“From where I sit, the opportunity in front of us is huge,” BHP’s (NYSE: BHP; LSE: BHP; ASX: BHP) chief technical officer Laura Tyler told the PDAC’s virtual convention.
“I see great prosperity as we collaborate to discover the commodities of the future … faster, more efficiently, and more sustainably than ever before.”
Speaking from Adelaide in Australia, Tyler noted that the last year had been one of “challenge and opportunity for us all.” Continue Reading →
BHP (ASX, LON, NYSE: BHP) is moving its exploration headquarters to Toronto, Canada’s most populous city, as it looks to growth its pipeline of “green metals” projects, particularly copper and nickel.
The move, announced by chief technical officer Laura Tyler, follows the world’s largest miner’s decision to partner with Midland Exploration (TSX-V: MD) in August last year to explore for nickel in northern Quebec.
Both copper and nickel have taken the centre stage in the “green revolution”, as they are vital metals needed for EVs, battery storage, charging stations and related grid infrastructure. Continue Reading →
Both metals expected to see increased future demand due to electric vehicle industry growth
Australia’s BHP Group Ltd. is moving its exploration headquarters for nickel and copper — two metals expected to see increased future demand because of electric vehicle industry growth — to Toronto.
The company’s announcement Wednesday comes after a BHP subsidiary Rio Algom Ltd. struck a partnership in August with Canadian junior Midland Exploration Inc. to fund nickel exploration in northern Quebec.
The company has also been exploring for copper in Canada, on and off for years, Laura Tyler, BHP’s chief technical officer, told the Financial Post. But as climate change alters global commodity consumption patterns, she said nickel and copper demand are set to surge, leading the company to reevaluate where to put its people and resources. Continue Reading →
SYDNEY—As ships with its coal remain stranded at sea because of a diplomatic dispute between Australia and China, BHP Group Ltd. showed another side of the trade relationship with its best underlying profit in seven years as it rode a rally in iron-ore prices.
BHP reported a $6.04 billion profit before exceptional items for the six months through December, up 16% compared with a year ago, as China’s big bet on infrastructure spending to drive its economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic stoked demand for iron ore.
The company also declared a record half-year dividend of $1.01 a share. Prices of iron ore, used to make steel, recently surged to a nine-year high of $176.90 a metric ton. Continue Reading →
BHP (ASX, LON, NYSE: BHP) reinforced talks of a new supercycle on Tuesday by rewarding investors with a record $5.1 billion first-half dividend and forecasting a “very constructive” outlook for the commodities market fundamentals, as the global economy begins to rebound from covid-19.
The world’s largest miner said first-half profit jumped by 16%, hitting a seven-year high, as demand from top metals consumer China helped boosting iron ore prices by 70% in 2020, to a recent nine-year high of $176.90 a tonne.
That is well above the cost of roughly $10 to $20 a tonne most global miners spend in extracting the steel-making commodity, according to WSJ.com estimations. Continue Reading →
Australian mining giants Rio Tinto and BHP are facing fresh opposition from Native American groups over a plan to build an enormous copper mine in Arizona in the United States.
Apache Stronghold, a non-profit group, has filed a lawsuit in the US District Court in Phoenix to stop the US government from transferring a 980-hectare parcel of land at Oak Flat, Arizona, to the mining giants’ joint venture, Resolution Copper.
Resolution, which is 55 per cent owned by Rio Tinto and 45 per cent owned by rival BHP, says its proposed copper mine has the potential to supply nearly 25 per cent of US copper demand for 40 years. Continue Reading →
SolGold managing director Nicholas Mather wants to repair his fractured relationship with BHP and Newcrest Mining after an acrimonious year that culminated in a massive protest vote against his re-election to the board of the high-profile copper explorer.
BHP and Newcrest both own more than 13 per cent of SolGold and last year made public their respective concerns about Mr Mather’s approach to governance and funding of the Brisbane-based company, which has discovered several prospective copper and gold targets in Ecuador.
BHP and Newcrest were not the only SolGold shareholders with concerns about Mr Mather, with 44.7 per cent of the company’s register voting against his re-election to the SolGold board shortly before Christmas. Continue Reading →
Ten years after it happened, the Saskatoon StarPhoenix spoke with key players in what was at the time the biggest business story in the world.
It was ten years ago that BHP Billiton tried to buy Saskatchewan’s most iconic company. The Anglo-Australian mining giant’s hostile takeover bid for Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc. in the late summer and fall of 2010 was the biggest business story in the world at the time.
Tens of billions of dollars were at stake, not to mention a former Crown corporation at the heart of an industry that has long been considered the backbone of Saskatchewan’s identity, history and economy.
PotashCorp owned five of the nine potash mines then operating in the province, and employed thousands of people. It was also a global success, with operations around the world. And it was not for sale. Continue Reading →
The High Court of Manchester, northwestern England, blocked on Monday a £5 billion ($6.6bn) lawsuit against BHP over a devastating dam collapse at an iron ore mine in Brazil in 2015, which killed 19 people and became the worst environmental disaster in the country’s history.
The suit, filed last year by 235,000 Brazilian people and groups including indigenous tribes and the Catholic Church, claims the world’s no. 1 miner was “woefully negligent” in the run-up to the Samarco dam failure.
The claimants were seeking compensation for physical and psychological injury, property damage, moving costs, loss of earnings, loss of water supply and lost fishing income. Continue Reading →
PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Major BHP has committed its copper operations in Chile and Australia to the Copper Mark voluntary programme, designed to hold the copper industry accountable to responsible practices in critical areas including environment, community, human rights and governance issues.
The Copper Mark is a credible assurance framework to demonstrate the copper industry’s responsible production practices and contribution to the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals.
“We know that our long-term sustainability credentials are important to our customers and increasingly important to end consumers of copper products, such as buyers of electric vehicles and copper intensive consumer durables,” says BHP group sales and marketing officer Michiel Hovers. Continue Reading →
BHP fanned speculation that it is closing in on an off-take deal with Elon Musk’s Tesla after moving to boost nickel production while reducing carbon emissions in Western Australia.
Eddy Haegel, the boss of BHP’s reborn Nickel West business, said it would continue to acquire prospective nickel tenements in WA after investing in new and existing mines and boosting processing capacity.
Nickel West has also started commissioning work at its delayed nickel sulphate plant at Kwinana, south of Perth, as it doubles up on the battery metal. Continue Reading →
Battery manufacturers and automakers are increasingly looking to invest in nickel projects to secure supply and the resurgent West Australian sector stands to benefit, according to Mincor Resources managing director David Southam.
Talks between miner BHP and electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla over a potential nickel deal were last week reported by Bloomberg.
Both parties declined to comment but it hasn’t stopped the speculation being a key point of discussion at the annual Diggers and Dealers mining conference in Kalgoorlie. Continue Reading →
China does not like to feel jealous of Japan. But in the case of iron ore it has plenty to envy. Back in the 1960s, when Japan was building up its steel industry, the world’s supply of the stuff was so fragmented that Japan could play off producers in Australia and Brazil against each other.
China, now the world’s biggest steelmaker, does not have that luxury. Though it imports 70% of the world’s iron ore, most of this comes from three companies that in the intervening six decades have become titans.
They are Rio Tinto and BHP, two Anglo-Australian firms, and Vale, a Brazilian one. They have brought about consolidation in the industry. They benefit from high barriers to entry. None is keen to undercut the other two. That puts them in a far stronger position vis à vis Chinese customers than their predecessors were with the Japanese. Continue Reading →
Tesla Inc. is in talks with BHP Group on a nickel deal as the electric-car maker targets higher production and seeks to avoid a supply crunch, according to people familiar with the matter.
Talks are held up on pricing, and no final agreement has been reached so far between the automaker and BHP, the world’s largest miner, said one of the people, requesting anonymity because the talks are private.
The discussions come as Tesla works to raise the amount of the metal used in vehicle batteries to improve performance, and as it makes a push into in-house cell production. Continue Reading →
BHP has hired SensOre to target mineral deposits in support of its Nickel West operations in Western Australia. SensOre will apply its data cube and discriminant predictive targeting (DPT) technology on commodity-specific deposits as part of resource exploration with the major miner.
BHP chief executive Mike Henry has often reiterated the company’s intention to develop its growth options, particularly in future-facing commodities such as copper and nickel.
“… In the case of nickel and copper we would like more resource, although another thing that (BHP chief financial officer Peter Beaven) often talks passionately about is the potential for us to unlock more options within the resource that we already have, though a focus on innovation,” he told investors during BHP’s financial year results release in August. Continue Reading →
