Asia Mining – Page 147 – Republic of Mining

UPDATE 1- Indonesia may ease bauxite export ban to help fund refineries – by Wilda Asmarini (Reuters Africa – March 23, 2015)

March 23, 2015

http://af.reuters.com/

JAKARTA, March 23 (Reuters) – Indonesia is looking at easing its mineral export ban for bauxite producers to help promote the building of domestic processing capacity, a mines ministry official said on Monday.

Early last year Indonesia put in place export restrictions aimed at forcing miners to develop smelting and processing facilities so that it can increase the value of the minerals it produces and create jobs.

“We need a breakthrough in the law to accelerate bauxite smelter development,” Said Didu, head of the national smelter development team at the energy and mineral resources ministry, told reporters. “To accelerate bauxite smelter development, they should pay a guarantee bond to develop smelters to the government.”

The government has already offered a similar deal to copper miners, allowing them to export concentrates again after paying an export tax and a bond as a sign of good faith that they intend to build smelting capacity.

If bauxite miners have at least 30 percent of their smelter or refinery construction completed, they can apply for a government licence to resume some exports in order to get funding for the rest of their facility, Didu said.

China Cuts Coal Mine Deaths, But Count in Doubt – by Michael Lelyveld (Radio Free Asia – March 16, 2015)

March 20, 2015

http://www.rfa.org/english/

China has announced continuing progress in reducing coal mine fatalities, although doubts remain about death counts and cover-ups in one of the most dangerous industries in the world.

On March 10, the director of the State Administration of Work Safety (SAWS) told a Beijing press conference that coal mine accidents claimed 931 lives last year, as the death toll dropped below 1,000 for the first time.

“The situation has been greatly improved,” said the SAWS director, Yang Dongliang, according to Agence France-Presse. Speaking on the sidelines of China’s annual legislative sessions, Yang mixed praise for safety advances with a promise that the agency was determined to do more.

The most recent fatality figure represented an 86.7 percent decline from the toll of some 7,000 in 2002, the official Xinhua news agency reported. “The nation is still confronted with grave and complicated challenges in coal mine work safety, as the authorities aim to achieve a zero-death target,” Yang said.

There seems little doubt that China has made major steps forward in lowering the casualty count in an industry that accounts for half the world’s coal output.

Parliament passes bills to allow mine auctions – by Krishna N. Das and Nigam Prusty (Reuters India – March 20, 2015)

March 20, 2015

http://in.reuters.com/

NEW DELHI – (Reuters) – Parliament passed two bills on Friday to auction mines that produce minerals such as coal, iron ore and bauxite, in a boost for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bid to kickstart an industry that has languished for years.

The Mines and Minerals Development and Regulation, and Coal Mines Special Provisions bills were seen as a test of the government’s ability to secure support from opposition parties in the upper house of parliament where the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lacks a majority.

BJP has an overwhelming hold over the lower chamber, Lok Sabha, due to Modi’s resounding election victory 10 months ago. The bills have to be approved by President Pranab Mukherjee for them to become law – likely to be a formality.

India’s mining sector has been mired in controversy over the illegal allocation of resources, causing a near standstill in granting permits to open new mines, including an iron ore exploration licence for South Korean steel giant POSCO that wants to set up a steel plant in India.

Asia’s third largest economy was once the world’s third-largest exporter of iron ore but now has to import heavily due to court action on illegal mining. The Supreme Court has eased some of the curbs, but state officials have been slow to renew mining licences, fearing charges of corruption.

UPDATE 1-Investors fret as India defends reopening coal mine bids – by Krishna N. Das (Reuters India – March 17, 2015)

March 18, 2015

http://in.reuters.com/

(Reuters) – India’s coal ministry said it will decide this week the fate of nine winning mine bids it is re-examining to rule out any price discrepancies, despite criticism that its move to reopen some of the tenders will hurt business sentiment.

The government, which last month started auctioning off coal mine sites after a court said a previous method of awarding concessions was illegal, is re-examining “outlier” bids for the 33 mines auctioned so far, Coal Secretary Anil Swarup said.

The winning bids for the nine mines were the highest in their individual auctions, but were considered low when compared with the winning bids for other similar blocks.

“We are not even looking at somebody doing wrong,” Swarup told Reuters on Tuesday. “We are looking at whether the price that was quoted is good enough for the government or not, and whether we could get a better price.”

Swarup said if any discrepancy is found, the mines may be re-auctioned, given to states or handed over to government-owned Coal India Ltd. This has left some companies, including Jindal Steel and Power Ltd, uncertain as to the status of what had appeared to be winning bids in the auctions.

India’s Conflict Minerals – by Anthony Loyd (National Geographic – April 2015)

March 17, 2015

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/

The gunman at the jungle’s edge lived and died by different names. Some knew him as Prashant, others as Paramjeet. Occasionally he called himself Gopalji, trading the alias with another insurgent leader to further confuse the Indian authorities trying to hunt him down.

When I met him, he was fresh from killing, and called himself by yet another name. “Comrade Manas,” he said as he stepped from the shadows beneath a huge walnut tree, machine gun in hand, a slight figure, his frame and features burned out and cadaverous with the depredations of malaria and typhoid, war and jungle.

The day was already old and the sun low. The silhouettes of a dozen or so other gunmen lurked in the deepening green of the nearby paddy fields, watchful and waiting. Manas and his men were on the move and had little time to talk.

In India they are known by a single word, Naxalites: Maoist insurgents at the heart of the nation’s longest running and most deeply entrenched internal conflict. Their decades-long war, which costs India more lives today than the embers of the conflict in Kashmir, has been described by former premier Manmohan Singh as India’s “greatest internal security threat.”

In the spate of violence 24 hours before our rendezvous, Manas, just 27 years old, and his men had killed six policemen and wounded eight more in an ambush across the range of low hills at whose base we now met.

Mongolia: Between a Rock and a Hard Place – by Marcel Plichta (International Policy Digest – March 12, 2015)

March 13, 2015

http://www.internationalpolicydigest.org/

Since the establishment of a democracy in Mongolia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, foreign interests have attempted to reassert control over the landlocked piece of steppe between China and Russia.

Mongolia’s position, located between two ambitious powers, means that it is the target of Chinese and Russian influence, often to the detriment of the fledgling democracy and its people. Historically Mongolia’s geographical position and nomadic inhabitants (of which there are still many) has made it vulnerable to the influence of its neighbors. Mongolia was subjugated to both Beijing and Moscow at different times and still struggles with the political influence of both powers.

Economics further complicates Mongolia’s diplomatic issues; vast amounts of mineral wealth have been discovered in Mongolia since the early 90’s including large reserves of copper, gold, and coal. Previously Mongolia’s weak economy, based on pastoral products such as beef and cashmere production, meant that it provided very little potential wealth for powers seeking to control it.

These discoveries have led to serious interest from a resource-hungry China, which accounts for 89% of Mongolia’s exports, as well as Russia, which faces more competition for resources in an ever more hostile Europe.

Despite the renewed interest from its neighbors, most foreign companies involved in the Mongolian mining sector have been Canadian or Australian, of the 11 foreign companies invested in copper production, 9 of them were Australian or Canadian.

Lessons from Rio’s Mongolian adventure – by Neil Hume and James Wilson (Financial Times – March 13, 2015)

March 13, 2015

http://www.ft.com/intl/companies/mining

How to minimise the risks of joint ventures with governments

If Rio Tinto could start again with Oyu Tolgoi, a $12.6bn copper and gold mine in Mongolia, what would it do differently? The question is addressed in an academic paper that examines ways to reduce the risks resource groups take when investing in frontier markets.

OT, which has already cost more than $6bn, is expected to be one of the biggest copper producers in the world and to last for decades. However, development has stalled as the Anglo-Australian mining group and the Mongolian government argue over how to pay for the second underground phase.

Rio is refusing to proceed until disagreements over cost overruns and taxes have been ironed out, while the cash-strapped Mongolian government wants to cut its 34 per cent equity stake in the project in return for higher royalties from the mine.

Much is at stake for both sides. For Rio, the expansion of OT will bulk up its copper business and reduce its dependence on iron ore. For Mongolia, it needs cash quickly from the mine to meet spending commitments.

So what can be done to prevent this situation happening again? The paper, written by Henry Steel, a special adviser at Rio, and Stefano Gatti, of Bocconi University Milan, focuses on the investment agreement between Rio and the Mongolian government as a key source of tension.

COLUMN-Who benefits from the iron ore supply glut? Nobody? – by Clyde Russell (Reuters U.S. – March 11, 2015)

March 11, 2015

http://www.reuters.com/

PERTH, March 11 (Reuters) – One question that skulks like an elephant in a room where the iron ore industry has gathered is who has benefited the most from bulging global supplies.

The Anglo-Australian pair of BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto are happy to tell you how they have successfully ramped up output at costs low enough to still rake in profits.

That was very much their message at this week’s Global Iron Ore & Steel Forecast conference in the Western Australia capital city.

The smaller miners suffering from the collapse in Asian spot iron ore prices are only too willing to speak of their battle to survive amid what they see as the destruction of the value of an industry that is Australia’s largest export earner.

The price of iron ore .IO62-CNI=SI hit its lowest on record on Tuesday, at $58 a tonne, with this year’s decline of 19 percent compounding last year’s slump of 47 percent.

Steel industry officials in China, the destination of two-thirds of the world’s seaborne iron ore, will also tell you how their industry suffers from overcapacity, poor profits and the economy’s shift to consumption-led growth.

Indonesia attracts $1.4 bln in investment for 11 nickel smelters – by Wilda Asmarini (Reuters U.S. – March 11, 2015)

March 11, 2015

http://www.reuters.com/

JAKARTA – (Reuters) – Eleven new nickel smelters are to be built in Indonesia over the next two years at a cost of $1.4 billion, a mining ministry official said, a sign that laws requiring domestic processing of ores are having an impact after initial resistance from the industry.

Early last year, Jakarta put in place export restrictions aimed at forcing mining firms to develop smelting and processing facilities so that Indonesia could refine all of its raw ores and concentrates.

Most of the six new nickel smelters due to be finished in 2015 are located in Sulawesi, Coal and Minerals Director General Sukhyar told reporters late on Tuesday. They involve a combined investment of $920 million and will have capacity to produce 6,000 tonnes of refined nickel a year plus 66,000 tonnes of ferro nickel and 50,000 tonnes of nickel pig iron.

Another five nickel smelters set for completion in 2016 are all in Sulawesi, Indonesia’s main nickel ore region, and will cost about $468 million in total, Sukhyar added.

“We estimate that if all these nickel smelters are completed, in 2018 we will be able to process 30 million tonnes of nickel ore – 50 percent of our nickel ore exports in 2013,” he said, referring to exports before the January 2014 ban.

Column: India coal output will gain, but not to heroic forecasts – by Clyde Russell (Reuters India – March 9, 2015)

March 9, 2015March 9, 2015

http://in.reuters.com/

NEW DELHI – (Reuters) – It’s easy to dismiss the government’s assertion that the country will be able to more than double coal production in the next five years. But that doesn’t answer the question of how close they will get.

India will produce 1.5 billion tonnes of coal by the end of this decade, Coal Secretary Anil Swarup told the Coaltrans India conference this week in New Delhi.

Swarup, the top coal bureaucrat, presented these numbers in a relaxed and confident manner, a stark contrast to previous government presentations at Coaltrans events, which have generally been cautious and fraught with defensive justifications of past disappointments.

He still has the problem that nobody believes that state-controlled behemoth Coal India (COAL.NS) will be able to double its output to 1 billion tonnes per annum within five years.

There is perhaps some more confidence that private miners will be able to ramp up their production to 500 million tonnes, but that comes with the caveat that the laborious process for mining approvals is streamlined.

‘India poised to be world’s 3rd largest economy’ (Business Standard – March 9, 2015)

March 9, 2015

http://www.business-standard.com/

As India’s investment climate seems to be improving, the moment might not be far away for the country to emerge as the world’s third economy, says Jim O’Neill who is better known for coining the acronym BRIC.

“It is probably too early to say with certainty that India will soon take its place as the world’s third largest economy, behind China and the United States. But, given that India’s investment climate seems to be improving, that moment might not be too far away,” he said in a recent commentary posted on Project Syndicate website.

“By 2017, India could surpass Italy and Brazil to become the world’s seventh largest economy; by 2020, there is a reasonable chance that it will overtake France and the United Kingdom to become the fifth largest,” O’Neill, who was recently in India, said.

Way back in 2001, O’Neill, had coined the acronym BRIC — the grouping of Brazil, Russia, India and China — while mentioning about growth prospects in large emerging markets.

O’Neill, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, is now a Honorary Professor of Economics at Manchester University and Chairman of the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, among other roles.

Rocky road ahead for sputtering China – by Brian Milner (Globe and Mail – March 6, 2015)

March 6, 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.

China has cut its growth target for this year by half a percentage point to about 7 per cent, a level that would mark its slowest expansion in a quarter of a century.

It also ought to dispel any notion that its leadership can engineer a fairly smooth economic transition toward the greater manufacture and domestic consumption of higher-value goods without serious growth hiccups and heavy state intervention.

The less optimistic outlook makes sense for a government that typically does whatever is necessary to meet – and preferably exceed – its publicly avowed goals for the economy.

The technocrats have known for some time that the sputtering economy has no chance of exceeding 7 per cent growth this year, and that it may take considerable data massaging (a government specialty) just to reach the lower bar. Major headwinds include continued weak demand in key export markets, serious manufacturing overcapacity and a bubble-ridden property market teetering on the brink.

Realizing the Indian Dream – by Jim O’Neill (Project Syndicate – March 5, 2015)

March 6, 2015

http://www.project-syndicate.org/

NEW DELHI – It is not often that I get to wear two hats at once. But that is exactly what happened earlier this month, when I spent a few days in New Delhi.

I was in India primarily as part of my current role as Chairman of a review for the British prime minister on anti-microbial resistance (AMR). But my visit coincided with the presentation of India’s 2015-2016 budget, the first under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Given some of my other interests and experiences, I found what was presented to be very interesting.

Following recent revisions to its GDP figures, India’s economy has recently grown – in real terms – slightly faster than China’s. A key feature of my research into the BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) more than ten years ago was that at some point during this decade, India would start to grow faster than China and continue to do so for dozens of years.

The reasoning is straightforward. India’s demographics are considerably better than China’s, and the size and growth rate of a country’s workforce is one of the two key factors that drive long-term economic performance – the other being productivity. Between now and 2030, the growth rate of India’s workforce will add as much to the existing stock of labor as continental Europe’s four largest economies put together.

India is less urbanized than China, and it is in the early stages of benefiting from the virtuous forces that normally accompany that process.

Cash-strapped North Korea steps up mining output – by Anna Fifield (Washington Post – February 27, 2015)

February 27, 2015

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

SEOUL — The sharp fall in global commodity prices is starting to have an impact on North Korea, economists say, hurting a state that relies heavily on exports of minerals to keep its economy afloat — and its gargantuan military funded.

Combined with China’s economy coming off the boil, the recent slump in coal prices in particular could hurt Kim Jong Un’s “byungjin” policy: his stated desire to simultaneously develop North Korea’s economy and its nuclear weapons program.

“Commodity prices are dropping, so it’s becoming more and more difficult for North Korea to earn foreign currency,” said Choi Kyung-soo, president of the North Korea Resources Institute in Seoul. “I think last year, minerals trade decreased by about 10 percent by volume and about 15 percent by price.”

Mining makes up roughly 14 percent of the North Korean economy, which, although in a parlous state and under heavy financial sanctions, appears to have been growing modestly in recent years, when China still was booming and commodity prices still were surging.