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Plan for cleaning up uranium tailings ready for approval – by Alex MacPherson (Saskatoon StarPhoenix – September 28, 2015)

http://www.thestarphoenix.com/

The cleanup of a derelict northern Saskatchewan uranium mine could move one step closer this week.

The Saskatchewan Research Council (SRC) — which is overseeing the multi-million-dollar Gunnar Remediation Project on behalf of the provincial government — will present its plan to cover the site’s three tailings deposits at a Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) hearing in Ottawa on Wednesday.

Canada’s nuclear watchdog will consider evidence presented by all interested parties, including the SRC and northern First Nations, before making its decision, which is expected in about six weeks, a CNSC spokesman said Monday.

The Gunnar mine site is located near Uranium City on the northern shore of Lake Athabasca, about 800 kilometres north of Saskatoon. The deposit was discovered in 1952 and mining commenced three years later.

When it was operational, the site featured an open pit mine, an underground mine, two acid plants, a uranium mill, and various ancillary buildings. Three tailings deposits totalling some 4.4 million tonnes and a large waste rock pile eventually accumulated on the site.

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How Alcoa Inc’s split could finally bring it together with Alcan – by Jonathan Ratner (National Post – September 29, 2015)

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

Alcoa Inc.’s plans to split into two publicly traded companies isn’t expected to be completed until the second half of 2016, but that won’t stop it from looking to the future, which may mean some big acquisitions down the road.

Dividing the upstream and downstream businesses will draw attention to the company’s sum-of-the-parts valuation, but Michael Gambardella at J.P. Morgan doesn’t think that represents real value creation. The analyst thinks the plan could lead to modestly higher overhead costs and won’t generate any savings.

He suggested Alcoa would be wise to take a second step and combine the upstream business with another large aluminum producer, which should create significant additional value in a depressed metal price environment.

“This potential value creation could occur from significant cost cutting opportunities with greater scale and better market conditions from supply cuts, and potentially from further consolidation activities triggered by such a transaction,” Gambardella told clients.

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In refreshing change, gold producers pitch investors on their survival instincts – by David Milstead (Globe and Mail – September 26, 2015)

The 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.

Can a gold company be all things to all kinds of gold investors? Let’s hear what Goldcorp Inc. CEO Chuck Jeannes had to say at this week’s Denver Gold Forum.

“I think there’s a couple camps out there. One would be the group that continues to believe very much in gold, and in the near term, thinks gold is going up, and is very much focused on our leverage to the gold price,” Mr. Jeannes said in kicking off Goldcorp’s investor presentation.

“I think Goldcorp is a very good choice for that camp of investor. We’ve got growing production this year, our costs are declining, we have zero limitations on our exposure to gold price, no hedging, no streams on gold assets, so we give you that exposure.

“The biggest and second camp of investors are those who continue to believe in gold, but are concerned about what the price is going to do in the near and medium term, so you want to minimize your risk of holding shares while you wait for the gold price to recover – and you don’t know when that’s going to happen,” Mr. Jeannes continued.

“For that class of investor, I think Goldcorp is a really safe choice.

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Glencore slumps 30% as debt fears grow – by Lionel Laurent and Sudip Kar-Gupta (Reuters/Globe and Mail – September 28, 2015)

The 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.

LONDON — Reuters – Glencore shares tumbled more than 30 per cent to an all-time low on Monday on fears that the mining and trading company was not doing enough to rein in its debt to withstand a prolonged fall in global metals prices.

About 3.5 billion pounds ($5.33-billion) in market value was wiped off the firm, which is in the middle of a drive to sell assets and raise cash to help cut its $30-billion debt pile and protect its credit rating after a crunch in prices of its main products, copper and coal.

Swiss-based and London-listed Glencore earlier this month raised $2.5-billion through a share placement, part of a wider plan to cut its net debt by a third by the end of 2016.

Glencore’s top individual shareholders, according to Thomson Reuters Eikon data, include CEO Ivan Glasenberg, with an 8.4 per cent stake, and Qatar Holding, with 8.2 per cent. Qatar is also a top shareholder of German auto maker Volkswagen , another beaten-up blue-chip.

Monday’s fall spread to the broader UK mining sector, which has also felt the pain from an emerging-markets slowdown and a crash in commodities prices. The FTSE 350 mining index sank to its lowest level since Dec. 2008.

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Argentina’s presidential candidates want mining to be platform for country’s recovery – by Cecilia Jamasmie (Mining.com – September 24, 2015)

http://www.mining.com/

Only weeks before Argentina heads to the polls to choose its new leader, analysts are saying that President Cristina Fernandez’s chosen successor, Daniel Scioli, would probably be the best outcome for miners, as he has promised to maintain financial incentives designed to bolster investments, as well as oil and gas production.

But others differ. One of them is Santiago Dondo, a mining specialist at Pensar, the think tank of leading opposition candidate Mauricio Macri’s party. He told Reuters that the former mayor of Buenos Aires and ex-president of the popular Boca Juniors soccer team, may be a better choice. This, as Macri would give provincial governments a larger chunk of profits from companies operating in the country. The candidate, he added, has vowed to improve environmental inspections across the industry.

“The main challenge … is to generate trust at home, which would also give investors stability,” Dondo said. But according to the country’s mining chamber, any of the three candidates running in the upcoming October election is a good option, as they all have said they see mining as the platform for Argentina’s recovery.

“Scioli has said mining should be an engine for the economy, Macri has been consistent in his support and [opposition candidate] Sergio Massa has said the sector deserves attention,” the president of the Argentine Mining Chamber, Martin Dedeu, said earlier this year, according to País Minero (in Spanish).

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Commodity conundrum: Opposing views on Ontario’s Ring of Fire – Business Network News (September 24, 2015)

  http://www.bnn.ca/ The Ontario government plans to spend $1 billion for infrastructure in the northern Ontario mining area known as “The Ring of Fire”. BNN gets the positive and negative view on the future of mining in this area from Alan Coutts, CEO of Noront Resources, a junior miner in the region, and Patrick Ryan, …

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Can Alberta go coal-free by 2025? – by Tyler Hamilton (Toronto Star – September 25, 2015)

The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Alberta is a province that wears its fossil-fuel heritage with pride. But it’s taking aim at coal-fired electricity generation.

There may be no more power plants burning coal in Ontario, but it was only a decade ago that the province generated enough electricity from coal to supply three million households.

When the last coal-fired facility was closed in 2014, it capped the single-largest effort to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in North America.

Now coal-dependent, Alberta is giving it a shot. It is something that would have been unthinkable less than a year ago in a province that wears its fossil-fuel heritage with pride. Depending on the plan, Alberta could set the stage for Canada to become virtually coal-free by 2030 – conceivably earlier.

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Caterpillar’s cost-cutting plans a mark of struggling global economy – by Brian Milner (Globe and Mail – September 25, 2015)

The 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.

It must have seemed like a good idea when Caterpillar Inc. forked out $7.6-billion (U.S.) in 2011 to acquire mining machinery heavyweight Bucyrus International Inc.

At the time, Caterpillar could not keep up with the soaring demand for massive trucks, earth-movers and other heavy equipment in the midst of a global resource boom.

So the company happily paid more than a 30-per-cent premium to get its hands on Bucyrus and its hydraulic shovels, draglines and other expensive specialized gear it did not produce on its own.

But as it soon turned out, the timing of the costly expansion could not have been worse for the world’s biggest maker of construction and mining equipment. The resource balloon began deflating by mid-2012, and things have been going from bad to worse for Caterpillar ever since.

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Gold stocks explode higher – Barrick up 11% – by Frik Els (Mining.com – September 24, 2015)

http://www.mining.com/

On Thursday, the price of gold spiked higher after turmoil on world equity markets and global economic fears sparked a return to safe-haven buying.

Futures contracts in New York with December delivery dates jumped 2% to a high of $1,156 an ounce – gold’s best level in a month.

After weeks of lacklustre trade ahead of the US Federal Reserve interest rate decision, volumes on Comex shot up to twice the daily average on Thursday with just under 20 million ounces traded.

With fundamentals pointing to further upside potential for the metal, gold investors piled into mining stocks in massive volumes. The world’s top gold mining stocks gained steadily during the day and traded at their highs at the close on Thursday.

Barrick Gold Corp (NYSE:ABX, TSE:ABX) jumped 10.8% with more than 33 million shares changing hands, 12 million more than already high post-Fed interest.

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Papal fundamentalism – by Peter Foster (National Post – September 25, 2015)

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

John Boehner, speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, couldn’t stop tearing up. Although Boehner is famously lachrymose, his watery eyes symbolized that for U.S. Catholics, indeed for all Catholics, Pope Francis’ address to a joint session of Congress on Thursday was a matter of faith, hope and charity.

The Pope has become a Zelig-like figure onto which the faithful project all their best intentions and highest aspirations. He plays to the role, turning up at Congress in a super humble Fiat (He left Washington later in a super jumbo jet).

For the not quite so enchanted, Francis is less a symbol of universal love and goodwill than a figurehead who has become deeply involved on the wrong side of some of the most divisive and dangerous political issues of our day. The question for the more cynically-inclined is how far those involvements represent an attempt to divert attention from the ongoing problems of the Church itself, which is still beset by the reverberations of sexual and financial scandals.

The Pope does not fit into normal political categories. He is a hybrid of social conservatism and socialism, which made his speech an inevitable mixed bag, a platter of papal platitudes peppered with elements of controversy, some carefully-padded, some not.

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Cameco defends safety of uranium mining as Cigar Lake mine opens – by Ian Bickis (Canadian Press/Global News – September 24, 2015)

http://globalnews.ca/

SASKATOON – Cameco’s CEO Tim Gitzel defended the safety of uranium mining as the company opened its operations at Cigar Lake this week amid trying times for the sector.

“Anyone that’s toured these mines, talked to our workers, they can talk to the communities, they can see our statistics, it’s a very safe occupation, and we’re proud to be part of it,” Gitzel said.

Those comments stand in stark contrast to a report released in July by Quebec’s environmental regulation agency (BAPE) concluding after a year of study that it would be premature to allow uranium mining in the province.

The three-person BAPE panel wrote that there are still many uncertainties and “significant gaps in scientific knowledge of the impacts of uranium mining on the environment and public health.”

Gitzel disagrees. “I thought that was a very unfortunate finding in Quebec,” said Gitzel.

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How Hillary Clinton and Rachel Notley are bringing more bad news to Alberta’s oilpatch – by Claudia Cattaneo (National Post – September 24, 2015)

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

When Alberta Premier Rachel Notley travels to Montreal, New York and Toronto next week to promote investment, she will discover that speaking from both sides of her mouth about her province’s energy sector doesn’t exactly instill confidence.

Sounding yet again like a cheerleader for opponents of Alberta’s energy industry, Notley, head of the left-leaning NDP government, reacted positively to U.S Democratic Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton’s surprise announcement that she’s opposed to the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf.

That’s right, speaking to reporters, Notley said she’d rather see more refining and upgrading in Alberta (which would have to be financially supported by her cash-strapped government because no one in the private sector wants to do it) than sending the province’s bitumen to refineries in the U.S. Gulf through a pipeline proposed by Calgary-based TransCanada Corp. and supported widely by the North American oil community.

“I do think we need to get our product to tidewater,” she said. “I’m just not convinced that getting our product down to the Gulf where there’s a whole bunch of cheap refining is absolutely the best strategy for an industry in Alberta when Albertans want to see focus more on upgrading and refining.”

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Goldcorp stays positive on Éléonore gold mine (Northern Miner – September 23, 2015)

The Northern Miner, first published in 1915, during the Cobalt Silver Rush, is considered Canada’s leading authority on the mining industry.

Goldcorp (TSX:G; NYSE: GG) highights the potential at its Éléonore gold mine in northern Quebec, despite recently lowering the project’s 2015 production forecast, partly due to higher-than-expected mining dilution.

“Looking forward, I’m not worried about Éléonore. It is a great plant; it’s a great orebody,” Chuck Jeannes, the company’s president and CEO, said in a Sept. 22 webcast presentation at the Denver Gold Forum.

The underground mine reached commercial production on April 1, 2015, after pouring first gold last October. The slower-than-anticipated startup resulted from commissioning issues in the first half of 2015, relating to the tailings filter press and primary crusher feeder. However, those issues have been resolved, Jeannes says.

In August, the Éléonore mill achieved nameplate capacity of 7,000 tonnes per day, with roughly 2,000 tonnes of the feed coming from low-grade stockpiles.

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Riding Volks into the sunset? – by Terence Corcoran (National Post – September 24, 2015)

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

Poor old VW, caught in the giant pincers of the U.S. regulatory machine that keeps closing in on car markers and car drivers in the name of the climate and the environment. Volkswagen, whose Golf series won the 2015 Motor Trend Car of the Year award at the annual Green Car Congress for Sustainable Mobility, had diesel vehicles that beat the competition on fuel economy and carbon emissions.

As the Motor Trend judges put it, the VW Golf series has “low fuel consumption and carbon footprint, relative to the vehicle’s competitive set.”

But it now looks like the Golf and other VW diesel models have trouble meeting the toughest of the many U.S. emissions targets, the one for nitrous oxide. To get around this little problem, some collection of numbskulls at the global German auto giant decided they could to a little tweak of the on-board computer systems that would have the effect of producing a lower-than-actual reading of nitrous oxide emissions when undergoing official tests.

There may be a bigger issue here too. Clive Crook, writing for Bloomberg News, sees the VW scandal as a broader indicator of a major Europe-wide automotive gamble on “clean diesel” engines.

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Don’t call it a scandal: Volkswagen corruption is a syndrome – by Henry Mintzberg (Globe and Mail – September 23, 2015)

The 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.

Henry Mintzberg is the Cleghorn professor of management studies at McGill University in Montreal and author of Rebalancing Society: Radical Renewal Beyond Left, Right, and Center.

What were they thinking? That’s the question on everyone’s mind as the Volkswagen crisis unfolds. That question makes a big assumption: that the company’s leaders were thinking about anything beyond their greed. About decency, about our environment, about their progeny.

Okay, so you will not buy a Volkswagen. A Chevrolet instead? Watch out for the ignition. Or how about a Toyota? Just duck as the airbag comes your way. Do you, by any chance, see a pattern? Have we been thinking?

In Europe, the United States, Japan and most everywhere else, something is going on. There is a level of sheer corruption that transcends the automobile industry.

How about banking in the United States and Europe? How about politics, most everywhere?

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