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Canadian/International Media Resource Articles

Rio Tinto reports at [Eagle] mine forum – by Stephen Anderson ([Michigan] Daily Mining Gazette – May 16, 2013)

http://www.mininggazette.com/

L’ANSE – Rio Tinto representatives provided an update on the Eagle Mine, collected live electronic survey results through a community scorecard and fielded an array of questions and comments during a mining forum Wednesday night at the L’Anse American Legion Post 144.

Mine update

Matt Johnson, manager of external relations at Rio Tinto Eagle, gave a brief historical recap of the mine, starting with explorations dating back to the 1950s, the discovery of the ore body in 2002, the permit application and finalization in 2008 and 2010, respectively, and the start of underground drilling in 2011.

“We do have a goal of being in production in 2014,” he said. “A few months ago we announced a moderated schedule, so we pushed our schedule back. (Work on the Humboldt Mill) has been postponed for the time being.”

Production was originally slated to start in early 2014; now it’ll likely be toward the end of that year, but that’s not the only reason the life of the mine will extend farther.

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Strateco books $87m impairment as Quebec uranium project stalls – by Henry Lazenby (May 15, 2013)

http://www.miningweekly.com/page/americas-home

TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Quebec-based Strateco Resources has booked a $87-million impairment charge during the first three months of the year, as its flagship Matoush uranium project lays in limbo following the province’s March moratorium on uranium exploration and mining.

This follows the decision by Quebec Environment Minister Yves-François Blanchet not to issue the certificate of authorisation for the Matoush uranium project, located east of James Bay in a First Nation reserve, until the relevant public hearings committee, the Bureau d’audiences publiques sur l’environnement, better known as BAPE, had submitted its report on the province’s uranium industry.

As at December 31, Boucherville-based Strateco had invested more than $123-million in moving the Matoush project up the value curve.

Strateco charged it was obliged to impair its Quebec uranium properties, deferred exploration and evaluation expenditures and fixed assets associated with the project, owing to its inability to proceed with the underground exploration programme, the absence of significant exploration and evaluation expenditures planned for the year and the overall uncertainty surrounding Quebec’s uranium industry.

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US House Resources Committee approves rare earths/critical minerals bills – by Dorothy Kosich (Mineweb.com – May 16, 2013)

 http://www.mineweb.com/

The National Strategic and Critical Minerals Production Act and the National Strategic and Critical Minerals Policy Act are now headed to a vote of the U.S. House of Representations.

RENO (MINEWEB) – The House Natural Resources Committee Wednesday approved two bills aimed at the development of rare earths and critical minerals in the United States.

Approved on a 24-17 committee vote, the National Strategic and Critical Minerals Production Act of 2013 (H.R. 761) requires the Secretaries of Interior and Agriculture to more efficiently develop domestic resources of the minerals and mineral materials of strategic and critical importance to United States economic and natural security and manufacturing competitiveness.

The chief sponsor of the bill, Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nevada, seeks to limit the length of delays to permit new mining projects. The measure sets time limits for the permit review process, including a maximum of 30 months for the total review process.

The bill also stipulates that the lead agency is not required to address agency or public comments that were not submitted during the public comments period required by law or provided by the lead agency.

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What Norway did with its oil and we didn’t – by Esther Hsieh (Globe and Mail – May 16, 2013)

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.

When oil was discovered in the Norwegian continental shelf in 1969, Norway was very aware of the finite nature of petroleum, and didn’t waste any time legislating policies to manage the new-found resource in a way that would give Norwegians long-term wealth, benefit their entire society and make them competitive beyond just a commodities exporter.

“Norway got the basics right quite early on,” says John Calvert, a political science professor at Simon Fraser University. “They understood what this was about and they put in place public policy that they have benefited so much from.”

This is in contrast to Canada’s free-market approach, he contends, where our government is discouraged from long-term public planning, in favour of allowing the market to determine the pace and scope of development.

“I would argue quite strongly that the Norwegians have done a much better job of managing their [petroleum] resource,” Prof. Calvert says. While No. 15 on the World Economic Forum’s global competitiveness rankings, Norway is ranked third out of all countries on its macroeconomic environment (up from fourth last year), “driven by windfall oil revenues combined with prudent fiscal management,” according to the Forum.

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Respect is key to aboriginal approval of Northern Gateway pipeline – by Brian Lee Crowley (Globe and Mail – May 16, 2013)

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.

Contrary to what regular readers of newspapers might believe, aboriginal communities in Canada are not knee-jerk opponents of development. On the contrary, a careful reading of their recent responses to development proposals gives reason for optimism.

Perhaps the highest-profile example of a major natural resource project facing roadblocks in large part because of aboriginal opposition is the Northern Gateway pipeline to link Alberta’s oil sands to Asian markets through the West Coast. While other players (such as the B.C. government) matter too, without aboriginal support, Northern Gateway (or its equivalent) almost certainly will not succeed. With that support, it has a fighting chance. Can that support be achieved?

Those with long memories recall the 1970s proposal to build a Mackenzie Valley pipeline to carry Northwest Territories gas to southern markets. This proposal coincided with a rising aboriginal self-awareness and organizational muscle under outstanding leaders such as George Erasmus.

As the pipeline project gathered steam, these newly organized aboriginal communities begin to complain about their exclusion from decision making despite the fact that the pipeline’s greatest impact would fall on them and their land.

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B.C. vote shifted on one word: Pipelines – by Gordon Gibson (Globe and Mail – May 16, 2013)

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

The NDP looked way ahead before voters went to the polls in British Columbia. Then it all changed. Why? One word: “Pipelines.” Or more precisely, two: “Kinder Morgan.”

Until two weeks ago it was the election of the NDP’s Adrian Dix to lose. Then he got greedy. Worried about an emerging Green threat, Mr. Dix sought to pre-empt the party by going greenier-than-thou, specifically by promising to ban significantly greater tanker traffic out of the port of Vancouver, which would doom the export of Alberta oil to the Pacific. This was a stunning turnabout on a clear promise to withhold judgement until the pipeline application had been filed with details made available.

His gamble failed and, more importantly for the future of the NDP, the Greens elected their first MLA. This will split the vote on the left for years to come. Even more portentous for this election, it was the beginning of a major switch in voting intentions – missed by the pollsters, but surely clear enough last night.

Why the significance of this change in policy? It crystallized a number of fears in the minds of voters. The Liberals had run a brutal campaign based on fear. Fear of what? Fear of the NDP economic record in the last government. Fear of Adrian Dix and what he might do.

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World’s oldest flowing water found deep in Timmins mine – by CBC News (May 15, 2013)

http://www.cbc.ca/thunderbay/

Water as much as 2.64 billion years old has chemistry that could support life

Water found in a deep, isolated reservoir in Timmins, Ont., has been trapped there for 1.5 billion to 2.64 billion years — since around the time the first multicellular life arose on the planet — Canadian and British scientists say.

The water pouring out of boreholes 2.4 kilometres below the surface in the northern Ontario copper and zinc mine is older than any other free-flowing water ever discovered. It is rich in dissolved gases such as hydrogen and methane that could theoretically provide support for microbial life, the researchers report in a paper published Wednesday online in the journal Nature.

“What we can be sure of is that we have identified a way in which planets can create and preserve an environment friendly to microbial life for billions of years,” said a statement from Greg Holland, the Lancaster University geochemist who is the lead author of the study.

“This is regardless of how inhospitable the surface might be, opening up the possibility of similar environments in the subsurface of Mars.”

His Canadian co-authors included Barbara Sherwood Lollar and Georges Lacrampe-Couloume at the University of Toronto; Greg Slater at McMaster University in Hamilton; and Long Li, who is currently an assistant professor at the University of Alberta, but worked on the project while at the University of Toronto.

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Editorial: BC Liberal win leaves miners absolutely ecstatic – by John Cumming (Northern Miner – March 15, 2013)

The Northern Miner, first published in 1915, during the Cobalt Silver Rush, is considered Canada’s leading authority on the mining industry. Editor John Cumming MSc (Geol) is one of the country’s most well respected mining journalists. jcumming@northernminer.com

The B.C. mining community’s heartbreak over the early exit of the Vancouver Canucks from the Stanley Cup playoffs (so fast, fans didn’t even have time to loot the downtown core) has been soothed by the surprise majority win of the pro-mining Liberal party in yesterday’s provincial election.

In a stunning defiance of pundits and pollsters who had almost unanimously predicted at least a minority government for the left-leaning opposition New Democratic Party, Premier Christy Clark led her Liberals to a resounding win that captured 44.4% of the popular vote compared to the NDP’s 39.5%. That translated into the Liberals taking 50 of province’s 85 seats, or five more than the party had going into the election.

Clark lost her own seat, and will now seek a new one in a safer riding. Remarkably, Canada now has four women premiers in the four leading provinces, with three having assumed their positions in general elections.

Living in a province critically dependent on resource extraction to fuel the economy, B.C. voters clearly put aside their assorted pet peeves built up after 12 years of Liberal rule provincially and stuck with the gang that’s pro-resource development.

The NDP losing ground in a lot of the northern jurisdictions is particularly telling.

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Mining exploration companies shift focus to survival as venture capital dries up in bear market – by Gordon Hamilton (Vancouver Sun – May 14, 2013)

http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html

Mining companies are hunkering down to weather what some say is the worst bear market in memory by shutting down operations, cutting staff and making fewer deals.

The downturn is hitting British Columbia’s mineral exploration companies particularly hard, according to Gavin Dirom, president of the Association for Mineral Exploration B.C.

Venture capital for the sector has “absolutely dried up,” Dirom said Tuesday. As a result, juniors are cutting back on exploration activity, focusing on fewer properties and consolidating their properties through joint ventures to survive.

“It’s the worst we have ever seen,” he said. “Economic survival mode is what these companies are facing.” He was commenting on a report by consultants Ernst & Young that found only 24 per cent of global mining companies are going to be focusing on mergers and acquisitions — the industry’s lifeblood — over the next six months.

The Ernst & Young report Capital Confidence Barometer, says that although confidence in the sector is improving — 57 per cent of companies believe the world economy is strengthening — the appetite for mergers and takeovers has vanished.

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Sherritt facing demands from activist as chairman Ian Delaney retires – by Peter Koven (National Post – May 8, 2013)

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

A turbulent period could be looming for Sherritt International Corp., as an activist investor is challenging the company just as its long-time chairman and figurehead retires.

Scott Leckie of Takota Asset Management is calling on Toronto-based Sherritt to buy back more stock and study a potential lawsuit against SNC-Lavalin Inc., which he believes is responsible for cost overruns and delays at the company’s Ambatovy nickel project. He said he took his complaints public after Sherritt ignored three private letters.

“[Sherritt CEO] David Pathe has said they’re in a position to respond to opportunities. To me that means they have excess capital above and beyond anything they’re going to need for the last bits and pieces of Ambatovy,” Mr. Leckie said in an interview.

Sherritt also quietly revealed in a filing that chairman Ian Delaney, 69, is retiring from the company and is not standing for re-election at the annual meeting later this month.

He has been Sherritt’s dominant personality since he seized control of it in a proxy fight in 1990, and his departure leaves a major gap. But it does not come as a shock; in late 2011, he passed the CEO job on to Mr. Pathe and said he was content with the state of the company.

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Freeport suspends Indonesia mine after tunnel collapse – by Randy Fabi and Michael Taylor (Reuters U.S. – May 15, 2013)

http://www.reuters.com/

JAKARTA – (Reuters) – Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc halted operations at the world’s second largest copper mine in Indonesia on Wednesday as rescue workers scrambled to find 25 workers caught underground in a tunnel collapse a day earlier.

The head of Freeport Indonesia said he would travel to the remote West Papua site later on Wednesday to assess rescue operations and decide on when to resume production at the Grasberg mine, which also holds the world’s largest gold reserves.

Thirty-nine workers were attending an underground training class near the mine when a tunnel collapsed on them early on Tuesday morning, the company said. Rescue crews evacuated 14 people, four of whom died, the company said.

The Grasberg mine, which employees more than 24,000 workers, was not significantly affected, but production was suspended to pay homage to those involved in the accident.

“There is no direct impact on our operation but as a sign of sympathy we have suspended the operation,” Rozik Soetjipto, president director of Freeport Indonesia, told reporters. “I will go to the site tonight and from there we can decide what is the next step.”

Rescuers were using jacks, saws and other hand tools to free the remaining workers, as the tight space in the collapsed underground tunnel prevented them from using heavy earth-moving equipment, the company said.

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The Canary in the Copper Mine (is dead) – by Laura Paskus (Santa Fe Reporter – May 14, 2013)

http://www.sfreporter.com/santafe/

How New Mexico’s copper industry wrote its own rules

Close your eyes, and picture a radical. Bill Olson is not that guy. With a neat brown beard and a fondness for western shirts and jackets, even the occasional bolo tie, he’s the quintessential water nerd. When asked, over coffee and a blueberry scone, to talk about groundwater, he actually grins. Delightedly.

In short, he’s not exactly the person you’d expect to find at the center of a controversy over New Mexico’s environmental rules. And yet, here he is.

Olson is a former bureau chief at the New Mexico Environment Department, which regulates how industry impacts the state’s natural resources. Specifically, he has worked to keep groundwater—the underground aquifers that provide most of New Mexico’s drinking water—from becoming contaminated.

“I’m passionate about groundwater and protection issues,” he says. “It’s something that’s important to me.” It’s early May, and the state has just wrapped up a few grueling weeks’ worth of hearings about a new water pollution rule for copper mines.

To industry, the new rule represents the chance to profit and create jobs in New Mexico. Others see it as an abdication of the state’s responsibility to protect groundwater—and a move to hand over the public’s water to private companies.

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OBITUARY: Pioneering geophysicist Lawrence Morley broke new ground – by Ron Csillag (Globe and Mail – May 15, 2013)

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.

Sometime in 1963, Lawrence Morley proposed an outlandish theory: That rocks on the ocean floor were imprinted with a record of the direction and intensity of the Earth’s magnetic field. Because the planet’s magnetic polarity reversed direction every half-million years or so, he believed that iron-rich rocks and ridges on the sea floor “remembered” field reversals by locking into place their magnetic properties at the time of formation. As on the Earth’s surface, rocks miles beneath the ocean told a story, he believed.

Dr. Morley based this highly speculative theory on ocean surveys that had shown alternating bands of normal and reverse magnetism in the ocean’s crust. The patterns were so distinct that undersea maps, in black and white to represent the two magnetic orientations, resembled zebra stripes. It was all very puzzling.

“I believe,” he wrote, despite the mystery, “that there still is a wealth of unexpected information magnetically frozen in the rocks of the ocean basin floors.”

He completed a paper on his conclusions, building on earlier theories on continental drift and the spreading out of the seafloor. It was rejected. The journal’s referee, in a snub now well-known in the scientific community, tartly noted that the idea may be interesting for “talk at cocktail parties, but it is not the sort of thing that ought to be published under serious scientific aegis.”

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What happens if the pandas die? – by Russel Noble (Canadian Mining Journal – May 2013)

Russel Noble is the editor for the Canadian Mining Journal, Canada’s first mining publication. 

I’m sure most of you have either read or heard by now that China has loaned Canada two of its Giant Panda bears and whether you’re familiar with this news or not, you’re now probably asking yourself; “What’s the relevance and why is it even being discussed in a mining magazine?”

Well let me explain. First of all, the loan of the bears for the next 10 years (five in Toronto, five in Calgary) is more than a way of China unloading the care and maintenance of two bamboo processors on us. There’s far more to it than that. In fact, feeding and cleaning up (they defecate up to 40 times a day) after the pair is just the start.

The Chinese expect and trust us (meaning Canada) to provide the bears with the right environment (and mood) for them to survive and hopefully, procreate while they’re here.

Even Prime Minister Stephan Harper is so excited by this possibility that he and his wife were at the airport to greet the bears like giddy expectant grandparents. He even signed the FedEx Bill of Lading, thus confirming the safe arrival of these animals. I wonder why the Prime Minister didn’t trust Canada Post to deliver the animals and chose a US-based carrier instead?

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Resource development offers opportunity for Aboriginal communities – by Ken Coates and Brian Lee Crowley (National Post – May 15, 2013)

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

Aboriginal Canada wants in. For generations, natural-resource wealth and opportunity almost entirely bypassed Aboriginal communities. But now, empowered by court decisions, land-claims settlements, and rising Indigenous political power, Aboriginal people are determined to get a fair share from the development of natural resources on their territories.

For governments, developers and the country at large, significant adjustments are required if new partnerships and collaboration are going to become the hallmark of resource activity in Canada. The good news on this front is two-fold. First, First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities are ready to participate in collaborative activities. Second, Canada already has a significant number of examples of practical and effective partnerships with Aboriginal communities.

Aboriginal communities that are approached by resource companies typically are called upon to perform an exercise in socio-economic calculus. Negotiations focus on skills and job training for local residents, local hire provisions, opportunities for Aboriginally-controlled businesses, a defined role in environmental oversight and remediation, direct financial returns from resource sales, contributions to community projects and programs, and, increasingly, the possibility for equity ownership. The returns can be considerable, and can provide just compensation for developing resources on Aboriginal lands.

Aboriginal governments also have to determine if the proposed developers are trustworthy, and if regional and national governments will support the collaborations.

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