Twitter

Copper

NEWS RELEASE: Superior Copper Corporate Update

TORONTO, ONTARIO–(Marketwired – June 27, 2013) – Superior Copper Corporation (TSX VENTURE:SPC) (“Superior Copper” or the “Company”) is providing the following information update to the shareholders of the Company.

The Company announces that it intends to complete a best efforts non-brokered private placement financing (the “Financing”) of up to $300,000 principal amount of convertible promissory notes (“Notes”).

The Notes are due two years from the date of closing of the Financing (the “Maturity Date”) and bear interest at a rate of 8.0% per annum, payable monthly. The holder is entitled to convert all or any portion of the unpaid principal amount of the Notes into units of Superior Copper (“Units”) at a price of $0.10 per Unit. In the event that the 20-day weighted average trading price of Superior Copper’s common shares (“Shares”) on the TSX Venture Exchange (the “TSXV”) is at least $0.25 at any time prior to the Maturity Date, Superior Copper is entitled to require the holder to convert all or any portion of the unpaid principal amount of the Notes into units of Superior Copper (“Units”) at a price of $0.10 per Unit.

Each Unit will be comprised of one Share and one Share purchase warrant (“Warrant”), with each Warrant being exercisable for one Share at an exercise price of $0.15 on or before the Maturity Date. Where the closing price of the Shares on the TSXV is at least $0.25 for a period of 20 consecutive trading days, the Company shall have the right to accelerate the expiry date of the Warrants by giving notice to the holders of Warrants that the Warrants will expire 30 days later.

Read more

Mongolia risk to hurt growth even with Oyu Tolgoi start-up, election – by Terrence Edwards and Sonali Paul (Reuters India – June 26, 2013)

http://in.reuters.com/

ULAN BATOR/MELBOURNE, June 26 (Reuters) – Mongolia’s efforts to protect its mineral wealth have scared investors so much that not even the first exports from its biggest mine and the expected re-election this week of a president who wants foreign capital will turn sentiment around.

With the country’s economic growth heavily tied to its vast copper and coal resources, Mongolia should have been celebrating the first copper sales to China from the $6.2 billion Oyu Tolgoi mine.

Instead, the government twice this month told mine operator Rio Tinto to delay the first shipment, partly due to a dispute over the repatriation of profits. Some analysts said the holdup was also aimed at keeping a lid on nationalism ahead of the presidential vote on Wednesday.

Industry experts believe exports will start soon, but the delays follow a year in which Mongolia introduced draft legislation to tighten control over mining activity and limit foreign investment.

“Whilst the country has lots of resource potential and holds Oyu Tolgoi, a world-scale mine, there’s too much headline risk,” said Darko Kuzmanovic, a portfolio manager at Caledonia Investments, which holds global mining stocks but has steered clear of Mongolia-focused miners.

Read more

Codelco: The copper conductor – by John O’Hanlon (BE Mining – February 27, 2013)

http://www.bus-ex.com/

Copper fundamentals are highly buoyant. Demand for copper is increasing at over half a million tones annually, most of it driven by China, which consumes 20 percen of global supply. Demand for copper shows no sign of levelling off in the opinion of researchers at Yale, who calculated from 2006 consumption figures that global demand for copper would exceed the amount extractable from the ground by 2100.

Codelco (Corporación Nacional del Cobre de Chile or the National Copper Corporation of Chile) was founded in 1976, five years after the Chilean government nationalized the entire copper mining industry. Codelco grouped the existing deposits into a single mining, industrial and commercial corporation and today it is the biggest copper producer in the world controlling a tenth of known global reserves.

Codelco has more than $20.835 billion in assets and in 2011 its equity totalled $6.065 billion. In the same year the company produced 1.79 million metric tons of refined copper – over ten percent of world copper production. And at today’s investment levels it estimates it has the capacity to maintain current production rates for a further 70 years at least.

But that can’t be done without strategic investment, and a number of specific projects are being targeted. The Andina Division is located at 3,000 metres above sea level a little to the north of the Chilean capital Santiago and at the base of the chain of operations that is strung out along the Andes in the northern half of Chile.

Read more

UPDATE 3-Mongolia tells Rio Tinto to delay Oyu Tolgoi copper exports (Reuters India – June 21, 2013)

http://in.reuters.com/

ULAN BATOR, June 21 (Reuters) – Rio Tinto said its plan to start exporting copper from the $6.2 billion Oyu Tolgoi mine on Friday has been delayed at the request of the Mongolian government, heightening investor concerns about the risks of mining in the country.

Uncertainty over what was behind the delay sparked an exodus out of shares in other Mongolian miners on Friday, with Canadian and Australian listed miners exposed to the country sliding between 10 and 20 percent.

Journalists had been invited last week to attend a ceremony at the copper and gold mine on June 14 to mark the first exports. That was postponed to June 21, but the event was again cancelled at the last minute. Mongolia is due to hold a presidential election on June 26.

“Oyu Tolgoi is ready to start its first shipments of copper concentrate from its Mongolian mine and all necessary permits to do so have been received from relevant authorities,” Rio Tinto spokesman Bruce Tobin said on Friday.

“However, plans to start shipping on Friday 21 June have been postponed at the request of the government of Mongolia.” The company declined to comment on what was behind the latest delay.

Read more

Rio Tinto’s Oyu Tolgoi mine in Mongolia to begin shipments – by Robb M. Stewart (Dow Jones/The Australian – June 20, 2013)

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/

RIO Tinto plans to make its first shipment of copper and gold from the Oyu Tolgoi mine in Mongolia on Friday, an operation the mining company estimates will account for over 30 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product when it reaches full production in 2020, says a person familiar with the matter.

A ceremony marking the event would be held that day at the mine in the southern Gobi Desert, about 100km north of the Mongolia-China border, the person said.

The $US6.2 billion Oyu Tolgoi mine is key to Rio Tinto reducing its dependence on iron ore, which accounts for about 80 per cent of its earnings. Faced with volatile commodities markets, new Chief executive Sam Walsh is moving to simplify the company’s structure and is selling non-core and poor performing assets and targeting more than $US5bn in cost savings by the end of next year. A number of senior managers at Rio Tinto’s iron ore division in Western Australia were laid off this week.

The first copper-gold concentrate was produced at Oyu Tolgoi in January and Rio Tinto had forecast commercial output would begin by the end of June, provided it could settle a dispute with Mongolia’s government over costs and the further development of the mine.

Read more

The value of mining in Arizona – by Jonathan DuHamel (Tucson Citizen – June 18, 2013)

http://tucsoncitizen.com/

Without minerals, we would not have electricity, food, or shelter. Minerals make today’s technology-based life possible, but that’s something many of us take for granted. We want the benefits from those minerals, but some want mining of minerals to be in somebody else’s neighborhood. The importance of mining has long been recognized:

If we remove metals from the service of man, all methods of protecting and sustaining health and more carefully preserving the course of life are done away with. If there were no metals, men would pass a horrible and wretched existence in the midst of wild beasts… -Georgius Agricola, in De Re Metallica, 1556.

For Arizona, it is not just metals. Arizona produces sand and gravel, limestone for cement production, coal for electrical generation, and a variety of industrial minerals which contribute almost $2 billion to Arizona’s economy.

Arizona has a long history of mining. There is archeological evidence that cinnabar, coal, turquoise, clay, pigments, and other minerals were mined in Arizona beginning at least 3,000 years ago.

According to the Arizona Mining Association, Arizona currently produces 68% of domestically mined copper. With that copper production comes by-product molybdenum, gold, silver, platinum, and rhenium.

Read more

Our view: ‘Eyes wide open’ on metals mining – Duluth News Tribune Editorial (June 19, 2013)

http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/

A guest speaker in Duluth yesterday long has been a dark cloud over any prediction of economic benefit related to the coming mining of precious metals in northern Minnesota.

A guest speaker in Duluth yesterday long has been a dark cloud over any prediction of economic benefit related to the coming mining of precious metals in northern Minnesota. And he was brought here by Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness, a Minneapolis-based anti-mining nonprofit.

So the expectation, naturally, was for a mining-is-evil message. And that’s just what Thomas Power, a Princeton-educated economics professor of 40 years at the University of Montana, delivered. But at least he did so with a history lesson rather than with half-truth propaganda or with picket-sign catch phrases that too often have been the weak tools of the doom-and-gloom, anti-mining crowd.

“My message is to go in with eyes wide open,” Power told the News Tribune Opinion page before speaking over the lunch hour Tuesday at Clyde Iron. “I’ve been doing economic research and teaching courses on Montana’s and on the western states’ economies for 45 years. … It wasn’t possible to study the Montana economy without paying attention to the mining part of it.”

Read more

Copper mining economics questioned by Montana economist – by John Myers (Duluth News Tribune – June 19, 2013)

http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/

University of Minnesota Duluth geologists call it the largest untapped copper-nickel deposit in the world, with millions of tons of valuable metals worth billions of dollars sitting in the Duluth complex of rock under Minnesota’s Arrowhead.

University of Minnesota Duluth geologists call it the largest untapped copper-nickel deposit in the world, with millions of tons of valuable metals worth billions of dollars sitting in the Duluth complex of rock under Minnesota’s Arrowhead.

Supporters and economic reports point to hundreds of new mining jobs if Minnesota’s first-ever copper mines become a reality, along with spinoff employment, huge payrolls and millions in taxes and royalties paid. Mining, already one of Northeastern Minnesota’s largest industries thanks to taconite iron ore, has the potential to become even bigger with copper, nickel, palladium, platinum and gold.

But Thomas Power, former chairman of the University of Montana’s economics department, warned Northland residents Tuesday to be careful in the rush into copper.

At a Duluth lunch forum sponsored by the Friends of the Boundary Waters environmental group, the professor said mining’s economic costs are often overlooked in the luster of a promised boom time. He said many economic reports released around proposed mining projects are ripe with benefits but fail to address costs. That should cause economists, and the public, to bristle, he said.

Read more

Serbia may be on cusp of mining revival after years of decline – by Aleksandar Vasovic and Stephen Eisenhammer (Reuters U.S. – June 13, 2013)

http://www.reuters.com/

Reuters) – Serbia’s mining sector, stagnant since the wars that tore Yugoslavia apart in the early 1990s, looks set for a revival as volatile commodity prices increase the allure of countries in Europe with established infrastructure and skilled labor.

Once home to a core copper and gold mining facility for the former Yugoslavia, the town of Bor in the north-eastern corner of Serbia has a history of mining dating back to Roman times.

Canadian major Freeport and its smaller partner Reservoir Minerals are exploring the area’s underground reserves. Early results have impressed investors and analysts. “The grades they’re drilling are exceptional… These come around once a decade,” said Brent Cook, a geologist and private investor who writes an investment newsletter.

International mining firms are under pressure from increasingly cautious investors to move away from projects in non-traditional mining countries where a lack of good roads, railways, water and power, as well as skilled workers, can hike costs.

Eastern Europe, along with Spain and Greece, has emerged at the forefront of this shift, with governments that are eager to help boost jobs and growth.

Read more

Market appears too relaxed about China copper outlook – by Clyde Russell (Reuters India – June 14, 2013)

http://in.reuters.com/

(Reuters) – The market may be too sanguine about the outlook for copper prices, as import demand in top consumer China shows signs of increasing just as an anticipated global supply surplus is looking vulnerable.

Shanghai copper fell on Thursday when trading resumed after a three-day holiday, with the most active October contract dropping by as much as 3 percent to 51,350 yuan ($8,354) a tonne in early trade.

While the decline was largely a catch-up to weakness in London earlier this week, it’s indicative that traders aren’t overly concerned about the supply outlook.

The Shanghai slump came a day after Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc declared force majeure on deliveries from its Grasberg operation in Indonesia, the world’s second-largest copper mine.

The legal clause allowing the company to miss contracted shipments comes after the mine was shut indefinitely after two accidents in May claimed the lives of 29 workers. Indonesian authorities want the mine closed until investigations into the incidents are completed, a process that may take several months.

Read more

Canadian Company: EPA is Evil, Let Us Create Giant Alaska Mine – by Hal Herring (Field and Stream – June 10, 2013)

http://www.fieldandstream.com/

There is nothing like a good anti-federal-government advertising campaign to rally support for, well, almost anything. In this time of Internal Revenue Service scandals and accusations that the Environmental Protection Agency has charged so-called “conservative” groups for Freedom of Information Act requests that they handed over to environmental groups for free, the time was ripe for a smart advertising professional to tap in to the zeitgeist and try, yet again, to sell a highly skeptical American public on the Pebble Project—a huge proposed gold and copper mine proposed by two foreign mining corporations to be built on public lands in the headwaters of Bristol Bay, Alaska.

On June 4, Northern Dynasty Minerals, Limited, a Vancouver, Canada-based corporation that owns 50 percent of the Pebble Project, ran an ad in the Washington Post and on various political websites that demands an end to what it calls EPA’s “black box bias” against the mine. The ad also claims that the EPA is manipulating public opinion and denying science in response the results of the EPA’s 14 month-long comprehensive Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment (BBWA) show that the Pebble Project does indeed threaten the greatest salmon fishery on earth (a $500 million industry annually) and the estimated 14,000 jobs that depend upon it, thus industrializing one of America’s wildest and most pristine expanses of public land, which would forever change the culture and economy of the 7,500 people, mostly Native Americans, who now call it home.

I’m not sure what the Canadian mining executives thought the report should have said. Perhaps that Pebble Project would build the first road, first power-generating facility, and first deep-water port in the region to open up mining on tens of thousands of acres of public land in the trackless headwaters of the Nushagak and Kvichak Rivers.

Read more

‘Mining will fuel our city’s future’ – [Queensland] North West Star Editorial (June 9, 2013)

http://www.northweststar.com.au/

BUSINESS leaders are positive about the city’s future despite a wave of public concern after news of Glencore Xstrata’s Mount Isa Mines’ prediction its local copper operations could cease by 2019.

The North West Star came under fire and wore the brunt of the response towards the revelations, titled “Is this the end?” in Friday’s edition. But many have come forward with positive outlooks for the city beyond current copper operations at the mine, saying it was simply the natural “ebb and flow” of the mining industry

Several mine workers told The North West Star that General Manager for Mount Isa Copper Operations at Xstrata Copper Mike Westerman addressed a group of employees on Thursday morning at the mine site.

The employees said Mr Westerman stated the feasibility study for the Mount Isa Open Pit (MIOP) project, which would have increased the mine’s life by 30 years, was too expensive and copper operations would either close in 2019 or operate until 2021 as a non-profit venture.

Read more

Copper Expansion: The Copperbelt: the pride of Zambia – by John Chadwick (Publisher International Mining – June 2013)

http://www.im-mining.com/

John Chadwick reports from Zambia’s buoyant copper mining centre, where he worked many years ago.

The first thing I noted when flying into Ndola at the eastern end of Zambia’s prolific Copperbelt was the town’s proud new football stadium. It appears as a symbol of the accomplishments of the Copperbelt this century and its re-establishment as one of the world’s top mining regions. Zambia is Africa’s largest copper producer and the fourth largest in the world – and growing fast. Copper production has rocketed from 257,000 t in 2000, to more than 700,000 t in 2011 and about 650,000 t in 2012. Zambia’s Chamber of Mines predicts output reaching 1.5 Mt by 2016 as a result of the many projects underway.

The road from Ndola to Kitwe (where I started my career in mining as a mining engineer) has been greatly improved and there are plans to improve it further all the way through Chingola and Chililabombwe to the Kasumbalesa border with the DRC as a two-lane highway. Kitwe is the heart of the Copperbelt and a vital centre for mining supplies and services with Zambia and into the DRC’s Katanga Province.

On that road to Kitwe from Ndola, one first passes north of CNMC Luanshya Copper Mines, 85% owned by China Nonferrous Metals Co Ltd (CNMC) and 15% by ZCCM-IH. Luanshya is one of the oldest mines in Southern Africa. It was shutdown in 2008 at the height of the global financial crisis. CNMC reopened the mine in 2009 after extensive modernisation works.

Read more

UPDATE 3-Beijing’s forced sale of Glencore Peru mine may play into China’s hands – by Denny Thomas (Reuters India – June 4, 2013)

http://in.reuters.com/

HONG KONG, June 4 (Reuters) – Beijing’s demand that Glencore Xstrata Plc sell a copper mine in Peru may bring rich dividends for China Inc., as two companies linked to Chinese state-backed groups are weighing rival bids for the $5 billion-plus project.

Interest from Chinese state companies in Glencore’s Peruvian mine is a rare case of an asset sale forced by a government as a condition of merger approval working in favour of its own national champions, and underscores China’s new-found clout in regulating global takeovers.

Chinalco Mining Corp International and Hong Kong-listed MMG Ltd, both linked to a Chinese state-owned enterprises, are considering offers for Glencore Xstrata’s Las Bambas mine, according to people close to the matter, less than three months after Beijing blessed Glencore’s $35 billion purchase of Xstrata.

Under the deal struck with Beijing’s Ministry of Commerce in April, Glencore has three months to begin the process of selling Las Bambas, one of the group’s biggest development projects, with the expectation of finding a buyer by the end of August 2014.

Read more

RPT-Disruptions tighten copper supply, surplus narrows – by Melanie Burton and Eric Onstad (Reuters U.s. – May 26, 2013)

http://www.reuters.com/

SINGAPORE/LONDON, May 24 (Reuters) – A series of copper mine shutdowns and supply logjams has prompted some analysts to scale down forecasts for a market surplus, but it would take more disruptions to swing the market into a deficit.

“People are making adjustments, we certainly are. At the beginning of the year we were pencilling in a 300,000 tonne surplus. That’s probably going to be pegged back by half or so,” analyst Robin Bhar at Societe Generale in London said.

“Demand is down as well, so one offsets the other. I don’t think we’ll have a deficit market again but certainly a more balanced market.”

The forecast surplus has weighed on benchmark copper prices , which have shed 13 percent since touching a peak in February of $8,346 a tonne for the year so far.

The global market for refined copper was expected to have a 98,500 tonne surplus this year and 305,000 tonnes in 2014, based on the average forecast of 18 analysts polled by Reuters in April. The 2013 estimate was already scaled back from a 127,000 tonne surplus forecast in January.

Those April forecasts came shortly after a rockslide at Rio Tinto’s Bingham Canyon copper mine, which the company said would reduce production by about 100,000 tonnes.

Read more