https://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Canada’s quest for critical minerals has led to an astonishing promise: The federal government says it can slash the time it takes a proposed mine to get through the regulatory review process from 12 to 15 years – to just five.
Without access to a supply of pixie dust or a time machine, this commitment will demand a phenomenal amount of goodwill and co-operation from industry, First Nations and the provinces and territories.
MOSCOW, March 29 (Reuters) – Russia’s Nornickel, the world’s largest palladium producer and a major producer of high-grade nickel, said on Friday that some clients in the European Union had refused to buy products made with Russian metals.
Although Nornickel itself and its metals is not a target of Western sanctions some consumers are voluntarily shunning deals for its metals and of products made from Russian raw materials, said Anton Berlin, vice president for sales.
https://www.canadianminingjournal.com/
What will it take for Canada to reach its ambitious critical minerals goals? I was asked that question in Houston at a conference attended by lawyers from across the world on the future of energy.
My answer was that Canada’s preliminary steps towards a viable strategy will require much more significant involvement by the government, including financial support, streamlining approval processes, and removing regulatory barriers, if meaningful progress is to be made.
The following three areas that need prompt attention:
-Reducing overregulation.
-Far greater investment by all levels of government.
-Responding to geopolitical tensions and protectionism.
Jakarta | Indonesia will press on with plans to expand nickel output despite a supply glut that is forcing rivals to shut down mines, as the world’s top producer aims to keep prices low and protect long-term demand for the metal crucial to electric car batteries, a senior government official has said.
The country’s production capacity for battery-grade nickel was expected to quadruple to 1 million tonnes by 2030, said Septian Hario Seto, the deputy co-ordinating minister for investment and mining. Capacity for nickel pig iron, which is used to make stainless steel, was projected to expand by up to 15 per cent in three years from the current 1.9 million tonnes, he added.
Hungry to diversify their economies beyond fossil fuels, Middle Eastern powers are investing in the resources needed to produce clean energy
In the summer of 2023, Rothschild bankers working for Zambia’s government were close to finalising a shortlist of buyers for a prized copper mine.
Mopani, a troubled but rare asset formerly owned by resources giant Glencore, had drawn offers worth hundreds of millions of dollars from big names in the mining world eager to gain access to a metal that is crucial to clean energy technologies of the future.
March 25 (Reuters) – Washington’s drive to make the United States a major global lithium producer is being held back by a confusing mix of state regulations that are deterring developers and hampering efforts to break China’s control of the critical minerals sector.
Across Texas, Louisiana and other mineral-rich states, it’s unclear who owns the millions of metric tons of lithium locked in salty brines underneath U.S. soils, how the battery metal should be valued by regulators and who ultimately should pay to process it into a form usable by manufacturers.
A recent paper in the journal Science Advances sheds new light on how concentrations of metals used in renewable energy technologies can be transported from deep within the earth’s interior mantle by low-temperature, carbon-rich melts.
The article details how an international team led by Isra Ezad, a postdoctoral research fellow at Australia’s Macquarie University, carried out high-pressure and high-temperature experiments creating small amounts of molten carbonate material at conditions similar to those around 90 kilometres depth in the mantle, below the earth’s crust.
While the United States dawdles, Canada has quietly taken the lead in countering China’s grip on the global supply of critical metals. Both the United States and Canada have raised the alarm over China’s control of mineral supply chains, but only our northern neighbors are taking decisive action to do something about it.
It is not rocket science to figure out how to solve the crisis. Nor is it hard to tell whether a country is serious when it proposes a solution. Canada wants to slash the time it takes to get new mines up and running, and it’s zeroing in on streamlining regulatory review and improving its mine permitting process.
The possibility of harvesting the seabed is growing in popularity among lawmakers amid a push to extract rare minerals for defense applications
Mining the ocean floor for minerals often seemed like a fantasy, but U.S. national security concerns could be bringing it closer to reality.
Thousands of feet down at the bottom of the ocean, small rocks holding vast quantities of nickel, manganese and cobalt—the perfect combination of minerals to make an electric-vehicle battery—sit untouched, as high costs to reach them, a lack of research and public opposition have kept deep-sea mining a pipe dream.
https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/
Rock Tech Lithium expects to break ground on lithium conversion plant in 2025
The BMI Group said it’s spending millions to prepare and remediate the former Red Rock paper mill site to make it shovel-ready for new industrial use by 2025. The southern Ontario brownfield redeveloper chose the PDAC mining show to formally announce Rock Tech Lithium will be its anchor tenant built around a proposed lithium refinery.
The Canadian-German mining company’s Georgia Lake deposit is only 60 kilometres north of town, up Highway 11. “We believe in the north shore of Lake Superior,” said Peter Whitby, general manager of BMI’s Red Rock Developments subsidiary, in explaining their upcoming industrial and holistic community-building plans for the north shore town on Lake Superior.
The Trudeau government’s mandate that all new passenger vehicle sales must be electric or plug-in hybrid by 2035 could cause chaos because Canada’s electricity grid isn’t close to having the capacity needed to charge them, according to a new study by the Fraser Institute.
The fiscally conservative think tank estimates in a report released Thursday that to meet the higher demand for electricity will require increasing electricity generation nationally by up to 15.3% within 11 years.
‘We won’t have electric cars,’ say local communities ravaged by lithium mining for car batteries.
Calcha K, Bolivia – Teófila Cayo Calcina, 56, stands among her rows of quinoa plants, pointing towards the horizon. “The lithium plant is 50km in that direction. We are worried that the mining could leave us with not enough water to survive,” she says, clearly disheartened.
Calcina lives with her husband in one of the houses overlooking the central square of the tiny village of Calcha K, an hour’s walk from her quinoa fields, where she grows quinoa real, a variety which is native to the Uyuni region of Bolivia and is considered a “superfood” in Western countries such as the US and Europe.
https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/
Magna Mining moves into advanced exploration at Crean Hill Project
Magna Mining, a home-grown Sudbury mine developer, is putting the paperwork in place to test mine a former INCO mine. The company said it filed an amended closure plan for its Crean Hill Project with the provincial mines ministry in late February.
This opens the door for Magna to begin an advanced exploration program that will shape the project’s economics and life of mine. Crean Hill is located in the southwest corner of the Sudbury basin. Under the Inco flag, it ran from 1900 to 2002. Magna acquired the asset from Vale in November 2022 and put 19,000 metres of drilling into the property last year.
The Baptiste and Turnagain mines would represent $8 billion in capital investments and would contribute significantly to Canada’s nickel production
Canada is the world’s sixth-largest nickel producer, with roughly 130,000 million tonnes of nickel produced in Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba and Labrador annually. There are currently no nickel mines in B.C., but a growing demand for the metal from the electric vehicle market, and a federal strategy that promotes critical mineral self-sufficiency in Canada, could change that.
There are now two very large nickel mines proposed for B.C., representing a potential investment of roughly $8 billion: The FPX Nickel Corp. (TSX-V: FPX, OTCQB: FPOCF) Baptiste project near Fort St. James and the Giga Metals (TSX-V: GIGA) Turnagain project near Dease Lake in northwest B.C.
(Bloomberg) — The Biden administration is offering a $2.26 billion loan to help Lithium Americas Corp. develop a Nevada lithium deposit that’s the country’s largest.
The conditional loan from the US Department of Energy will provide the vast majority of the capital needed to fund the first phase of development, the Vancouver-based company said in a statement Thursday, confirming an earlier Bloomberg News report. Shares of Lithium Americas jumped 28% in New York trading and 18% in Toronto as of 9:32 a.m.
