Why B.C. is a preferred jurisdiction for mining headquarters – by Nelson Bennett (Business In Vancouver – March 15, 2024)

https://www.biv.com/

Canadian securities regulations, local expertise makes Vancouver a junior mining mecca

Pick any mining jurisdiction in the world—Mexico, Chile, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—and you are likely to find at least one mining or exploration company there that is headquartered in Vancouver. As of 2022, there were 944 publicly listed mining and mineral exploration and development companies headquartered in B.C., according to the BC Securities Commission (BCSC).

Most of these companies don’t have mines or exploration projects in B.C. or even Canada, for that matter. Some operate in far-flung frontiers—places such as Guatemala, Mali and the DRC, which can be politically risky and even downright dangerous.

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OPINION: Coal is dead, or at least was, according to the ESG crowd. Long live coal – by Eric Reguly (Globe and Mail – March 16, 2024)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

For the resources industry, the trick to meeting ESG standards was pretty simple: sell your dirty fuels, especially coal. If you did, investors who cared about the health of the planet would love you, and your company’s valuation would go up.

The formula seemed solid a few years ago, and a big number of mining giants sold or spun off their coal assets. Canada’s Teck Resources was the latest to pursue the black-to-green transition with the sale, announced last year but not yet approved by Ottawa, of its metallurgical coal business to Switzerland’s Glencore.

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Gabriel Resources investors flee after miner loses $4.4-billion arbitration claim against Romania – by Gabriel Friedman (Financial Post – March 15, 2024)

https://financialpost.com/

Investors shave nearly $900 million off market cap in one of swiftest, largest single-day losses for a Canadian junior miner

Yukon-based Gabriel Resources Ltd. once harboured ambitions to build one of Europe’s largest gold and silver mines in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, which has been mined by humans for at least 2,000 years. But the proposed mining area is now on the UNESCO World Heritage list and Gabriel just lost an eight-year legal battle with Romania that has left the company’s future uncertain.

Gabriel’s experience is a cautionary tale that shows how shifting attitudes around resource extraction and an evolving global financial system have changed the business of mining.

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Two major mining prospects could put B.C. on the nickel mining map – by Nelson Bennett (Business In Vancouver – December 6, 2024)

https://www.biv.com/

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.

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Gold mine with history of contaminating B.C. creek fined $276K – by Betsy Trumpener (CBC News British Columbia – March 15, 2024)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/

Barkerville Gold Mines’ penalty reduced in part because of COVID restrictions on business: report

A gold mining company that discharged contaminants into a B.C. creek more than a thousand times since 2017 has now been fined over $275,000 for its most recent violations of environmental rules, according to a March 2024 report from the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy.

Barkerville Gold Mines, owned by Osisko Development since 2019, operates two gold mines and a processing mill east of Quesnel, B.C., in the mountainous Cariboo region about 440 kilometres north of Vancouver. The environmental violations took place at its underground Bonanza Ledge gold mine.

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US to Offer Record Loan for Lithium Americas Project in Nevada – by Ari Natter (Bloomberg News – March 13, 2024)

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/

(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.

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Did Idris Elba’s ‘Goldfather’ video boost gold prices? – by Terence Corcoran (Financial Post – March 15, 2024)


https://financialpost.com/

Price of gold hitting records but likely more due to central bank stockpiling than film star’s documentary

For several months a one-hour video starring charismatic film and television star Idris Elba has been heavily circulated via YouTube. Titled “Gold: A Journey with Idris Elba,” the documentary-style production never made it to the Oscars for obvious reasons.

Funded by the World Gold Council, the production is a professionally-produced vehicle that clearly aims to portray the gold council’s corporate members — from Canada’s Agnico-Eagle and Barrick Resources to China’s Shandong Gold Group — as leaders of a wondrous industry producing a dazzling product that glitters around the world.

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Federal budget may include legislative changes to streamline environmental regulation on large resource projects – by Niall McGee (Globe and Mail – March 13, 2024)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Federal Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson says legislative changes in response to the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling last year that curtailed Ottawa’s powers to regulate resource projects could come in next month’s budget.

Last October, the court ruled that the federal government doesn’t have nearly as much jurisdiction to regulate resource projects as it assumed it had under the Constitution. Currently, mines, oil and gas projects and pipelines are regulated based on a roughly 50/50 split between the federal government and the provinces through two separate and often overlapping processes.

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Limited refining capacity in Canada an obstacle for net zero mining: KPMG – by Bruno Venditti (Northern Miner – March 11, 2024)

https://www.northernminer.com/

Few Canadian mining leaders have committed to full carbon emission reductions by 2050, according to a survey by KPMG. The survey conducted last month with 75 mining company decision-makers found that only 23% have made formal commitments to achieve all scope-related carbon emission reductions by 2050 or earlier,

About a quarter have not yet made formal commitments but are actively developing emission reduction plans. Moreover, 10% lack both ESG and carbon reduction strategies, while 7% either do not intend to implement such strategies or face challenges in reducing emissions at present.

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Remediation project at Long Lake gold mine expected to finally begin to clean up arsenic tailings – by Angela Gemmill (CTV News Northern Ontario – March 13, 2024)

https://northernontario.ctvnews.ca/

An environmental cleanup project is expected to finally get going in Sudbury this year. It was in 2015 when arsenic was discovered in an old gold mine site near the extreme western part of Long Lake, but several delays prevented the project from moving forward until now.

The two tailings ponds above the glory hole are what will be remediated. “What they’re doing is scraping all of the tailings together and putting them together into a compound,” chair of the Long Lake Stewardship Committee, Scott Darling explained.

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Canada, U.S. governments reach deal to address cross-border coal pollution – by Wendy Stueck (Globe and Mail – March 11, 2024)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

The Canadian and U.S. governments have agreed to put the issue of cross-border pollution from B.C. coal mines before the International Joint Commission, a body set up more than a century ago to resolve conflicts over shared waters.

The request, made through what is known as a joint reference under the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909, follows years of campaigning by Indigenous peoples and was developed with the Ktunaxa Nation, an Indigenous people whose traditional territory takes in parts of British Columbia, Montana and Idaho.

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Strolling down Ontario’s Electric Avenue – by Tamer Elbokl, PhD (Canadian Mining Journal – March 4, 2024)

https://www.canadianminingjournal.com/

The global demand for lithium is projected to reach 1.5 million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) by 2025 and over three million tonnes by 2030. As the world moves away from fossil fuels, the world needs a stable supply of quality lithium to achieve a low-carbon future, and Canada needs lithium (among other critical minerals) to achieve its net-zero target.

In 2022, the government of Ontario announced its first critical minerals strategy, aiming to secure the province’s position as a global leader of responsibly sourced critical minerals, including lithium. The provincial government plan is to work alongside all stakeholders including the federal government, the mining sector, manufacturing Indigenous Peoples, and local communities.

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PDAC 2024: Some junior miners must die so others may live, panel says – by Alisha Hiyate (Northern Miner – March 8, 2024)

https://www.northernminer.com/

Canada’s once-mighty junior mining sector crumbled after governments squeezed the middle class and let multinationals buy the country’s big miners, a panel of finance experts told mining’s biggest conference this week.

Large Canadian miners such as Falconbridge, Inco and Noranda (all gone by 2007) would use much as $200 million each a year to shepherd perhaps 100 junior level companies because they made half of the discoveries, Franco-Nevada (TSX: FNV; NYSE: FNV) co-founder Pierre Lassonde said on a panel at the Prospectors and Developers of Association of Canada convention in Toronto on Tuesday.

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We rented a Tesla to explore Ontario’s EV supply chain. We saw the dirty, the clean and everything in between – by Marco Chown Oved and Steve Russell (Toronto Star – March 10, 2024)

https://www.thestar.com/

In the Great Ontario EV Road Trip Part 2, two Star journalists head to the refineries and plants kickstarting the province’s clean revolution.

NORTH BAY—How fast can you get those burgers out? The wait staff appears taken aback by our question. We’re in North Bay and have stopped to charge our EV on the way to Sudbury. We plugged in and hurried over to Syl’s Neighbourhood Kitchen for a quick bite.

But we only have 25 minutes or so before Tesla starts charging us an idle fee for taking up a charger spot when it’s full. Fortunately, Syl’s kitchen is quick and the food’s delicious. We make it back to our car with time to spare. Charging your EV isn’t like gassing up your car.

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Nickel from China, Indonesia could face tariffs over market manipulation concerns, Ottawa says – by Niall McGee (Globe and Mail – March 7, 2024)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Federal Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson says Canada and other Western countries could consider imposing tariffs against Indonesia and China because of the potential for market manipulation stemming from their stranglehold on the global nickel market.

Indonesia has gone from supplying 7 per cent of the global supply of nickel to 55 per cent in the past decade, with much of that new production controlled by China-based mining companies with ties to the authoritarian Beijing government.

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