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NEWS RELEASE: KGHM International: A Legacy of Responsible Mining – by Robert Spence (Mining Global – December 10, 2014)

http://www.miningglobal.com/

As a wholly owned subsidiary of KGHM Polska Miedź S.A., KGHM International (KGHM-I) is focused on its operating assets, working to advance its growth pipeline. The company operates a group of projects spread across North and South America including four open-pit mines and two underground mines.

One of the most advanced and responsible initiatives the company has undertaken is the implementation of a mine-for-closure operating plan at its KGHM-I Carlota (“Carlota” or “the company”) mine.

Responsible mining initiatives

Permitted in 1997, the Carlota project is a 100 percent owned open-pit, heap leach mine producing roughly 25 million pounds of copper annually. Located in Arizona, the mine became one of the first copper mines designated and permitted under modern environmental legislation within the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

Since the inception of the mine, Carlota has been pursuing a goal of responsible environmental stewardship and excellent community relations. The company has implemented a mine-for-closure plan that follows suit with the Arizona environmental regulations as well as Federal guidelines. The key component of mine-for-closure is incorporating closure activities into the mine plan during operations and continuing copper production while conducting closure.

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Germany hopes to ‘beat China with CETA’ in race for raw materials – by Dario Sarmadi (Euractiv.com – December 10, 2014)

http://www.euractiv.com/

On many issues, the free trade agreement between the EU and Canada is caught in the crossfire. But if the agreement fails, Europe is likely to lose the race for economically essential raw materials, analysts in Germany and Canada predict. EurActiv Germany reports.

Although the final text of the free trade agreement between the EU and Canada has been set for over one month now, critics are not giving up.

Among them is the organisation Campact, campaigning against the controversial arbitration courts and putting pressure on national parliaments to have CETA rejected in its current form. But Europe’s politicians see CETA as the beginning of a new era.

By removing trade barriers, the European Commission is hoping for €12 billion in additional growth. And industry also has high expectations for the measure; Canadian raw materials are particularly important for Germany’s automotive, chemical and high-tech industries.

“Where do the batteries for our electric cars come from? What about the nickel for our airplanes? Demand for critical raw materials is growing and that is why CETA is so essential,” explained Tim Aiken, CEO of the Nickel Institute, at the EurActiv Europe+Canada workshop last week. The Nickel Institute represents the combined interests of Nickel producers worldwide.

At the same time, Aiken warned against China, the sleeping giant seeking to challenge Western dominance in the competition for raw materials, and the fastest-growing economic power in the world.

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[NEWS RELEASE] North American Nickel (NAN): A good summer in Greenland (BE Mining.com – December 9, 2014)

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

Though it’s barely six months since we last reported on progress at NAN’s 3,601 square kilometre property, which encapsulates the nickel-rich Greenland norite belt (GNB) and where the company was embarking on an ambitious drilling programme, the results and the indication of future discoveries has been so encouraging that it is quite difficult to know where to start.

As NAN’s President and interim CEO Dr Mark Fedikow told us not that long ago: “This year we have said we will drill a minimum of 4,700 metres of core but that could be increased to as much as 10,000 metres if no unforeseen difficulties are encountered.” With their efficient technical and drill team firing on all cylinders a total of 8,773 metres was drilled in 2014.

That is impressive, as were the results obtained with high grade nickel, copper and PGM mineralisation, but there remain many more exploration targets identified and more geophysical surveying required. This summer’s work focused mainly on the Imiak Hill complex, which includes Imiak Hill, Mikissoq (previously referred to as Imiak North) and Spotty Hill, three mineralised zones within 1.6 kilometres of one another, and Fossilik, another large area of norite.

“We went into our 2014 drill programme with the game plan of getting onto the ground as early as possible, and we managed to get in and start ground geophysical surveys in April,” says Fedikow.

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Ruble Drop Helps Russian Metal Companies Skirt Selloff – by Yuliya Fedorinova and Ksenia Galouchko (Bloomberg News – December 8, 2014)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Russian metal and mining companies are winning back investors’ favor this year, avoiding a broader selloff in equities as the weakening ruble helps boost their profits from exports.

Eight of the 10 best performers in the RTS Index (RTSI$) in 2014 are producers of raw materials from steel and nickel to diamonds and soil nutrients. While the dollar-denominated gauge sank 37 percent, United Co. Rusal, the world’s largest aluminum company that touched a record low in November 2013, led the rally in non-oil commodity stocks with an almost fourfold advance.

While stocks from lenders to utilities and airlines have tumbled as Russia’s economy headed for the first recession since 2009, the slumping ruble has lifted metal and mining companies that have costs in the local currency and make sales abroad. Crude, the country’s top export, has sunk into a bear market, driving a 38 percent decline in the ruble and exacerbating the impact that international sanctions linked to the Ukraine conflict have had on gross domestic product growth.

“The stocks of metal and mining companies are turning from ‘l’enfant terrible’ into the best performers,” Alexander Losev, the chief executive officer of Sputnik Asset Management in Moscow, said by e-mail on Dec 4. “Serious ruble devaluation is benefiting metal producers since their costs are in rubles and revenue from exports is in dollars.”

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DECEMBER 4 CELEBRATED AS INTERNATIONAL MINERS DAY – by Workplace Safety North (December 3, 2014)

http://www.workplacesafetynorth.ca/

Mining tradition dates back centuries to St. Barbara, patron saint of miners

Around the world, many miners celebrate December 4 as Miners Day and commemorate their patron saint, St. Barbara, requesting her continuing protection for their daily work.

In Canada last year, the Legacy Project Barbara Celebration 2012 was held at the German Cultural Centre in Saskatoon, with all employees of German-based K+S Potash Canada invited, along with consultants and local service-providers. The organization hopes to establish the Barbara Celebration in Canada, importing some of the traditions and values of the European mining industry. This festive celebration is connected to the very beginning of potash mining in Germany.

Saint Barbara is the patron saint of artillerymen, armourers, military engineers, gunsmiths, miners and anyone else who worked with cannon and explosives, according to Wikipedia. She is invoked against thunder and lightning, all incidents arising from explosions of gunpowder, and venerated by Catholics who face the danger of sudden and violent death in work.

Mining traditions are strictly observed at European mining companies like KGHM International. Beer halls are organized by both the company and individual divisions, and include a traditional “jump over the leather apron” initiation rite. Other festivities include retirement ceremonies, employee anniversaries and awards, meetings with the mothers of miners, family trips to the mines, and many other social events.

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Ukraine faces coal shortage with rebels controlling mines (Business Insider – November 29, 2014)

http://www.businessinsider.com/

Kiev (AFP) – With the rich seams of coal in eastern Ukraine under rebel control and Russia cutting off supplies, the Kiev government faces the awkward prospect of turning to its enemies for help.

As winter set in, the biggest fear in recent months was that Ukraine would run out of the natural gas that heats the country. A last minute deal with Russia averted that disaster. But now a new one is looming as coal shortages threaten to leave the country desperately short of electricity.

Ukraine gets some 40 percent of its power from coal-fired plants, and has traditionally had a surplus of coal, producing some 86 million tonnes at last count in 2012.

But the Russian-backed rebellion in the east has cut the government off from large swathes of the coal-rich mining region of Donbass. Then, without warning, Russia announced it was stopping coal supplies to Ukraine last week, claiming “force majeure” but offering no explanation.

“I don’t know for how long Russia intends to stop coal deliveries. If it stops them for a long period, our thermal stations will not be able to function at full power,” said Ukraine’s Energy Minister Yuriy Prodan.

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Mining, independence at stake as Greenland goes to the polls – by Katja Vahl and Sabina Zawadzki (Reuters India – November 28, 2014)

http://in.reuters.com/

NUUK/COPENHAGEN – Nov 28 (Reuters) – Greenlanders go to the polls on Friday with hopes for a mineral-rich independence from Denmark foundering on the reality of a tiny, shrinking economy.

The fall of premier Aleqa Hammond last month in an expense scandal has muted the nationalist rhetoric that promised independence based on wealth from some of the largest mineral deposits on earth.

With major mining projects in limbo due to low commodity prices, regulatory instability and the bankruptcy of the owner of the most promising prospect in the country, politicians of all hues have focused on the ailing subsidised economy.

The campaign appears neck and neck. For weeks, polls showed opposition party Inuit Ataqatigiit, led by 36-year-old Sara Olsvig, would win for only the second time since 1979.

But the ruling Siumut party, now led by former policeman Kim Kielsen, is managing to distance itself from former premier Hammond’s expenses scandal. At least one poll in the past week shows Kielsen in the lead.

“Hammond accentuated all the differences between Denmark and Greenland.

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Turkey’s miners pay a deadly price for cheap coal – by Piotr Zalewski (Financial Times – November 27, 2014)

http://www.ft.com/intl/companies/mining

In parts of Istanbul, as in most Turkish cities, you can smell the coming of winter before you properly feel it. Just as the first cold spell arrives, a woolly, sour blanket of smoke, pumped into the air from coal-fired furnaces, settles over the city’s poor neighbourhoods.

Turks are noticeably better off than a decade ago, but with the prospect of high natural gas bills, many still rely on coal to heat their homes. More than 2m families rely on the state to provide it for free.

Under a programme launched by the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party in 2003, a government agency hands out about 2m tons of coal to underprivileged families each year.

For a country that depends on imports for roughly 70 per cent of its rapidly growing energy needs, coal appears to be both part of the solution and part of the problem.

Over the next decade, Turkey’s government plans to increase the share of coal in electricity production, from 25 to 30 per cent. To help meet its goal of total installed capacity of 120,000MWs by 2023, it also plans to tap into all the country’s coal reserves.

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Finland exploring rail connections to Arctic Sea – by by Juhani Niinisto (Shanghai Daily – November 27, 2014)

http://shanghaidaily.com/

HELSINKI, Nov. 26 (Xinhua) — Finland has one third of its territory inside the Arctic Circle, but is the only Nordic country without any seaport by the Arctic Sea.

Opportunities of seafaring courses have triggered long-term consideration of how to establish rail connections to the Arctic Sea further north beyond the Norwegian border.

The main idea so far has been to build tracks from the western part of Finnish Lapland via Sweden and Norway.

A connection via Russia remains a less likely option, but it became slightly more feasible on Tuesday when the Finnish government chose to support railroad links to a potential mine in Eastern Lapland near the Russian border.

So far, tracks towards the Artic Sea only reach the Western Lapland mining town of Kolari. Development of rail connections in Eastern Lapland moved forward on Tuesday as the government preferred rail links over road transit in arranging services for a mining project at Sokli in the east.

The owners of the potential phosphate mines, Norway’s Yara, has set public transport input as a condition for the project. The investment would extend Finnish heavy duty rail tracks to just 60 km away from the Russian border.

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Flooded Mine Bolsters BHP’s Plan for Potash, CEO Says – by David Stringer (Bloomberg News – November 24, 2014)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

The flooding of a mine owned by the world’s biggest potash producer is confirmation for BHP Billiton Ltd. (BHP)’s Chief Executive Officer Andrew Mackenzie of the wisdom of his company’s planned move into the industry.

“These sorts of factors, combined with continued economic growth and demand for potash all conspire, if you like, to bring toward us the time when a new mine is required,” Mackenzie said in an interview in Sydney. “We have the lowest cost mine that would be useful to bring into the market at that stage.”

According to Mackenzie, no major new mines have begun production since the 1970s and the halt of operations at Uralkali’s Solikamsk-2 mine, which accounts for 3 percent of world supply, is a sign of the vulnerability of supply — just as the need to feed a booming global population spurs demand.

BHP is looking to build its Jansen project in Canada’s Saskatchewan province sometime in the next decade, though Mackenzie is cautious about giving an exact timeline. Spending of $3.8 billion has been approved so far on Jansen, including mine and service shafts, and Citigroup Inc. (C) forecasts the whole project may cost $16 billion.

“We do know we have to wait for the market to come towards us, but once those shafts are complete, we are only three to four years — at most — from first potash,” Mackenzie said yesterday in the interview.

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German plea to Sweden over threat to coal mines – by Pilita Clark, David Crouch and Jeevan Vasagar (Financial Times – November 24, 2014)

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

London, Gothenburg and Berlin – Germany has made a dramatic appeal to Sweden to help it out of an energy dilemma that threatens Europe’s biggest economy as it shifts away from nuclear power and fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s vice-chancellor, warned Sweden’s new prime minister Stefan Löfven last month that there would be “serious consequences” for electricity supplies and jobs if Sweden’s state-owned utility Vattenfall ditched plans to expand two coal mines in the northeast of Germany.

The intervention is a clear sign of the challenges Germany faces as it grapples with an ambitious switch to renewable energy – the so-called Energiewende.

Under the policy, Germany aims to derive 80 per cent of its electricity from clean sources by 2050. As part of that, it is closing down all of its nuclear power stations by 2022.

But it is making up the energy shortfall caused by the nuclear phase-out by generating power from coal – the dirtiest fossil fuel. Last year, German electricity production from lignite or brown coal, a particularly polluting form of the fuel, reached its highest level since 1990.

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THE LUNCH: For Kinross CEO, it’s ‘situation normal’ in Russia – by Eric Reguly (Globe and Mail – November 22, 2014)

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.

LONDON — When you buy a share in Canada’s Kinross Gold Corp., you are not just betting on gold prices; you are betting on the outcome of the great geopolitical standoff between the West and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which may or many not evolve into a new Cold War.

So far, the bet has gone massively in Mr. Putin’s favour – Kinross shares are so low that they seem to be awarding virtually no value to Kinross’s two big, and profitable, gold mines in Russia’s far east. In 2010, Kinross was a $20 stock. Today, it trades at about $3.20 and has been as low as $2.27. But haven’t all gold companies been slaughtered along with the gold price?

Yes, but Toronto-based Kinross is in a submarine class all of its own and when its executives and shareholders are in a masochistic mood, they call up a few Goldcorp charts. Vancouver’s Goldcorp Inc. is of roughly equal size yet its market value is more than four times higher than Kinross’s ($18.5-billion versus $3.6-billion). Eldorado Gold Corp., whose production is less than a third of Kinross’s, is worth $5-billion. Ouch! Whip us again! Kinross’s problem can be summed up in one wretched word: Russia.

“We’re getting doubly hammered because of the gold price and the situation in Russia,” says Kinross CEO Paul Rollinson, who was in London this week trying to convince investors and brokers that the economic sanctions against Russia were not endangering Kinross’s mines.

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EXCLUSIVE-Foreign firms challenge Poland over access to mine concessions – by Adrian Krajewski and Anna Koper (Reuters India – November 21, 2014)

http://in.reuters.com/

WARSAW, Nov 21 (Reuters) – Two foreign-owned mining firms have challenged the Polish government over what they see as the unfair allocation of copper and potash extraction permits to state-controlled miner KGHM.

Poland’s environment ministry, which allocates concessions, denied it gave preferential treatment to KGHM over Canadian Miedzi Copper, which has filed a lawsuit, or British firm Darley Energy, which has submitted an appeal.

KGHM, Europe’s second-largest copper producer and an industrial champion for Poland, is 31.8-percent owned by the state. It said it did not limit competition.

Whatever the outcome, the row could rattle foreign investors at a time when Poland’s resource sector, struggling with low prices on the world market, badly needs investment.

The government is also anxious to bring investors into shale gas, which it hopes will reduce its reliance on imported Russian gas. But a number of firms have pulled out, citing difficult geology and unclear regulations.

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Kompania Pleads for Polish Utilities to Rescue Coal Mines – by Maciej Martewicz and Maciej Onoszko (Bloomberg News – November 19, 2014)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Kompania Weglowa SA, the European Union’s largest coal producer, faces massive job cuts to survive unless Poland quickens the state-owned industry’s revamp, which may include help from power utilities.

“If we want to quickly heal Kompania, we should shut five mines and fire 15,000 people,” Chief Executive Officer Miroslaw Taras said at an industry summit in Katowice, Poland today. “But if we want to avoid social unrest, we should probably think about somehow combining coal mining with power generation either by means of agreed prices or takeovers of some mines.”

Poland, which relies on coal for 90 percent of its electricity production, is under growing pressure to overhaul the cash-burning industry after its two biggest producers this month failed to sell bonds abroad to finance operations. The government of new Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz yesterday appointed Wojciech Kowalczyk, a former banker, to oversee the mining restructuring.

Coal producers, which employ more than 100,000 people, have struggled to survive as sluggish economic growth cut demand for the fuel and sent prices to a seven-year low. Kompania, which runs 14 mines in the southern industrial region of Silesia, produces about a quarter of the EU’s coal output and half of Poland’s.

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What Uralkali’s mine shutdown may mean for the potash market – by Jonathan Ratner (National Post – November 20, 2014)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

A major supply outage at one of Uralkali’s potash mines in Russia raises the prospect of a much tighter global market for the commodity and could serve as a much-needed catalyst for Canadian fertilizer stocks.

The shutdown of the Solikamsk-2 potash mine after Uralkali detected an increased flow of brine, which can weaken a mine’s structure, bodes particularly well for producers such as Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc. to increase their sales since the Russian mine has annual capacity of approximately 2.3 million tonnes.

Raymond James analyst Steve Hansen said early indications are that the shutdown will be an extended one or possibly worse, and it comes during a period of international contract negotiations, which could influence both Chinese and Indian contract pricing to the upside.

He raised his 2015 international pricing benchmarks by US$10 per tonne to reflect the additional bargaining leverage that potash marketer Canpotex, whose members include Agrium Inc., Mosaic Co. and Potash Corp., should get from this development.

“With both Uralkali and Belaruskali running close to flat out of late, we believe that much of the volume shortfall stemming from this supply outage will accrue disproportionately to the western-based producers (i.e., Canpotex) who possess ample slack capacity,” he told clients.

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