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5,000 year old mine, and the inspiration behind Rio Tinto, set to reopen – by Lawrie Williams (Mineweb.com – July 17, 2015)

http://www.mineweb.com/

One of the world’s most fascinating and oldest mines, Rio Tinto in Spain, is now at the final stage of development ahead of re-opening.

There now seems to be nothing in the way to prevent the full-scale go-ahead by AIM and TSX listed EMED Mining from re-opening one of Europe and the World’s most historic mining sites.

The Rio Tinto mine in Spain has been mined since 3000 BC, as well as being the birthplace at the end of the 19th Century of one of the world’s biggest mining companies – Rio Tinto, although it is no longer involved in the Spanish mine.

EMED has now announced receiving the final operating licence from the Rio Tinto Municipality, which is the last piece of paper necessary to let it go ahead with initiating mining operations at the historic site. Wet commissioning of the rebuilt and refurbished concentrator is already under way and the company says it is now scheduling first commercial production in Q3 this year.

Company CEO, Alberto Lavandira commented on the permitting award: “The receipt of the licence is a major milestone for the company as it represents the final permit required to start building up production over the next few months, ahead of the originally anticipated target date of January 2016.”

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Police Watch Over a Vision of Golden Riches for Northern Ireland – by Firat Kayakiran (Bloomberg News – July 15, 2015)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

The explosives for the mine arrived with a police escort.

An hour after more than 30 blasts shook the Curraghinalt mine in Northern Ireland, dust still hung in the air. Through the haze, among the collapsed rock, were glints of gold. That’s the prize for Canada’s Dalradian Resources Inc. and a potential boost for one of the U.K.’s poorest regions.

“There is wealth here,” Patrick Anderson, Dalradian’s 47-year-old chief executive officer, said in the region’s capital of Belfast, where his ancestors worked in nearby shipyards that produced the Titanic in 1911. “I’m not talking about a single mine. We are working on building a mine camp here.”

Anderson, who co-founded a company that developed an Ecuador gold mine and sold it to Kinross Gold Corp. in 2008 for C$1.2 billion ($940 million), plans to raise $250 million for Curraghinalt. He says the mine can produce at least 2.9 million ounces of gold over 18 years more profitably than bigger deposits elsewhere.

So far, developing gold reserves in Northern Ireland has been a challenge.

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Employee concerns main hurdle in Potash Corp. takeover of K+S – by Rachelle Younglai (Globe and Mail – July 13, 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.

In Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc.’s quest to buy K+S AG, one of its biggest hurdles may lie in the German company’s corporate structure.

K+S has two boards of directors, one comprised of executives and another of employee representatives and shareholders.

The employee-shareholder group, known as the supervisory board, has enormous influence over the company with the power to hire and fire executives.

Unlike most takeovers, where a high enough bid will succeed, the buyer must also deal with the supervisory board, which takes into account the employees.

“The representative of the employees represent different interests,” said Martin Imhof, a partner at law firm Heuking Kuhn Luer Wojtek, who specializes in cross-border mergers and acquisitions in Germany.

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K+S investors see Potash Corp deal within reach despite rebu – by Andreas Kröner and Ludwig Burger (Reuters Canada – July 9, 2015)

http://ca.reuters.com/

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Shareholders in takeover target K+S say a deal could be done because suitor Potash Corp’s main aim is to get control over its German rival’s ambitious Canadian project and scale it back.

K+S’s “Legacy” mine in the prairies in western Canada would be the first built from scratch in the global potash industry in almost 40 years. It would add to an already oversupplied market where demand is suffering from weak emerging market currencies and low crop prices.

Potash Corp could more easily ration global supply by controlling K+S, but still commit to leaving its German operations largely intact. The potential threat to K+S’s domestic operations were seen as one reason why German regulators might block a deal.

K+S last week rebuffed Potash Corp’s 7.9 billion euro ($8.6 billion) proposed bid of 41 euros per share as too low and suggested the suitor was planning to shrink the company.

Potash is in demand as a mineral because it plays a vital role in plant growth and crop resistance to cold and drought.

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U.K. to End 300 Years of Deep Coal Mining as Prices Slump – by Alessandro Vitelli (Bloomberg News – July 10, 2015)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Britain plans to close its last deep coal mine in December, spelling the death of an industry that’s kept the nation’s economy humming since the Industrial Revolution.

The U.K.’s last deep underground mine, located at Kellingley in northern England, will shut around Dec. 15, U.K. Coal Holdings Ltd. said in a statement. The company’s Thoresby mine ceases production on Friday.

The closing of Kellingley will mark the nation’s exit from an industry that employed more than a million workers at 3,000 pits a century ago. Since 2000, U.K. power generators Electricite de France SA to RWE AG bought more of the fuel from abroad, where coal from Australia to Colombia is cheaper, according to the Federation of U.K. Coal Producers. European prices slumped to an eight-year low in April.

“The U.K. coal industry has been in structural decline for 40 years,” Paolo Coghe, an analyst in Paris at Societe Generale SA, said Friday by phone. “It’s no longer positioned to withstand an extended period of low prices such as the one we are experiencing now.”

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UK Coal’s Thoresby Colliery to cease mining on Friday (Reuters U.K. – July 10, 2015)

http://uk.reuters.com/

LONDON – Coal mining at Thoresby Colliery, one of the last remaining underground coal mines in Britain, will cease on Friday and 360 employees will be made redundant, mine owner UK Coal said in a statement.

Mining at UK Coal’s Kellingley mine will also cease on or around December 15, the company said.

Underground coal mining has become unprofitable in Britain because of fierce competition from cheaper markets such as Colombia, Russia and the United States, falling domestic demand and a government drive away from carbon-intensive coal power generation.

UK Coal was placed into administration in 2013 after struggling with rising costs, hefty pension liabilities and strong competition from cheaper coal imports.

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Potash Corp. confident of K+S bid, could raise if more value seen – by Pachelle Younglai (Globe and Mail – July 8, 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.

Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc. is confident K+S AG shareholders would accept its $8.7-billion (U.S.) bid, but is open to raising the offer if its German rival could reveal more value not currently seen by the Canadian company, according to a source close to the deal.

K+S has rejected Potash Corp.’s offer of €41 ($45 U.S.) a share, saying it is too low and grossly undervalues its Legacy potash project in Saskatchewan. K+S has said it believes Legacy alone is worth €21 a share, which has led some analysts to speculate that K+S is looking for an offer of about €50 a share.

The source characterized that amount as inconceivable and said there was no chance that such an offer would materialize given the average takeover premium in Germany is 32 per cent and Potash Corp. is offering a 57-per-cent premium to K+S’s share price over the past year.

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How German cities are turning former coal mines into parks [photos] – by Marielle Segarra (Newsworks.org – July 7, 2015)

http://www.newsworks.org/

I’m spending a few weeks in Germany as part of a German/American journalist exchange program through the RIAS Berlin Kommission and the Radio Television Digital News Foundation. During the trip, I’m sending back lessons on urban planning and revitalization from German cities. Today’s topic: how cities in the Ruhr region are embracing their heritage by repurposing industrial sites.

When I think of quintessentially European cities, I imagine cobblestone streets, historic brick buildings, magnificent cathedrals, sidewalk cafes, and chocolatiers on every corner. I think of cities with history stretching back hundreds, and even thousands of years. Paris. Or Brussels. Or Rome, or Prague, or Vienna, or Hamburg…

But of course, Europe has all kinds of different cities, each with their own unique aesthetic and history.

Last week, I visited several cities in Germany that don’t fit the mold. What’s most prominent about them isn’t ancient history, but rather, their more recent, industrial heritage.

The Ruhr region of Germany is a sprawling metropolitan area, with 5.2 million people and 53 cities with boundaries that blur together. For decades, the region was dotted with thousands of coal mines, steel mills, and other industry.

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[U.K. potash mine] Sirius reaps the benefits of charming the locals – by Kate Burgess (Financial Times – July 5, 2015)

http://www.ft.com/home/us

Miner won planning permission to extract 13m tonnes a year of potash from the North York Moors

The comic potential in mineral fertiliser was exploited to the full by satirist Sacha Baron Cohen when his creation, Borat the Kazhak, boasted “other countries have inferior potassium” in a spoof national anthem. But his claim is one that Britons might legitimately dispute now as Aim-quoted Sirius Minerals prepares to mine a Yorkshire deposit of potassium-rich salts described as the richest in the world.

Last week, Sirius Minerals won planning permission to extract 13m tonnes a year of white pellets of so-called polyhalite from under the North York Moors national park. The planning victory was no mean feat. Last month, just across the Pennines, Lancashire locals saw off a bid by shale gas explorer Cuadrilla to begin fracking in the area, because they were worried about the effects on local homes and health.

In contrast, Yorkshire’s local residents cheered Chris Fraser, Sirius’ forceful founder and chief executive, as he left the council meeting at Sneaton Castle in Whitby, pictured. The talk in the Venerable Bede hall was all about Sirius creating a thousand jobs and pumping millions into the local economy for the next century.

It was the culmination of a canny three-year campaign by Mr Fraser to woo the region’s farmers and landowners.

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RUSSIAN HEARTLAND: Cossacks on the run to protect nature – by Marc Bennetts (Politico – July 5, 2015)

http://www.politico.eu/

In Russia’s fertile Black Earth region, eco-activists struggle to protect their communities from a state-backed nickel-mining project.

NOVOHOPYORSK, Russia — It’s almost midnight when I arrive in the town of Novokhopyorsk, located deep in the bucolic heart of central Russia’s Black Earth region, so-called for its famously fertile soil. The curtains in a nearby home twitch as I step out of the car — late-night visitors are a rare sight in the rural community.

Surrounded by lush countryside and rolling fields, Novokhopyorsk, population 6,380, has become the unlikely setting of what is arguably modern Russia’s most stubborn protest movement.

The Kremlin may have quashed the mainly middle-class political demonstrations that rocked Moscow in 2011 and 2012, but environmental issues are stirring dissent in Russia’s heartland, creating new problems for the authorities as the war in Ukraine rumbles on and economic instability rises.

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German minister backs K+S’s Potash bid rejection (Reuters U.S. – July 4, 2015)

http://www.reuters.com/

FRANKFURT – A German regional minister gave his backing to potash miner K+S’s rejection of an $8.8 billion-euro takeover bid by Canada’s Potash Corp of Saskatchewan, saying K+S should remain a German company.

Tarek Al-Wazir, minister of economy in K+S’s home state of Hesse, said on Saturday he would support K+S’s efforts to make sure regional jobs and value creation were not lost.

K+S has rejected a proposed bid by Potash of 41 euros per share, saying it was too low and warning its suitor could be planning to dismantle or shrink the salt and fertiliser company.

Al-Wazir said in a statement emailed by K+S: “We will continue to make efforts to ensure that K+S has a successful future in our state and we stand by K+S’s side.”

He added that limiting the environmental damage caused by mining would also be much harder to negotiate with a Canadian company. “For that reason, too, we have an interest in K+S’s remaining a north Hessian company,” he said.

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Potash Corp. wants face time with K+S to save takeover deal – by David Stringer, Andrew Noël and Sheenagh Matthews (Bloomberg News/BNN – July 3, 2015)

http://www.bnn.ca/

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc. said it wants to meet with management of K+S AG as soon as possible to address concerns that led the German fertilizer producer to reject its 7.8 billion-euro ($8.7 billion U.S.) takeover offer.

“We are seeking to meet with K+S management at the earliest possible opportunity so that we can jointly discuss our commitments and further specify the details that would form the basis of a successful combination,” Potash Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jochen Tilk said in a statement on Friday.

Potash Corp. (POT.TO) seeks to reassure K+S that it wouldn’t be unraveled after the deal, saying the offer isn’t predicated on closing mines, curtailing production, selling the German company’s salt business or cutting jobs. It repeated the merits of its offer of 41 euros a share, after K+S CEO Norbert Steiner indicated in a earlier statement that a proposal of at least 50 euros a share would be more appropriate.

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K+S Said to Reject $8.6 Billion Takeover Bid by Potash Corp. – by Aaron Kirchfeld, Andrew Marc Noel and Sheenagh Matthews (Bloomberg News – July 2, 2015)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

K+S AG, the German potash supplier, plans to reject an $8.6 billion-plus takeover offer from Canadian fertilizer producer Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc. because it deems the bid to be too low, according to people familiar with the matter.

The German company is preparing to announce its opposition to the bid as early as today, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. A representative for K+S declined to comment.

Potash Corp. plans to analyze K+S’s response and reasoning before deciding on its next move, according to two people familiar with the matter. The Canadian firm still sees the industrial logic for the deal and an opportunity to reach an agreement, they said.

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan-based Potash Corp. said on June 25 that it made a “friendly” takeover bid. The proposed price was more than 40 euros a share, people familiar with the matter said at the time, prompting shares of Kassel-based K+S AG to gain as much as 39 percent. Today, the stock dropped as much as 2.3 percent.

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North York Moors mineral mine set to get go-ahead – by Helen Pidd (The Guardian – June 30, 2015)

http://www.theguardian.com/international

Promising to create over 1,000 jobs and pump £1bn-plus into the UK economy, the scheme has won over many locals but angered environmentalists

One of the biggest developments in a UK national park in living memory could get the go-ahead on Tuesday if councillors approve plans for a £1.7bn mineral mine under the North York Moors.

Following Lancashire council’s surprise decision to defy its own planners and legal advisers by rejecting fracking on Monday, the meeting in Whitby will be closely watched by those keen to see whether big resources projects can win over local officials.

UK firm Sirius Minerals – via its subsidiary York Potash – wants to dig a mile-deep shaft under the moors to tap a huge seam of a potassium-rich mineral called polyhalite, a type of potash used as fertiliser, for the next 100 years or more.

Promising more than 1,000 local jobs and an annual contribution to the UK GDP of over £1bn, the scheme has won over many initially sceptical locals worried about the environmental impact on the beautifully bleak moorland.

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Potash Corp tussle could be win for BHP – by Amanda Saunders (Australian Financial Review – June 29, 2015)

http://www.afr.com/

A takeover tussle between two of the world’s biggest potash players could have an unlikely winner: BHP Billiton.

Analysts say a deal between Canada’s Potash Corp and Germany’s K+S will mean the remaining players in the market have increased pricing power over the next decade.

BHP has its foot on a potash megaproject called Jansen in Canada, which CEO Andrew Mackenzie has said is the best potash asset in the world.

But BHP is yet to decide whether to develop it could hinge the success of exploration and acquisitions in its other two key growth commodities: oil and copper.

Mr Mackenzie told The Australian Financial Review this month that BHP may have to choose between copper, potash and conventional oil in about five years, and could take on partners or exit one of the plays to protect its progressive dividend.

Deutsche mining analyst Paul Young said a Potash Corp deal with K+S would probably be positive for BHP.

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