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Economists duel over benefits of Arizona copper mine – by Mike Sunnucks (Phoenix Business Journal – September 25, 2013)

http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/

A new economic study pours water on the projected benefits of a huge proposed copper mine 60 miles east of Phoenix.
But the authors of a previous study, commissioned by the multinational companies proposing the mine, are sticking by their more ambitious projections.

The competing studies look at the proposed Resolution Copper Mine in Superior. The mine would be one of the largest in the world and is proposed by U.K.-based Rio Tinto PLC and Australia’s BHP Billiton Ltd. The two companies are among the largest copper miners in the world.

The San Carlos Apache Tribe — which opposes the mine — commissioned a new study by University of Montana economist Thomas Power and his firm Power Consulting Inc. The study takes issue with a 2011 study commissioned by Resolution Copper Co. and conducted by Scottsdale-based Elliott D. Pollack & Co.

Resolution Copper is the company formed by BHP and Rio Tinto to develop the mine. The Pollack study projects the mine will create 3,719 jobs statewide worth $220.5 million in annual wages. That includes 1,429 direct mining jobs for the mine.

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Copper mine belt to ring Grampians – by Nick Toscano (The Age – September 22, 2013)

http://www.theage.com.au/ (Austrialia)

Mining companies have been permitted to drill at the doorstep of the Grampians National Park, and the area could become ”a new copper belt” in Australia, according to one mining executive.

Since December, the Department of State Development, Business and Innovation has pushed through three exploration licences that allow companies to drill on either side of the Grampians, after geological surveys showed the area was ”highly prospective” for copper.

An application was lodged on May 7 by the Queensland miner Diatreme Resources for a government licence to begin exploratory drilling near the Grampians’ southern border. Last month it was approved after what the company said was the ”quickest turnaround” it had ever experienced.

”The speed at which they’ve granted this tenement, which took about four months, is the fastest we’ve ever had,” chief executive Tony Fawdon said. ”They can often take several years.” Mr Fawdon said the recent departmental surveys had identified substantial copper deposits, which are believed to stretch from the Grampians to the state’s north-west.

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Tentative deal in dispute over N.Y. [Copper] heiress’ will – by Jennifer Peltz (Associated Press -September 21, 2013)

http://www.boston.com/?mastheadLogo

NEW YORK (AP) — A tentative deal has been reached in a New York court fight over the will of a reclusive Montana copper mining heiress that would give more than $30 million of her $300 million estate to her distant relatives, a person familiar with the case said Saturday.

The breakthrough in the fight over Huguette Clark’s estate comes after jury selection started in a trial pitting nearly two dozen of her half-siblings’ descendants against a goddaughter, a hospital where she spent the last 20 years of her life, a nurse, doctors, a lawyer and others.

An April 2005 will cut out her distant relatives. Another will, six weeks earlier, left them most of her money. The tentative settlement will give the relatives about $34.5 million after taxes under the deal, while her nurse would have to turn over $5 million and a doll collection valued at about $1.6 million, the person told The Associated Press. Her lawyer would get nothing.

The person spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity to discuss the settlement because it hasn’t yet been made public. News of the tentative settlement was first reported by The New York Times and WNBC.

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Japan’s JX to develop its mines, eyes stake buys in upstream copper push – by Yuka Obayashi (Reuters India – September 19, 2013)

http://in.reuters.com/

TOKYO, Sept 19 (Reuters) – JX Nippon Mining & Metals Corp will focus on development of its own copper mines in South America but may also look at buying stakes in other projects as Japan’s top smelter aims to cut its dependency on major miners for ore, a senior executive said.

Japanese copper smelters are stepping up acquisitions of upstream metal assets and development of copper mines to hedge against any increase in ore prices as their profit margins on smelting declines.

JX Nippon Mining is aiming to raise the volume of copper content coming from its own mine interests for refining to an annual 250,000 tonnes in 2015 and then to 350,000 tonnes by around 2020, its parent JX Holdings Inc had said in March. Around 100,000 tonnes of in-house copper content in concentrate was used to refine metal in 2012.

“We want to achieve our 350,000 tonnes goal first, then move further into upstream where we expect higher profit return,” Keiichi Goto, deputy chief executive officer of JX Nippon Mining, told Reuters in an interview earlier this week.

JX’s rival Sumitomo Metal Mining Co Ltd also plans to boost annual volume of copper content procured from its own mining interests to 300,000 tonnes by the 2021 business year from 120,000 tonnes now.

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REFILE-Anglo departure not the end of Alaska’s Pebble mine, locals say – by Yereth Rosen (Reuters U.S. – September 17, 2013)

http://www.reuters.com/

(Reuters) – Supporters and opponents of a giant mine to tap Alaska’s gold and copper wealth have found a rare point of agreement: The Pebble project remains alive even without its heavyweight financial backer.

Anglo American, the global mining group that partnered with Canada’s Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd in 2007 to develop Pebble, said on Monday it was pulling out, less than two month after promising shareholders it would cut costs and halve its $17 billion pipeline of potential mines.

Anglo’s departure dealt a sharp blow to the ambitious plan to build an open-pit mine in Alaska’s unspoiled Bristol Bay region, at a time when investors are increasingly cautious about plowing cash into building expensive new mines.

But the hiccups aren’t stopping Northern Dynasty. It sees plenty of opportunity to push ahead on the project, which is expected to produce some 1 million tonnes of copper concentrate a year, on its own or with a new partner.

“This is a huge asset – a huge, valuable asset for the State of Alaska,” said Ron Thiessen, Northern Dynasty’s chief executive, who added that he remains very confident the mine will be built within the next 10 years.

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N.Y. trial to examine will of Montana Copper King heiress – by Associated Press (The Missoulian – September 15, 2013)

http://missoulian.com/

NEW YORK — She had wealth few could boast and used it to finance a life few would choose — an heiress to the fortune of the founder of Las Vegas spending 20 years voluntarily in New York hospital rooms.

Now Huguette Clark’s reclusive existence is about to be scrutinized in a Manhattan courtroom, where jury selection is due to start Tuesday in a civil trial over her will. With an estimated $300 million at stake, the case broaches questions about aging, caregiving and the line between encouraging gratitude and extracting gifts.

Clark’s distant relatives say hospital executives, a nurse, a lawyer, an accountant and others in her small circle induced a dependent, fragile woman to give them millions of dollars during her lifetime and in her will. The beneficiaries say she was a sharp-minded, strong-willed, munificent person whose decisions were as deliberate as they were unusual.

Signed when the childless Clark was 98, the disputed April 2005 will largely left her estate to arts charities, her nurse and a goddaughter. It provided nothing for her relatives, who were the main beneficiaries of a will she’d signed just six weeks earlier.

“Fundamentally, however, this tragic story presents much more than just a question of whether a particular will is valid or not,” the relatives’ lawyer, John R. Morken, said in a court filing.

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Billionaire miner Robert Friedland sounds off – by Tommy Humphreys (Mining.com – September 15, 2013)

http://www.mining.com/

I was able to catch up with billionaire Ivanhoe Mines (TSX:IVN) Executive Chairman Robert Friedland in Toronto yesterday. The Singapore-based mining legend was in Toronto this week to announce the launch of Ivanhoe Pictures, a new film and TV finance and production company, and to host the first investor presentations for his Ivanhoe Mines after a summer spent relaxing and reflecting on the Italian coast, where Mr. Friedland acquired a hotel property earlier this year.

Friedland says that the Chinese are determined to fight air pollution. “I have a home in Beijing but I’ve been avoiding it in recent years because the air pollution has become absolutely diabolical,” Friedland commented. This alone would be enough to drive the conventional Platinum market crazy, he added, noting that catalytic converters which reduce toxic emissions in automobiles use substantial amounts of platinum and palladium.

There is a revolution coming to the automobile industry via the Japanese, according to Friedland. Senior officials in Japan tell him that the Toyota Motor Company will announce hydrogen fuel cell automobiles later this year with a commercial roll out coming in 2015. “These cars will use ounces, not tenths of ounces of platinum,” Friedland said. This is why the Japanese government bought 10% of Ivanhoe’s Platreef project for $300 million, Friedland believes.

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Zambia’s economy set to grow by 8.1% in the next few years – by Zandile Mavuso (MiningWeekly.com – September 13, 2013)

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

The completion of major copper mining projects in Zambia next year is expected to contribute to economic growth of 8.1% from 2014 to 2016, advisory firm KPMG states.

“Copper production in the country peaked in the 1970s at 700 000 t and gradually declined to 255 000 t by 1998, as a result of depressed prices and under- investment in the then State-owned industry. However, as copper production soars on the back of the completion of major projects and also because of the development of the new Trident mine, operated by Canada-based mining company First Quantum Minerals (FQM), Zambia is set to be at the peak of copper production once again,” says KPMG senior partner in Zambia Jason Kazilimani, Jr.

FQM reports that one of its major projects, the Kansanshi mine, has under- gone several significant expansions – the most recent being a smelter that is currently being built. It is estimated that the smelter will produce 300 000 t/y of treated copper concentrate. Before this new development, the mine’s initial production capacity was 110 000 t/y of copper.

By 2015, the yearly production should reach about 400 000 t of copper, which is a major achievement that will ensure the mine reaches it one-million tons of total copper production by 2017.

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Massive mine proposed at Oak Flat, sacred tribal land – by Emily Bregel (Arizona Daily Star – September 8, 2013)

http://azstarnet.com/

The planned Rosemont Copper Mine just south of Tucson isn’t the only mining controversy in Arizona. It isn’t even the biggest.

About 100 miles north of Tucson, Resolution Copper Mining wants to build a mine in Superior, a town of 2,800 people, that could yield 1 billion pounds of copper a year. That’s more than four times the projected output for Rosemont Copper’s planned mine in the Santa Rita Mountains, which would produce an estimated 243 million pounds of copper annually.

Resolution — owned by mining giants U.K.-based Rio Tinto and Australia-based BHP Billiton — says the mine would create 1,400 jobs and generate $61 billion over its 40-year lifespan, plus construction and clean-up time. It would extract enough copper to meet 25 percent of U.S. demand.

“If you can imagine five Super Bowls in Superior every year for 60 years, that’s the level of economic boost and economic activity this mine is going to generate,” said Andrew Taplin, Resolution Copper Mining’s project director since October 2012. But the project would also permanently alter an outdoor destination popular with Southern Arizonans. At the Oak Flat campground, five miles east of Superior, stone picnic tables are shaded by centuries-old oak trees.

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Timna copper mines dated to King Solomon era – by Aaron Kalman (The Times of Israel – September 8, 2013)

http://www.timesofisrael.com/

Radiocarbon dating of olive pits shows site was active during 10th century BCE, backing up Biblical account

New archaeological finds, including date and olive pits, have backed up the biblical narrative according to which the Timna copper mines in the south of Israel were active during the reign of King Solomon, around the 10th century BCE.

The findings — based on the radiocarbon dating of material unearthed at a new site in Timna Valley in the Arava Desert, and released last week by a team led by Tel Aviv University’s Dr. Erez Ben-Yosef — overturn a consensus that had held sway among archaeologists for several decades.

After the unearthing of an Egyptian temple from the 13th century BCE in 1969, most archaeologists believed that the site had been built and was operated by the ancient Egyptians. Before that find, the area was called “King Solomon’s Mines,” as a result of digs by archaeologist Nelson Glueck who found pottery shards from the 10th century BCE and said the copper mines were active during the time of the ancient Israelite kingdom.

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Copper Rally Reversing as Glut Expands to ’01 High: Commodities – by Agnieszka Troszkiewicz & Maria Kolesnikova (Bloomberg News – September 3, 2013)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

The biggest rally in copper in three months is reversing as analysts predict that the largest glut in 13 years will overwhelm consumption from an accelerating Chinese economy, which uses two in every five tons.

Production will exceed demand by 408,000 metric tons next year, the most since 2001, compared with 167,000 tons in 2013, the average of 15 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg shows. Futures rose 3.2 percent in August, the most in three months, on signs of an expansion in Chinese manufacturing. Prices will drop 6.1 percent to $6,800 a ton by the end of December, the median of 13 analyst and trader predictions shows.

Copper is falling with all other metals this year after a decade when prices rose fivefold. Producers from Rio Tinto Group to BHP Billiton Ltd. added 3.4 million tons to output since 2003, about what Europe uses in a year, and Morgan Stanley expects another 4.1 million tons by 2017. While prices are 29 percent below the record set in 2011, they are still about 50 percent higher than what the costliest mines need to break even, Macquarie Group Ltd. estimates.

“We’re having this big wave of copper supply growth,” said David Wilson, an analyst at Citigroup Inc. in London who has followed metals for almost two decades.

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Miners Buying Hugo Boss Perfume as Chile’s Copper Booms – by Matt Craze & Javiera Quiroga (Bloomberg News – August 20, 2013)

http://www.bloomberg.com/ 

Since starting work at the Esperanza copper mine in northern Chile two years ago, Erick Moreno has tripled his salary and is preparing to buy his first home. The pay, he says, is so good that he’d never take a job elsewhere.

“I am going to die in this industry, I don’t see myself anywhere else,” Moreno said by phone from Antofagasta, a city on the edge of the mineral-rich Atacama desert. “When you start working in a mine, everything changes and in a very little period of time.”

While Moreno, 27, completed his engineering course at Antofagasta University, he says many fellow students dropped out to start work at the mines without graduating. Most of them already own their homes and drive sports cars, while many older miners have five or more houses, some far from the mines that litter the northern desert, he said.

Spending by high-earning miners is spreading through the economy, fueling a consumer boom and driving unemployment to its lowest since 1973. The nation, squeezed between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, has become the wealthiest in Latin America, according to the International Monetary Fund, with gross domestic product per capita rising to about $16,300 this year from $4,780 ten years ago. World Bank President Jim Yong Kim last month congratulated the country on earning “high-income” status.

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COLUMN-Mongolia, Rio Tinto playing high stakes on copper mine – by Clyde Russell (Reuters U.S. – August 19, 2013)

http://www.reuters.com/ 

Aug 19 (Reuters) – Is Rio Tinto’s dispute with the Mongolian government over the expansion of the Oyu Tolgoi copper and gold mine the signal that the nation’s commodity boom is over, or is it just a hiccup?

Certainly, Mongolia’s reputation as a desirable investment destination and one of the few remaining countries ripe for developing natural resources has taken a battering recently.

Rio Tinto, the world’s second-largest mining company, said on Aug. 14 that it will cut 1,700 jobs at Oyu Tolgoi after a $5 billion expansion of the project was put on hold last month.

The dispute is over how the expansion gets financed, and the Mongolian parliament has been recalled from its summer recess for an emergency session to try and deal with the matter.

But the real issue is how long it will take for Mongolia to get significant amounts of money from the mine, which is slated to boost the economy by 35 percent by 2020. 

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UPDATE 1-Freeport says Indonesia export ban may cut copper output – by Fergus Jensen (Reuters India – August 13, 2013)

http://in.reuters.com/

Aug 13 (Reuters) – Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc’s Indonesian subsidiary warned that output from Grasberg, the world’s second-biggest copper mine, could be cut by a ban on unprocessed ore exports that takes effect next year.

The Indonesian government is pushing miners, especially foreign-owned operations such as Freeport’s Grasberg, to add more value within the country.

Freeport, which on Tuesday signed two memorandums of understanding with Indonesian companies planning to build smelters that would process its ore, said it might seek a way around the rules during its contract renegotiation with the government.

The company currently processes only around 40 percent of its ore mined in Indonesia at one smelter in East Java, PT Freeport Indonesia Chief Executive Rozik Soetjipto said on Tuesday, but the law now requires it to smelt all of the ore in Indonesia from January 2014.

“If there is no dispensation from the government… our mining capacity will need to be reduced … It’s very complicated,” Soetjipto said at a news conference in Jakarta.

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Mount Milligan mine on verge of production – by Derrick Penner (Vancouver Sun – August 8, 2013)

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

Copper-gold project north of Prince George will be first new mine in B.C. in more than a decade

Crews at Thompson Creek Metals’ Mount Milligan project have started crushing rocks and are mere days away from turning on the milling machinery that will grind down the ore and start extracting copper and gold from the first new mine to open in British Columbia in more than a decade.

That development will turn the $1.57-billion construction project into an operating mine with the goal of commencing commercial production of ore sometime in the fall, churning out an estimate 40,369 tonnes (89 million pounds) of copper concentrate and 262,000 ounces of gold per year.

However, the mine’s opening coincides with an uncertain time for the mining sector with falling metals prices and companies such as Teck Resources scaling back capital projects.

“It’s a bit of a mixed environment” for copper miners, according to Patricia Mohr, vice-president of industry and commodity research for Scotia Economics.

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