OTTAWA — The pending takeover of a Canadian lithium mining company by a Chinese state-owned company raises no national security concerns, federal Liberals argued Thursday.
Liberal MP Andy Fillmore, parliamentary secretary to Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, told a House of Commons committee that the Industry Department reviewed last fall the proposed takeover of Neo Lithium Corp. by China’s Zijin Mining Group Ltd.
A one-man judicial commission, looking into allegations of illegal mining in Assam’s Digboi forest division, has found that rat-hole mining, an unscientific and dangerous technique in which workers enter deep tunnels around three or four feet high to extract coal, is flourishing unchecked in the region.
The area examined by the one-man commission of Justice Brojendra Prasad Katakey overlapped with parts of numerous ecologically sensitive zones, including the Dehing Patkai elephant reserve, which contains within it the Dehing Patkai National Park. Though rat-hole mining has been banned in neighbouring Meghalaya since 2014, numerous instances of it have been recorded there.
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China’s monopoly on rare earth minerals is a danger to the United States. Newly proposed legislation, however, seeks to circumvent that threat.
The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare how dependent the U.S. is on Chinese manufacturing and goods, including what are termed “rare earths,” a group of metals used to make magnets found in electronics, weaponry, and vehicles.
https://www.northernminer.com/
Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s oil powerhouses, boasting the second-largest proven reserve of the slick stuff. Still, as the inaugural Future Minerals Forum recently held in Riyadh heard, the kingdom is prepping for a pivot to embracing metals essential to developing the future global economy.
Saudi Arabia is looking to invest its massive capital potential to develop its mining industry, from exploration to downstream battery metal processing. Perhaps more impactfully, the country has an opportunity to become the hub for mineral knowledge and finance for the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia region.
Saudi Arabia holds an estimated $1.3 trillion worth of untapped mineral deposits — led by phosphate, gold and copper — according to the National Industrial Development and Logistics Program.
These three commodities, all of which are already being mined in the Kingdom, will no doubt be much discussed at Future Minerals Forum, to be held in Riyadh between Jan. 11 and 13.
Coal prices have shot up around the world this month after Indonesia — the fourth biggest coal producer in the world — temporarily banned coal exports from January 1 to January 31 after domestic stockpiles at the state-owned PT Perusahaan Listrik Negara (PLN) power plants fell to critically low levels.
By December 31, the PLN had less than 1 percent of the coal it needed this month, according to officials from Indonesia’s Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources. Without the ban, islands including Java and Bali may have faced widespread power loss and blackouts, according to Ridwan Jamaludin, the ministry’s director general for coal.
(Bloomberg) — Indonesia’s pledge to be more than a raw-materials supplier is set to pile pressure on China’s steel to electric vehicles industries that are already grappling with rising cost volatility.
The Southeast Asian country said Wednesday it’s studying a progressive levy on exports of nickel pig iron and ferronickel that could be imposed as soon as this year. Concerns about lower shipments from the world’s biggest nickel supplier sent the London Metal Exchange benchmark surging to the highest in more than a decade.
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On Tuesday, Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev ordered his government to levy higher taxes on mining companies within Kazakhstan. In a speech to parliament, Tokayev stated: “The income of firms in the mining sector has grown against the backdrop of higher prices for raw materials.”
The boom in income for miners came after prices of industrial metals surged in the last year. The Central Asian state holds vast mineral reserves, possessing 30% of the world’s chrome ore reserves, 25% of manganese ore, 10% of iron ore, 5.5% of copper, 10% of lead, and 13% of zinc, according to official estimates.
The world is decarbonising and Australia has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to capitalise on the inevitable surge in global uranium demand that will accompany it.
Global financial institutions are taking a new look at the Australian uranium sector, and with good reason. Civil unrest over the past week in Kazakhstan – the world’s largest exporter of uranium – and the consequent impact on uranium prices highlights the geopolitical sensitivity of the commodity.
In the early days of the oil industry, the U.S. quickly established dominance as the world’s most important producer and consumer of petroleum. But over time, depletion in the U.S. and discoveries abroad caused U.S. dominance of the petroleum industry to fade. Although the U.S. remained the world’s largest consumer of petroleum, it became increasingly dependent on foreign oil.
It became clear many years ago that U.S. dependence on other countries for petroleum was a national security issue. The issue came to a head in 1973, when various members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) initiated an oil embargo against the United States and certain U.S. allies.
Is Mongolia’s prosperity being built at the expense of its future stagnation? A growing number of experts believe that the country is becoming over-reliant on mining-led growth. Making matters worse, the government is only saving a measly one cent of each dollar earned from its mineral output.
To expedite mineral shipments, the government had pledged to build a separate railway by this year from the massive Tavan Tolgoi coal mine to expedite coal deliveries through the South Gobi corridor. But it failed to secure financing.
Scientists say that a highly controversial deep-sea “gold rush” risks potentially devastating consequences for marine ecosystems, biodiversity, coastal communities and climate change.
The deep seabed is Earth’s final frontier but this mostly unexplored, dark and pristine abyss is threatened by highly destructive deep-sea mining which could be at full throttle within months.
China has been urged to create a multi-agency mechanism to secure supplies of critical minerals as a geopolitical leverage against the United States and its allies amid a global drive towards green energy.
Experts studying the White House’s strategy on rare earths say the proposed body could be similar to the system in the US where the commerce, energy, foreign policy and federal authorities are all involved in devising and implementing critical minerals strategies.
JAKARTA/CHENNAI, Jan 3 (Reuters) – Indonesian coal miners are seeking a quick resolution to a government coal export ban that has caused fuel prices to rise and could disrupt the energy supplies of some of the world’s biggest economies.
The world’s leading exporter of thermal coal on Saturday banned the shipments because of concerns it could not meet its own power demand. But the risk is a knock-on impact on economic linchpins China, India, Japan, and South Korea, which together received 73% of Indonesian coal exports in 2021, shiptracking data from Kpler showed.
China’s northern Inner Mongolia region is aiming for a fivefold increase in rare earth production value by 2025. This comes as the country’s near-total dominance of global supply raises concerns about its possible use as a bargaining chip.
“Inner Mongolia’s rare earth industry is in the unique position of having three elements – resources, manufacturing, and research and development – in one place,” deputy chief of industry and information technology Wu Suhai said as he called for a consolidation of industry chains.
