a nuclear cooperation agreement established in 2013.

Cameco signs major uranium supply deal with India (Business Network News – April 15, 2015)

April 15, 2015

http://www.bnn.ca/

BNN.ca staff

Canada’s largest uranium producer has signed a sales agreement with India. Cameco will provide the Department of Atomic Energy of India with 7.1 million pounds of uranium concentrate under a long-term contract through 2020.

“This contract opens the door to a dynamic and expanding uranium market,” Cameco president and CEO Tom Gitzel said in a statement. “Much of the long-term growth we see coming in our industry will happen in India and this emerging market is key to our strategy.”

The agreement, worth $350-million to Cameco, was announced by Prime Minister Stephen Harper during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Canada Wednesday. Cameco shares (CCO.TO 5.69%) surged almost five percent Wednesday to $19.80 on the TSX after the news was announced.

Looming India Uranium Deal Huge for Saskatchewan, Premier Says – by Josh Wingrove (Bloomberg News – April 10, 2015)

April 13, 2015

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Cameco Corp., Canada’s biggest uranium producer, would reap a revenue windfall once a sales agreement is finalized with India, while boosting employment in its home province, Saskatchewan’s premier said.

A deal would be “huge,” yielding hundreds of millions in revenue and supporting jobs in the mining sector, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall said in an interview with Bloomberg News on Friday. He was asked to comment on a possible agreement by Saskatchewan-based Cameco to provide uranium for nuclear power.

“It’ll mean tax revenue, it’ll mean job retention, it’ll mean new jobs, if in fact there is an agreement here with India,” Wall said by telephone. “Depending on all the specifics, you’re going to be talking about hundreds of millions of dollars worth of sales over some period of time.”

A long-term deal by Cameco to sell uranium to India could be announced as soon as next week when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits Canada, said a person familiar with negotiations, who asked not to be identified because the agreement isn’t yet final. The Globe and Mail had reported the possibility of a deal earlier Friday. Modi is scheduled to make a three-day trip to Canada from April 14-16, with stops in Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver.

Can Indonesia’s 50 Cent-an-Hour Workers Mimic China’s Success? – by Chris Brummitt (Bloomberg News – April 9, 2015)

April 13, 2015

http://www.bloomberg.com/

As the sun lowers into the Java Sea, Asep Saefullah and his friends sit by a pond among the rice fields near his village in Indonesia, chatting, smoking clove cigarettes and fishing.

Not for much longer. Work has begun on an industrial park with a power station and water treatment plant that will create as many as 190,000 jobs. It’s part of a grander plan to turn this stretch of coastline on the island of Java into an export city, with a container port and a highway to the capital, Jakarta.

This is Indonesia’s shot at recreating the success of Shenzhen, the marshy village in southern China that became the heart of that nation’s industrial expansion in the late 1990s. Now China is too expensive for many factories, and industries that poured money into cities from Shenzhen to Shanghai for two decades are looking for somewhere with lower costs and lots of cheap workers.

“The great China boom was really bad for the Southeast Asia economies,” said Tim Condon, the Singapore-based head of Asia research at ING Groep NV. “With the China slowdown, all that moves in reverse. Southeast Asia’s manufacturing sector is the big winner, as it was in the early 90s.”

Japan Bets on Nuclear, and Coal, for Future Power – by Keith Johnson (Foreign Policy – April 8, 2015)

April 13, 2015

https://foreignpolicy.com/

Four years after Fukushima, Tokyo is angling to get nuclear reactors back online. But dirty old coal will be doing the real heavy lifting.

Japan has a new blueprint for its energy future, one that opens the door for a controversial return of nuclear power four years after the Fukushima accident took the country’s reactors offline. But even more noteworthy is that Japan now appears set to embrace a dominant role for dirty coal in the country’s energy mix for decades to come.

The plan, presented Tuesday, April 7, to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and expected to be finalized this spring, highlights the difficult choices that developing and even developed countries must make — just months before a landmark climate conference in Paris — between cheap but dirty energy and more expensive, if cleaner alternatives. Japan’s struggles are complicated further by the political fallout of Fukushima, which forced the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people and has left a residue of radioactive soil and water.

Abe’s blueprint envisions stable, round-the-clock power sources such as nuclear, coal, and hydroelectric growing from about 40 percent of the electricity mix today to 60 percent in 2030. The rest of Japan’s electricity would come from natural gas and renewable energy like wind and solar power, complemented by increasingly aggressive efforts to boost energy efficiency.

While there are no hard-and-fast targets yet for nuclear power in the new plan, officials say it would represent about 20 percent of the total — slightly more than the 15 percent that Abe had sought, but much less than the 30 percent of Japan’s electricity in the years before Fukushima.

Indian PM Modi eyes uranium supply deal with Canada – by Steven Chase and Kim MacKrael (Globe and Mail – April 10, 2015)

April 10, 2015

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

OTTAWA — Canada’s biggest uranium producer is in advanced talks with India on a deal to supply the country of 1.2 billion with fuel for nuclear power plants as Ottawa prepares to welcome Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi next week, sources say.

Mr. Modi has made it clear that obtaining a commercial supply of uranium from Canada’s Cameco Corp. is a major goal for him as he gets ready to visit Canada on April 14-16.

“We look forward to resuming our civil nuclear energy cooperation with Canada, especially for sourcing uranium fuel for our nuclear power plants,” the Indian leader posted on his Facebook page late last week.

Nuclear power is at the heart of a rapprochement between India and Canada in recent years. Canada banned exports of uranium and nuclear hardware to India in the 1970s after New Delhi used Canadian technology to develop a nuclear bomb.

The two countries turned the page with a deal that took effect in 2013. The highly symbolic Canada-India Nuclear Cooperation Agreement demonstrates that Canada no longer considers India a pariah for what it did in the 1970s.

Iron ore in fresh crisis as forward prices crumble – by Henning Gloystein and Manolo Serapio Jr. (Reuters India – April 10, 2015)

April 9, 2015

http://in.reuters.com/

SINGAPORE – (Reuters) – Iron ore is veering to a new crisis as prices for future delivery of the commodity slide 30 percent in the space of a month, and its outlook is now more bearish than oil and more dire than ever for miners struggling to just stay in business.

Prices of the steel-making ingredient for immediate delivery have slumped 60 percent over the past year as demand particularly from China slowed rapidly.

Despite the crumbling cash market, miners had been able to hedge future production at prices well above spot levels. Indeed, a month ago, miners could still sell 2017 output at close to $70 a tonne even as April 2015 prices fell below $60 for the first time in more than five years.

Forward iron ore prices have since tumbled below $47 for deliveries all the way until the end of 2017, depriving nearly all miners of any chance of establishing hedges at or above breakeven levels during that period.

A combination of factors brought about the recent capitulation in forward prices, most notably news that China plans to subsidise its iron ore sector to protect its flagging steel industry. Subsidies would help keep mines open and keep supplies flowing.

Lower coking coal contract price shows downward pressure – by Clyde Russell (Reuters U.S. – April 8, 2015)

April 8, 2015

http://www.reuters.com/

LAUNCESTON, AUSTRALIA – (Reuters) – – Coking coal prices are yet to show signs of bottoming with bearish signals from both contract talks between Australian producers and Japanese buyers as well as Chinese demand.

Hard coking coal for second quarter delivery was settled at $109.50 a tonne free-on-board between producer BHP Billiton and buyer Nippon Steel, Morgan Stanley said in a research noted on April 6.

This was down 6 percent from the previous quarter’s contract and represented a 7 percent premium to the spot price at the time the deal was concluded. The premium to the spot price is in line with prior settlements, with Japanese buyers willing to pay above spot in order to guarantee supplies.

Coking coal, also known as metallurgical coal, is used in steel-making and is traditionally a higher value product than thermal coal used in power generation because it has a higher energy value and fewer impurities.

However, coking coal prices are now down two-thirds from their peak around $300 a tonne in 2011, while benchmark thermal coal prices at Australia’s Newcastle Port have dropped about 55 percent over the same period.

As iron ore slides, China buyers inflict more pain on small miners – by Manolo Serapio Jr (Reuters U.S. – April 7, 2015)

April 7, 2015

http://www.reuters.com/

SINGAPORE, April 7 (Reuters) – Chinese steelmakers are unwittingly helping the world’s biggest iron ore miners tighten their grip on global production by demanding to pay for shipments of the raw material based closely on depressed spot prices.

The three largest and most profitable iron ore producers – Australia’s Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, along with Brazil’s Vale – have been happy to sell at or near spot despite plunging iron ore prices, while their smaller rivals struggle to make money.

Smaller producers, including some higher cost Australian miners, want to continue with deals based on longer-term averages of prices, looking to hedge against further falls in the market.

But buyers in the world’s largest consumer of iron ore are having none of it, with many Chinese mills demanding cargoes priced as close as possible to their delivery date.

“Pricing moves around with the steel mills. It used to be all based on a monthly average. Now you find the steel mills and traders perhaps trying to anticipate low points and suggesting quotation periods of maybe two weeks,” said Morgan Ball, chief executive of Australian iron ore miner BC Iron Ltd.

India’s $18 Billion Mistake? – by Dhiraj Nayyar (Bloomberg News – April 1, 2015)

April 7, 2015

http://www.bloombergview.com/

A decade ago, Korean steelmaker Posco’s proposed $12 billion investment in the eastern Indian state of Odisha (then still known as Orissa) was hailed as the country’s biggest-ever foreign investment commitment, as well as a vote of confidence in India as a potential manufacturing power. Ten years later, Posco’s reported pullout is a PR debacle and a blow to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s hopes to convince companies to “make in India.”

Worse, it’s the government’s success rather than its policy failures that appear to have driven out the steelmaker. On the heels of a lucrative auction of telecom spectrum, which garnered bids totaling a record $18 billion last week, the government is set to sell off iron ore and the rights to limestone mines by auction as well. Under the old regime, the state would have allocated these kinds of resources to industry at a nominal price. Now that the government is looking to maximize profits by putting them up for bids instead, Posco has apparently decided that the additional costs make the Odisha project unappealing.

The political logic of auctions is obvious. Under the previous Congress-led government, the opaque process of allocating resources to private companies quickly led to accusations of cronyism and corruption. Anger over the 2G spectrum scandal of 2008 and the coal scandal of 2009 played a huge role in Modi’s landslide victory last year.

Unfortunately, criticism has focused on the idea that the government gave away India’s resources too cheaply.

Vale sets aside $185m to finance expansion – by Tama Salim (Jakarta Post – April 1 2015)

April 1, 2015

http://www.thejakartapost.com/

Publicly listed nickel mine operator PT Vale Indonesia (INCO) will allocate up to US$185 million in capital expenditures (capex) this year to finance expansion projects, including the construction of new refining facilities. The company’s chief financial officer, Febriany Eddy, said on Tuesday the allocated sum was significantly higher than last year’s capital spending realization of $76.8 million.

She said that Vale would be gearing up for the second phase of its ore processing and refining facility in Sorowako, South Sulawesi, as well as operations in Bahodopi, Central Sulawesi. “Phase 1 is currently being concluded, so we’re starting to plan out the next phase while we await the licenses for expansion,” Febriany told reporters in South Jakarta, on Tuesday.

“If everything goes according to plan, we can realize all our capital spending and put our projects into motion.” Vale’s capital expenditure for 2014 was 51 percent lower than the $163 million target, because of delays in the issuance of required permits and the decision to further assess the rebuilding of an electric furnace.

On the other hand, stakeholder returns in 2014 were high as the firm reached a dividend payout ratio of 58 percent, equal to $50.2 million. Febriany argued that the high payout rate was in line with Vale’s previous actions, citing average dividend payments of more than 50 percent in the last five years.

Mercury in Mining a Toxic ‘Time Bomb’ for Indonesia – by Harry Pearl (Jakarta Globe – March 31, 2015)

April 1, 2015

http://thejakartaglobe.beritasatu.com/

Cisitu, Banten. Inside a dusty, cupboard-sized workshop in the remote mountains of western Java, Ateng spells out the toxic mix he uses to produce gold.

“I used 300 grams of mercury, in five ball mills, for two sacks of ore,” the 25-year-old says, flicking a blowtorch alight and taking aim at the amalgam of gold ore and mercury in front of him.

It’s a familiar calculation for Ateng, and one that in some form or another has been utilized for centuries — using mercury, a highly toxic liquid metal, to extract gold from ore. But here in Cisitu, a gold mining village deep in Gunung Halimun National Park, medical experts and environmental campaigners believe it could be the cause of a rash of illnesses among residents.

Rice fields and fishponds have been poisoned, environmental testing has found, and some residents are showing signs of severe mercury intoxication.

What’s more worrying to campaigners like Yuyun Ismawati, a Goldman Prize-winning environmental engineer and senior adviser at BaliFokus, is that a similar situation is being played out at hundreds of mining hot spots across Indonesia.

“You cannot see it now, but the cost of inaction could be huge,” says Ismawati, an Indonesian now based in the United Kingdom.

India seeks potash bargain after Belarus-China deal – by Rajendra Jadhav (Reuters U.S. – April 1, 2015)

April 1, 2015

http://www.reuters.com/

MUMBAI- (Reuters) – Belarus’ deal to sell potash to China at a lower-than-expected price has prompted India to seek a similar bargain ahead of the signing of new contracts this month, a move that could hit spot rates already under pressure due to stiff competition.

Belarusian Potash Company (BPC) last month agreed to raise the price of potash exports to China, the biggest consumer and which sets the benchmark, by $10 to $315 per tonne, undercutting Russian and North American rivals who were negotiating for a hike of $25-$30.

India, which imports all its potash needs, bought the crop nutrient at $322 per tonne on a cost and freight basis last year, the lowest level in seven years. It is seeking to keep the price at the same level this year.

India usually pays slightly more than China due to additional freight and as it buys in small consignments.

“The Chinese deal has highlighted the oversupply in the market,” said P.S. Gahlaut, managing director of state-run Indian Potash Ltd, the country’s biggest importer. “As far as India is concerned we cannot afford a price rise.”

Officials from Russia’s Uralkali, the world’s largest producer, are expected in India in the third week of April and any supply agreement around last year’s price will put pressure on spot prices that collapsed after Uralkali broke away from a joint trading venture with BPC in 2013.