(Bloomberg) — Rio Tinto Group plans to invest $2.5 billion in a new lithium mine in Argentina in a win for President Javier Milei’s efforts to deregulate the country’s economy and lure foreign investment.
The UK company plans to build a processing plant at the Rincon mine with an annual capacity of 60,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate, it said Thursday in a statement. Work on the facility, subject to permitting, will start in the middle of next year.
Russia’s Nornickel, the world’s largest producer of palladium and a major producer of refined nickel, on Friday said it plans to sell everything it produces in 2025, despite challenging conditions in the metals markets.
Nornickel is not subject to direct Western sanctions, though restrictions against Moscow have prompted some Western companies to avoid buying Russian metal and complicated payment flows, leading Nornickel to redirect sales to Asia.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/
On Nov. 12, 1991, the Australian minerals giant BHP issued a spare, eight-sentence press release that dropped like a bomb on Canadian mining. At a tiny lake 300 kilometres northeast of Yellowknife, the company and its Canadian partners had discovered microdiamonds.
Canada would become a major diamond producer, but at the time the news stunned the mining community. Diamonds in the Arctic? A group of men and women who had spent their lives ransacking Canada for minerals gathered for a late-night meeting in Toronto as they tried to understand the news.
Australia’s South32 is hopeful about a potential policy shift under Donald Trump’s second administration that could unlock access to the Ambler Mining District, a copper-rich region in northwest Alaska.
The company and its Canadian partner Trilogy Metals hold development rights and would benefit if plans for a controversial industrial road to the area gain approval. The 211-mile (340-km) road, which would enable mining operations in the region, was blocked in June by Interior Department due to environmental concerns.
(Bloomberg) — Codelco and Enami, Chile’s two state copper companies, are discussing the possibility of combining their respective efforts to expand smelting capacity into a single project, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
A new working group is looking into collaboration between a project to overhaul a shuttered Enami smelter and a separate proposal to build a new plant being organized by Codelco, said the people, who asked not to be identified given the talks are private and at an early stage.
(Kitco News) – While a likely U.S. recession in Q2 would impact industrial demand for silver, most of the gray metal’s recent strengths are expected to carry over into the new year, and the price of silver is projected to outperform gold in 2025, according to analysts at Heraeus Precious Metals.
In their Precious Forecast 2025, the analysts said that if market conditions unfold as expected, they believe silver will outgain gold once again in 2025. “This year, the silver price has seen the largest percentage gains across the precious metals (+26.82% to the end of November),” they noted.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/
The company says it’s letting ‘non-operational’ staff go as it moves to a ‘decentralized structure’
Vale is cutting jobs throughout its global operations to remain competitive as the price of nickel continues to slump. The company is refusing to say how many of its Sudbury employees are included in this round of layoffs.
In a statement it says “people in non-operating roles” will be leaving as the mining giant moves towards a “new decentralized structure.”
https://www.canadianminingjournal.com/
Ontario’s bid to lead in the critical minerals boom in Canada is fuelled with funding increases and deregulation goals in a new mining code. Yet the province must still widen education and mining’s appeal, industry leaders said last week in London.
This year saw Iamgold start the $3 billion-capex Côté mine followed by Equinox Gold’s 400,000-oz.-a-year Greenstone gold mine as Queens Park counted around $44 billion promised by car makers such as Toyota and Stellantis for new battery plants and assembly lines. The developments coincided with efforts to quicken permitting and feed northern minerals to southern factories.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Lundin Mining Corp. is selling two aging European mines for up to US$1.52-billion to Swedish mining company Boliden AB as it improves its balance sheet and raises cash to fund its South American copper growth strategy.
Vancouver-based Lundin is set to receive US$1.37-billion in cash when the deal closes, with an additional US$150-million to come if copper and zinc prices trade above certain levels over the next couple of years.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/
Collapse of Mount Polley tailings dam considered one of the worst environmental disasters in Canadian history
More than a decade after spilling millions of litres of toxic wastewater into rivers in the B.C. Interior, Imperial Metals Corp. has been charged with 15 violations of the federal Fisheries Act.
The charges were announced Tuesday by the B.C. Conservation Officer Service, which said it worked with the Department of Fisheries and Environment and Climate Change Canada to build the case for taking the company to court.
Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault’s decision not to assess the impact of a massive thermal coal mine expansion is “cowardly” and “colossal backtracking” on Canada’s commitments to stop exporting this dirty fossil fuel, says an environmental advocate. On Dec. 6, the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada (IAAC) decided Coalspur’s Vista Coal mine expansion in west-central Alberta will not be subject to a federal impact assessment.
“Over the last two years, we’ve seen zero progress on the thermal coal export ban, and now we’re seeing Canada move in the opposite direction by refusing to even assess the impacts of a major expansion of Canada’s largest thermal coal mine,” Julia Levin of Environmental Defence told Canada’s National Observer in a phone interview.
https://www.thesudburystar.com/
Union says its members won’t be affected by the cuts
Vale Base Metals will be shedding some staff in Sudbury but as of now the downsizing seems isolated to management and will not impact the rank and file.
“We have been informed there is an internal, managerial reorganization, that is obviously resulting in job losses, as has been reported already,” said USW 6500 vice-president Ray Hammond. “But we have not been informed of who or how many people that affects.”
Hammond said the union has been given no indication that any of its workers are slated to lose their jobs. “We have not been informed of it affecting our membership in any way,” he said. “They’re still hiring, for us, and we still have new members going through training as we speak.”
At present, gold is caught in a medium-term corrective cycle, while long-term price charts and macro fundamentals still firmly favor the safe-haven metal going higher once a now 6-week correction has run its course.
As mentioned in this column heading into the U.S. presidential election, gold had been long overdue for a 5-10% correction. The 54% 12-month surge in bullion into the end of October had yet to experience as much as a 5% correction heading into a chaotic U.S. election, with the overwhelming result having led to some healthy profit taking from an extreme overbought situation.
SSR Mining (NASDAQ, TSX: SSRM; ASX: SSR) announced on Friday it has acquired the Cripple Creek & Victor (CC&V) gold mine in Colorado from Newmont (NYSE: NEM, TSX: NGT). With this acquisition, SSR is expected to become the third-largest gold miner in the United States. The transaction includes a $100 million upfront cash payment and up to $175 million in milestone-based payments, for a total of $275 million.
Of the milestone payments, $87.5 million will be paid upon the approval of an amended permit for the CC&V Cresson mine filed by Newmont earlier this year to extend its life by adding leach pad capacity and making operational adjustments.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/
E-One Moli says it is focusing on Taiwanese production before expansion abroad
A $1-billion lithium-ion battery cell production plant that was planned for Maple Ridge, B.C., has been shelved. The parent company, Taiwan Cement Corp., announced the construction of the Canadian plant with much fanfare last year, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premier David Eby attending and promising a combined $284.5 million in government funding.
Taiwan Cement Corp. company chairman Nelson Chang is quoted in a statement saying that the plant construction has stopped in order to focus on Taiwanese production, in step with other battery makers suspending similar projects across North America.
