Twitter
Boston-Bay-Mines-Announcement

Copper

Robert Friedland’s Ivanhoe Mines selling minority stake to China’s CITIC – by Niall McGee (Globe and Mail – June 12, 2018)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Robert Friedland’s Ivanhoe Mines Ltd. is selling a minority stake to a Chinese state-owned firm, securing an important financing source, as uncertainty lingers over how a new African mining code could affect the Canadian base metals miner.

On Monday, Ivanhoe announced it is selling 19.9 per cent of the company by issuing 196.6 million shares in a private placement to CITIC Metal, a subsidiary of CITIC Ltd., China’s largest conglomerate.

The shares are being issued at $3.68 apiece, a 13-per-cent premium to its Friday close. CITIC Metal, which is set to become Ivanhoe’s biggest shareholder, has also agreed to advance Ivanhoe a US$100-million loan.

Read more

China’s Citic to take 20% stake in Friedland’s Ivanhoe Mines Share – by Neil Hume (Financial Post – June 11, 2018)

https://www.ft.com/

A Chinese state-owned conglomerate is set to become the biggest shareholder in Robert Friedland’s Ivanhoe Mines. Under the deal, announced in Beijing on Monday, Citic will take a 20 per cent stake in Ivanhoe for $560m and make a $100m loan facility available to the Canadian listed company.

Citic will also help Ivanhoe arrange project financing for the Kamoa-Kakula project in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has been hailed by analysts as the most significant copper find in decades.

The investment comes as the copper market heads for a deficit, with demand set to outstrip supplies. There is a paucity of new copper projects under development, while demand for the metal is set to increase as renewable energy generation grabs market share from fossil fuels.

Read more

Copper price surges to highest since January 2014 – by Frik Els (Mining.com – June 7, 2018)

http://www.mining.com/

Copper’s stunning rally continued in New York on Thursday to a high of $3.32 a pound ($7,310 a tonne), the highest since January 2014, as worries about labour-related supply disruptions in key producing regions resurface.

Workers at the Escondida copper mine in Chile, the world’s top producing mine by a country mile, fired an opening salvo in contract talks with part-owner and operator BHP that makes a quick resolution highly unlikely.

The union represents about 2,500 workers at the mine. Bloomberg interviewed union spokesman Carlos Allendes in Santiago on Wednesday:

“The company would be wrong to remain stubborn in its position that workers should earn less to give that money to shareholders.

Read more

Escondida Union to Copper Investors: Bet on Quick Wage Deal – by Laura Millan Lombrana (Bloomberg News – June 7, 2018)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

The world’s largest copper mine probably will avoid a repeat of last year’s prolonged strike as the two sides reign in expectations, according to a union leader.

The main union at Escondida in Chile presented its demands to owner BHP Billiton Ltd. on Friday, and the company has until the weekend to deliver its counteroffer. The two sides are scheduled to sit down for talks next week with the current contract expiring on July 31.

“If I was an investor, I would be betting on this being resolved quickly,” union spokesman Carlos Allendes said in an interview in Santiago on Wednesday. “Numbers show that, at the end of the day, a strike is no good for the company because they lost more than we did.”

Read more

Sudbury Accent: A slow road to the Ring [Part 2 of 5] – by Stan Sudol (Sudbury Star – June 4, 2018)

http://www.thesudburystar.com/

Let’s be brutally honest and frank. Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne and her mines minister, Michael Gravelle, have utterly failed in moving the Ring of Fire forward, which is located in the isolated James Bay lowlands about 500 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay.

For slightly more than five years, they have not been able to get shovels in the ground for an essential road into the most promising mineral discoveries in Canada since the Sudbury Basin in 1883, which was found during the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

By coincidence, it took a bit less than five years to build the entire CPR in the early 1880s from Ontario to Vancouver – a distance of roughly 4,200 kilometres. The distance between the Ring and the provincial highway system is about 280 kms.

But to cut both of these politicians some political slack, enormous blame must also be given to the previous Harper and current Trudeau governments, as well. First Nations are primarily a federal responsibility – though that doesn’t prevent the province from stepping in if there is a dire need of some sort.

Read more

‘No real winners’: Canadian miners brace for steel tariffs and threat of trade war – by Gabriel Friedman (Financial Post – June 5, 2018)

http://business.financialpost.com/

However, some mining executives say they would take the uncertainty surrounding steel from current U.S. trade policies in exchange for the tax breaks

In the middle of the U.S. desert, just east of Reno, Nevada, engineers and construction workers are preparing to sink a second shaft of what is likely to be North America’s next productive copper mine sometime next year — Nevada Copper Corp.’s Pumpkin Hollow underground mine.

And yet headwinds are blowing as U.S. tariffs and sanctions threaten to whip up a global trade war, and erode mining companies’ margins just as many commodities prices are rising.

Mining companies operating in the U.S. hope to benefit from a more lax regulatory regime, and from recent tax reform that included major corporate breaks, are worried lingering uncertainty about trade and global economic growth could slow the industry.

Read more

Giant Waste-Spewing Mine Turns Into a Battleground in Indonesia – by Danielle Bochove and David Stringer (Bloomberg News – June 5, 2018)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Every year, Freeport-McMoRan Inc. dumps tens of millions of tons of mining waste into the Ajkwa River system in Indonesia. The company has been doing it for decades, and is demanding the right to keep at it for decades to come.

The discharge of what are called tailings, the leftovers of mineral extraction, is perfectly legal under Freeport’s current contract with the government. But recently, after more than a year of tense negotiations over the terms of a new deal, Indonesia suddenly changed the rules: The Grasberg mine in the highlands of Papua province would have to operate by heightened standards.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise, really, considering most every other miner in the world has been forced or has elected to stop discarding tailings in rivers.

Read more

Copper King Pushes Gender Diversity — With All-Male Board – by Laura Millan Lombrana (Bloomberg News – May 28, 2018)

https://www.bloombergquint.com/

(Bloomberg) — As it battles to remain the world’s biggest copper producer, Codelco just achieved a new, less enviable mantle — the only major mining company with an all-male board and senior management team.

On Friday, Chilean President Sebastian Pinera tapped executive Juan Benavides to be chairman of the state-owned company. Earlier this month, he appointed Hernan de Solminihac and Patricio Briones as directors, replacing Dante Contreras and Laura Albornoz, then the only woman on the nine-member board. Chile is the biggest copper-mining nation.

Gender diversity is one of Codelco’s strategic objectives, according to its annual report. But the company has no women in top management, including vice presidents or mine managers. Women make up just 5.4 percent of the company’s senior administrators and 9.5 percent of its total workforce. To be sure, that last figure is higher than the average in Chilean mines.

Read more

BHP appoints new Olympic Dam boss – by Peter Ker and Simon Evans (Australian Financial Review – May 29, 2018)

https://www.afr.com/

BHP Billiton’s head of geoscience Laura Tyler will take charge of the Olympic Dam copper, gold and uranium mine, confirming her status as a rising star within the executive ranks of the global miner.

Ms Tyler, who has also been chief of staff to BHP’s chief executive Andrew Mackenzie, will replace Jacqui McGill as asset president of the famous South Australian mine.

Ms McGill, who has been one of the faces of the company through its “Think Big” television campaign, will leave BHP in the wake of the change.

Read more

Distraction or disaster? Freeport’s giant Indonesian mine haunted by audit report – by Bernadette Christina Munthe and Fergus Jensen (Reuters U.S. – May 24, 2018)

https://www.reuters.com/

JAKARTA (Reuters) – A state audit of operations at Indonesia’s Grasberg mine has cast a cloud over the government’s multi-billion-dollar deal to take a majority stake in the mine from Freeport McMoRan Inc and its partner Rio Tinto, according to government and company officials.

In April, in follow-up action to the audit, the environment minister issued two decrees that gave Freeport six months to overhaul management of its mine waste, or tailings, at Grasberg, the world’s second-biggest copper mine. One of the decrees said Freeport would be barred from any activities in areas that lack environmental permits.

And there may be more troubles to come for the Phoenix, Arizona-based company as the government has so far acted on only a part of the 2017 report by Indonesia’s Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) on Freeport’s decades-long operations at the mine in Indonesia’s remote easternmost province of Papua.

Read more

Vedanta shares tumble after protesters killed – by Amy Kazmin and Neil Hume (Financial Times – May 23, 2018)

https://www.ft.com/

Eleven dead after Indian police open fire on crowd objecting to smelter expansion

Shares in Vedanta Resources slumped on Wednesday after police fired into a crowd of local residents protesting against the expansion of its Indian copper smelter.

The London-listed company, which is controlled by billionaire metals tycoon Anil Agarwal and has interests from oil to aluminium, fell 11.5 per cent to 746.8p as investors reacted to the news.

At least 11 people were killed, and scores injured, on Tuesday when Indian police in the southern state of Tamil Nadu shot into the crowd of protesters, objecting to the planned expansion of the Tuticorin smelter and demanding its permanent closure. The unrest continued on Wednesday, when another three people were shot and at least one killed.

Read more

Rio Tinto about to offload stake in Grasberg mine for $3.5 billion – by Cecilia Jamasmie (Mining.com – May 23, 2018)

http://www.mining.com/

World’s No.2 miner Rio Tinto (ASX, LON, NYSE: RIO) confirmed Wednesday is ready to sell its stake in the giant Grasberg mine, the world’s second largest copper operation, to Indonesia’s state mining holding company Inalum for $3.5 billion.

The move could mark the end to a long-drawn-out, three-way dispute over the mine, which has been centered on bringing local ownership of Grasberg up to 51%, a main requisite set by the Indonesian government to allow Freeport-McMoRan (NYSE:FCX) to keep operating in the country.

Discussions with PT Indonesia Asahan Aluminium, known as Inalum, and Freeport — the other two companies engaged in talks — were ongoing, Rio said, “including as to price,” noting that no agreement had been reached.

Read more

Eritrea ‘poison pill’ complicates miner Lundin’s aspirations: sources – by Nicole Mordant and Susan Taylor (Reuters U.S. – May 17, 2018)

https://www.reuters.com/

VANCOUVER/TORONTO (Reuters) – The weak human rights record of one of Africa’s poorest countries is coming between Lundin Mining Corp and its pursuit of a prized European copper and gold asset. Cash-rich Lundin’s latest run at fellow Canadian miner Nevsun Resources Ltd is designed to bag the Timok project in Serbia, but it had to bring on a partner to pick up Nevsun’s Bisha mine in Eritrea.

That is because Lundin Mining’s board of directors, chaired by billionaire resources tycoon Lukas Lundin, refuses to invest in Eritrea, according to four people familiar with, but not able to speak publicly on, the matter.

They will not own the Eritrean mine “for even one second,” one of the people said. That stance is not necessarily a deal breaker, said an investor who declined to be named.

Read more

Anglo looks to sell Peru copper stake to Japanese firms: sources – by Clara Denina and Barbara Lewis (Reuters U.S. – May 17, 2018)

https://www.reuters.com/

LONDON (Reuters) – Anglo American (AAL.L) is likely to sell up to 30 percent of its multi-billion dollar Peruvian copper project Quellaveco to Japanese entities, including Mitsubishi, which already own part of it, three sources familiar with the matter said.

The London-listed miner said in its 2017 financial results it is seeking to cut its 82 percent interest in Quellaveco, which could produce 225,000 tonnes of copper annually, to between 50 and 70 percent.

The sources said it has hired investment banks Goldman Sachs (GS.N) and Morgan Stanley (MS.N) to help with the sale, which could be announced within the next two months.

Read more

Opinion: Rushing to Ruin the Boundary Waters Wilderness – by Richard Moe (New York Times – May 17, 2018)

https://www.nytimes.com/

Minnesota prides itself on being “the Land of 10,000 Lakes.” At least 1,100 lie in the far northeastern part of the state, along the border with Canada, where more than a million acres of pristine waters and unspoiled woodlands are interspersed with canyons, steep cliffs and huge rock formations shaped by glaciers during the last ice age.

Today this region, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, looks almost exactly as it appeared 10,000 years ago when Paleo-Indians lived there.

Sigurd Olson, the naturalist and writer who guided there for three decades, called it “the most beautiful lake country on the continent.” Few who see it would disagree. Today it is the most visited wilderness area in the United States.

Read more