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2017 Global Natural Diamond Production Forecasted at 142M Carats Worth $15.6B – by By Paul Zimnisky (Paul Zimnisky.com – May 3, 2017)

http://www.paulzimnisky.com/

Mined diamond production in 2017 is estimated to be 142.3 million carats worth $15.6B (see appendix below), which would be an 11.5% increase in carat volume produced over 2016 and an 9.9% increase in total value produced.

The top 10 largest mines in the world by value produced are estimated to represent 58% of global production. De Beers’ Jwaneng mine in Botswana is ranked number one, and is estimated to independently produce 15% of the world’s diamonds in value. Russia is estimated to be the largest producing nation by value at 35%, followed by Botswana at 22%, Canada at 14%, Angola at 8%, South Africa at 7%, Namibia at 5%, and Australia at 3%.

Russian diamond production is dominated by ALROSA (RTS: ALRS) which is 58% owned by Russian national and regional governments. The company’s prized Jubilee mine is estimated to produce 9.2M carats worth $1.4B in 2017, which by itself represents 9% of global diamond output by value. Company-wide, ALROSA’s portfolio includes 11 mines and 5 alluvial operations, producing 27% of global diamond production by volume and 33% by value (see Figure 1 for complete company-wide production figures of major producers).

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Memorial to hundreds killed in England’s biggest mining disaster (Yorkshire Post – May 7, 2017)

http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/

THE explosion made the ground shake for miles around, and flames erupted from 300 yards below. All around Barnsley – it was just before Christmas – “black snow” and burning wood fell out of the sky.

The apocalyptic scenes of December 1866 claimed 361 lives in England’s worst coal-mining disaster. The Oaks Colliery Disaster, which wrought so much devastation, was remembered yesterday as over a thousand people joined a huge procession, which bought the town to a standstill, for the unveiling of a new memorial.

In a poignant connection with the past, a steam buzzer, used to alert people of a disaster, was sounded before 20 descendants – including a Texan Sir William Jeffock, who bought his family across from the US – stepped forward to unveil the sculpture.  Its centrepiece is “Kitty” whose eyes are fixed directly on the colliery, as her child clings terrified to her shawl.

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[Norilsk, Russia] Global Lenses: Diverse political films tackle war, energy and the impact of history – by Daniel Glassman (Point Of View Magazine – April 26, 2017)

http://povmagazine.com/

Three new Canadian films take on contemporary global issues through radically different lenses. Stopping off in an Arctic Russian mining city, the ruins of Basra, Iraq and a massive thermonuclear reactor in Southern France, François Jacob’s A Moon of Nickel and Ice, Ann Shin’s My Enemy, My Brother and Mila Aung-Thwin and Van Royko’s Let There Be Light investigate the entangled issues of history, war, energy and ecology from the bottom up, through intense focuses on individuals and their stories.

Quebecois director Jacob makes his feature debut with A Moon of Nickel and Ice, a multi-faceted portrait of the Siberian nickelmining city of Norilsk. Three facts about Norilsk: It’s the world’s northernmost city with over 100,000 inhabitants; it’s one of the most polluted places in the world; and it’s a “closed city”—foreigners have been banned since 2001, and it was closed to most Russians as well during the Soviet era. Norilsk Nickel’s on-site smelting facility gives the gifts of acid rain, smog and fully 1% of the world’s sulfur dioxide emissions.

You may be wondering how they got 100,000 people to move there. Answer: they forced them. Yes, Norilsk was the site of a Soviet Gulag.

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NORILSK NICKEL WANTS BOTSWANA TO FORK OUT P2,5BN FOR DISHONOURED DEAL – by Staff (Sunday Standard – May 2, 2017)

http://www.sundaystandard.info/

Norilsk Nickel is seeking its “pound of flesh” to the tune of US$270 million (about P2,5 million) from the Botswana government over a botched deal by BCL to buy a 50-percent stake of its Nkomati Mine in South Africa last year.

The Russian mining giant on Thursday served notice to sue on the Minister of Mineral Resources, Green Technology and Energy Security, Sadique Kebonang, and the Minister of Finance and Development Planning Kenneth Matambo and the Attorney General.

Norilsk Nickel announced on its website on Friday that it intends to sue the government of Botswana “in respect of its involvement in the reckless trading of BCL Limited and BCL Investments Proprietary Limited (together “BCL”), with a view of recovering $271 million plus damages and other costs that are owed to Norilsk Nickel in relation to the sale of a 50 percent interest in the Nkomati Mine in South Africa and $6.4 million that are owed to Norilsk Nickel in relation to the sale of the Tati Mine in Botswana.

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UPDATE 1-Russia’s Nornickel says could miss 2017 output forecast by 3 pct (Reuters U.S. – April 27, 2017)

http://www.reuters.com/

Russia’s Norilsk Nickel (Nornickel) could miss its 2017 production forecast for nickel and platinum group metals (PGMs) by up to 3 percent after first-quarter output fell, it said on Thursday.

Nornickel, one of the world’s largest nickel and palladium producers, added its management was looking at ways to mitigate this risk and confirmed its previous 2017 production guidance.

This year Nornickel, part-owned by Russian tycoon Vladimir Potanin and aluminium giant Rusal, plans to produce from Russian feedstock 206,000-211,000 tonnes of nickel, 377,000-387,000 tonnes of copper, 2.6-2.7 million troy ounces of palladium and 581,000-645,000 ounces of platinum.

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Russian Mining Tycoons Eyeing Return to London Stock Market – by Yuliya Fedorinova and Jack Farchy (Bloomberg News – April 26, 2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

For three years, Russian companies retreated from the London stock market. Now, a pair of oil and mining billionaires is hoping to break the drought.

En+ Group Ltd., owned by aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, and Polyus PJSC, a gold producer controlled by the family of Suleiman Kerimov, are planning to sell shares in May or June. If successful, they could raise as much as $3 billion in London and Moscow.

The deals will test investor appetite for Russian assets after a rally in share prices, driven by the commodities recovery and expectations of receding tensions between Moscow and the U.S. While there have been some secondary share sales in London, including by Novolipetsk Steel PJSC in December, En+ and Polyus would be the first Russian companies to join the London exchange since 2014, according to London Stock Exchange data.

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Strongbow’s South Crofty to revive age-old tin mining tradition in Cornwall – by Henry Lazenby – April 21, 2017)

http://www.miningweekly.com/

VAANCOUVER (miningweekly.com) – Bolstered by strengthening tin prices and improving fundamental support in the long term, Canadian mineral exploration firm Strongbow Exploration is set to revive a mining tradition in England’s county of Cornwall, that reaches back thousands of years to the early Bronze Age.

The company’s flagship asset, the South Crofty project, is a past-producing underground tin/copper mine, located in the town of Pool, in the historic Cornwall tin mining district of south-west England. The project is located 390 km west-southwest of London, and is about 4.5 km south of the Celtic sea coast.

The Cornish mining industry, which started about 2150 BCE, reached its peak in the nineteenth century, when thousands of workers were employed in up to 2 000 mines, before the industry collapsed when ores began to be produced more cheaply abroad in Malaysia and Indonesia, among others, Strongbow president and CEO Richard Williams tells Mining Weekly Online in an interview.

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Galantas Gold plummets as it halts Irish mine expansion on terrorism fears – by Cecilia Jamasmie (Mining.com – April 24, 2017)

http://www.mining.com/

Shares in Galantas Gold (TSX, LON:GAL) collapsed in London Monday after the Canadian miner announced it had halted expansion work at its Omagh gold mine as the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said it was unable to guarantee it the necessary “anti-terrorism cover” for its blasting operations.

The Toronto-based company, which had has begun underground development at Omagh last month, was going to create 130 new jobs due to the expansion, but it now says it was reviewing potential redundancies with recently hired mine staff, and any new recruitment or ongoing investment had been “deferred”.

The stock plummeted on the news and it was down almost 33% to 4.65p at 1:41PM GMT, while it was trading 20% lower in Toronto at 9:38AM. PSNI told the company that due to resource constraints and competing priorities, it was currently only prepared to provide anti-terrorism cover for a maximum of a two-hour period, two days a week.

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For First Time Since 1800s, Britain Goes a Day Without Burning Coal for Electricity – by Katrin Bennhold (New York Times – April 21, 2017)

https://www.nytimes.com/

LONDON — Friday was the first full day since the height of the Industrial Revolution that Britain did not burn coal to generate electricity, a development that officials and climate change activists celebrated as a watershed moment.

The accomplishment became official just before 11 p.m., when the 24-hour period ended.
Coal powered Britain into the industrial age and into the 21st century, contributing greatly to the “pea souper” fogs that were thought for decades to be a natural phenomenon of the British climate.

For many living in the mining towns up and down the country, it was not just the backbone of the economy but a way of life. But the industry has been in decline for some time. The last deep coal mine closed in December 2015, though open cast mining has continued.

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Indigenous law banishes a giant B.C. mine – by Elizabeth McSheffrey (National Observer – April 21, 2017)

http://www.nationalobserver.com/

The moment you step onto Stk’emlúpsemc te Secwépemc land in southern British Columbia, according to Chief Ron Ignace, you are a beggar. As an outsider, you have no rights and you’ve strayed away from your home and family. You are considered a poor person, he tells National Observer, and you are beholden to the First Nations on whose territory you stand.

His message takes aim at anyone who wants to do business or travel on his nation’s land, be they tourists, government, companies, fishers, or boaters.

“The days of colonial authoritarianism are over,” he says. “It’s time for Canada to recognize that we are nations, as nations we have rights to our land, and if we are approached honourably, we can sit down and come to a fair and just conclusion.”

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In one of coldest spots on earth, Russia bets on boosting gold output – by Diana Asonova (Reuters U.S. – April 13, 2017)

http://www.reuters.com/

UST-NERA, YAKUTIA, RUSSIA – In winter it gets so cold that metal snaps. When the weather is warmer people make a living sifting the earth for fragments of gold in the Oymyakon district of Russia’s far eastern Yakutia region.

But the unusually rich deposits of the alluvial gold near the surface are running out and producers have had to switch to the more expensive process of digging mines to extract gold ore.

Production at the first two mines to be opened in the area since the fall of the Soviet Union will start soon. One is being launched by GV Gold, with U.S. fund BlackRock and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development among its shareholders, and another by the locally-owned Yantar group.

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The Kola Mining and Metallurgy Combine: Northwest Russia polluter posts impressive cuts in harmful emissions – by Anna Kireeva (Bellona.org – April 12, 2017)

http://bellona.org/

In a surprising development, the Kola Mining and Metallurgy Company –which for decades has stubbornly fouled air over Northwest Russia and Scandinavia – last year reduced its emissions of harmful sulfur dioxide by more than 20 percent.

The KMMC, a daughter company of the giant Norilsk Nickel, reported last week that its sulfur dioxide emissions for 2016 totaled 119,700 tons, which is 35,000 tons less than the previous year.

The new emissions figures seem to reverse a rise in the toxic heavy metal pollution that began in 2011. That year, the KMMC posted figures as high as 134,000 tons a year. They rose in subsequent years, plateauing at a towering 154,900 tons in 2015.

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Switzerland is Key to Global Gold – by Lawrence (Lawrie) Williams (United States Gold Bureau – April 5, 2017)

https://invest.usgoldbureau.com/

Lawrence (Lawrie) Williams is a precious metals market expert. He worked as a mining engineer and analyst in Africa and North America and wrote for the Mining Journal, and subsequently managed the publishing company, for over 36 years. Williams shares his unique knowledge of the precious metals industry at the United States Gold Bureau and other outlets.

The small (in area and population) European nation of Switzerland is the location of four of the world’s largest gold refineries – Argor-Heraeus, Metalor, Produits Artistiques Metaux Precieux (PAMP) and Valcambi.

Between them they refine annually a volume of gold equivalent to more than half global new mined gold output – sometimes far more when Asian demand is running particularly high, as in 2013, and when supply is plentiful (2013 saw huge disinvestment out of the major gold ETFs). That year Swiss refineries processed, and exported, around 2,600 tonnes of gold equivalent to about 80% of global new mined gold output.

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Swedish Miner Says Donald Trump Doesn’t Hold Key to Metal Prices – by Hanna Hoikkala and Niklas Magnusson (Bloomberg News – March 28, 2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

The operator of some of Europe’s largest copper and zinc mines expects President Donald Trump’s plans to spend on U.S. infrastructure to have much less impact on base-metal prices than the needs of burgeoning middle-class populations in emerging markets.

That’s because projects in the U.S. and other developed countries simply won’t use enough zinc or copper to have any significant impact on prices, Lennart Evrell, chief executive officer of Sweden’s Boliden AB, said in a March 22 interview. When poorer and less-developed countries decide to build transport and power networks they consume far more of these materials, he said.

“The U.S. is not big enough when it comes to commodities,” Evrell said. “It may be a very big economy, but when it comes to need for base metals, it’s more about the earlier stages of a country’s development, and the U.S. is not in that phase. We believe the driver behind the recent metals price increases is the rest of the world, and not Trump, as prices fell roughly as much after his election as they had gained in conjunction with his election.”’

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Discover The World’s Most Beautiful Coal Mine – by Sheobi Anne Ramos (Travelers Today – March 23, 2017)

http://www.travelerstoday.com/

In Germany, there lies a treasure unlike any other: a coal mine. You might scoff at the idea, but the Zollverein Coal Mine in Germany is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, also known as the most beautiful coal mine in the world.

Coal mining in this complex started in 1851 and was a vital part of Germany’s history. The famed “black gold” was dug here to fuel Germany’s industrial revolution, and during the Second World War, over 3.6 million tons of coal were produced.

Back then, the Zollverein Coal Mine was one of the most important industrial complexes in Europe, and for the years that followed, several more buildings and refurbishments were added to further increase the productivity of the place. For 135 years, the complex churned and the workers toiled in “Shaft XII” of the complex until it was decommissioned in 1986.

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