International Media Resource Articles – Page 710

South African gold miner eyes biogas to power underground trains – by Wendell Roelf (Reuters India – October 28, 2014)

October 29, 2014

http://in.reuters.com/

CAPE TOWN, Oct 28 (Reuters) – A South African gold mining firm trying to cut carbon emissions and costs and improve the health of its workers could be the first globally to fuel trains with biogenic gas formed over millennia deep beneath the ground, one producer said on Tuesday.

Molopo South Africa, which holds the country’s first and so far only onshore petroleum production license, said it was partnering with Sibanye Gold to start underground testing next year on a locomotive that has been converted from diesel to run on compressed natural gas (CNG).

Biogenic gas, produced by bacteria interacting with ancient decomposing plants to release methane, has been found in South Africa’s Free State province, close to the mining operations of Harmony Gold, Sibanye Gold, and Petra Diamonds.

Although there has been research into its use in powering trains, it has never gone beyond the prototype stage, experts say. But the CNG locomotive was recently tested above ground and it managed to pull eight wagons carrying a 30 tonne load, the equivalent of those pulled by diesel engines, Stefano Marani, a director at Molopo, said.

“Which is a very big milestone to move to the next phase of what we believe is a world first,” Marani told Reuters. There was also a massive reduction in diesel emissions, with big health benefits for mine workers.

The not so great debate – Is gold manipulated or not? – by Bill Holter (Mineweb.com – October 28, 2014)

October 28, 2014

http://www.mineweb.com/

Holter expresses his disappointment with the quality of the debate on gold manipulation at the New Orleans Investment Conference.

NEW ORLEANS – I attended the New Orleans Investment Conference this past week as the guest of Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee’s (GATA) Bill Murphy and Chris Powell for which I am highly grateful. There were many good and thoughtful speakers. I specifically wanted to attend this conference for two reasons; Alan Greenspan (Mr. Magoo) was a keynote speaker and I not so much wanted to hear what he had to say but, more importantly, how he answered audience questions.

What piqued my interest most about this conference, though, was the proposed debate between GATA’s Powell and Doug Casey of Casey Research. The topic was: “Is gold manipulated or not?” I had such high expectations for this but unfortunately was left disappointed.

The format was not much of a debate; each speaker was allowed seven minutes to lay out their case followed by a four minute rebuttal period each. The problem was, they did not interact nor did they debunk the other’s position. The debate, if you can call it that, was one-sided where Powell laid out documentation and fact while Casey gave us his opinion.

Powell started off and was pretty much 100% factual as he laid out printed documentation from the Federal Reserve and the BIS which confirms central bank activity in the gold market.

Cliffs Turnaround Plan Derailed by Iron Ore at 5-Year Low – by Sonja Elmquist (Bloomberg News – October 27, 2014)

October 28, 2014

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Other assets are being sold off quickly. The sale of a minority holding in a graphite
mining company was completed in August. Goncalves said he’s trying to sell a chromite
project in Canada’s Ring of Fire mining region “as soon as I can.”

Activist investor Casablanca Capital LLC’s plan to revive the fortunes of the largest iron ore producer in the U.S. is crumbling as the price of the commodity drops to a five-year low.

Casablanca went public in January with demands for Cliffs Natural Resources Inc. (CLF) to spin off or sell foreign mines and return more cash to investors. Casablanca won a proxy contest in July with the election of its slate of directors on the Cliffs board, one of whom was appointed chief executive officer.

With the iron ore market now in a worse state than it was at the start of the year, Cliffs may struggle to sell mines for a satisfactory price. Instead of raising its dividend, the Cleveland-based miner may have to eliminate the payout entirely, analysts at Citigroup Inc. and Nomura Holdings Inc. say.

A higher dividend “was something Casablanca promised before I joined,” Chairman and CEO Lourenco Goncalves said by phone in an Oct. 14 interview. “I’m not Casablanca.”

COLUMN-Why China blurs the global aluminium picture – by Andy Home (Reuters U.S. – October 27, 2014)

October 28, 2014

http://www.reuters.com/

Oct 27 (Reuters) – Is the world aluminium market in a supply-demand deficit or surplus? It’s a simple enough question but an extraordinarily difficult one to answer.

That much was clear at last week’s LME Seminar. Two respected bank analysts, Citi’s David Wilson and Natixis’ Nic Brown, offered diametrically different views.

Deficit, according to Brown, and one that will steadily increase over the next two years. Surplus, according to Wilson, with no sign of deficit until 2017 at the earliest.

Calculating supply-demand balances in any industrial metal is a tricky business, but the problems are compounded in aluminium.

There is, for example, no aluminium equivalent to the International Study Groups that do so much of the statistical leg-work in the copper, zinc, lead and nickel markets. The International Aluminium Institute (IAI) releases monthly production figures but only for primary metal, leaving the secondary scrap component of the supply chain shrouded in statistical darkness.

Mali eyes $9.5bn rail projects to unlock iron ore, bauxite deposits – by Tiemoko Diallo and Bate Felix (Reuters/The Africa Report – October 27, 2014)

October 28, 2014

http://www.theafricareport.com/

Bamako – Landlocked Mali aims to diversify its mining sector away from gold with Chinese-built rail projects worth $9.5 billion that would link it to the Atlantic coast, even as slowing Chinese growth and falling commodity prices cool investment.

The West African nation – the continent’s third-largest gold producer – said last month it had signed a string of investment deals with China totalling $11 billion, with most of this going to finance the rail deals.

Chinese authorities, however, have not confirmed the investment. Mali said $8 billion would finance a 900-km (560-mile) railway to Guinea’s port capital Conakry and $1.5 billion would renovate a rail link to Senegal’s capital Dakar, Mali’s main gateway port.

The improved transport links would attract investors to under-explored resources such as iron ore, bauxite and uranium that are bulkier and more costly to transport than gold. “The infrastructure will enable Mali to end its dependency on gold,” said Lassana Guindo, an adviser at the mines ministry.

President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita is striving to kick start Mali’s economy after a brief French-led war in early 2013 against northern Islamist rebels dragged it into recession.

Russian Mining Tycoons Seek to Trim Debt as Sanctions Sting – by Yuliya Fedorinova and Alex Sazonov (Bloomberg News – October 27, 2014)

October 27, 2014

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Russia’s mining billionaires are starting to feel the sting of economic sanctions.

Mikhail Prokhorov, whose investment empire stretches from the world’s largest aluminum maker to the Brooklyn Nets basketball team, recently explored whether fellow oligarchs, including Vladimir Potanin, were willing to buy a portion of his $2.7 billion stake in potash miner OAO Uralkali, two people familiar with the matter said. The reason: the sinking value of his Russian holdings means he’d like less debt and more cash, they said.

While Prokhorov aborted the plan after failing to get the price he wanted, it’s the latest example of the pressure on Russia’s commodity magnates as sanctions hit the economy at home and a global slowdown undercuts metals demand. Billionaires including Alexey Mordashov, who controls steelmaker OAO Severstal (SVST), and Potanin, the biggest shareholder in OAO Norilsk Nickel, have increased dividends from their businesses after selling some assets.

“Whenever you hear billionaires say they are not affected by sanctions and the general situation in Russia, that’s not quite true,” said Yulia Bushueva, who helps to manage about $500 million at Arbat Capital in Moscow. “It’s natural that they are looking at options to cut the debt. Others just want to get some extra cash in the current situation.”

Column – India, Indonesia take different, but similar coal paths – by Clyde Russell (Reuters India – October 27, 2014)

October 27, 2014

http://in.reuters.com/

LAUNCESTON, Australia – India, poised to become the world’s largest importer of thermal coal, appears to be opening up its domestic mining sector to foreign competition just as Indonesia, its biggest supplier, is making it harder for exporters.

On a superficial level it appears that India and Indonesia are choosing different paths for their coal sectors, but the policies being pursued by the countries’ new, reform-minded leaders may have more in common than first appearances suggest.

India may allow foreign companies to mine coal, as long as they set up units in the country, Reuters reported on Oct. 22, citing a source familiar with the matter.

This would be a major change for the South Asian nation, which has the world’s fifth-largest coal reserves but suffers from ongoing shortages because of inefficiencies across the mining, transportation and distribution chains.

Coal mining has been dominated by state-controlled Coal India, which consistently fails to meet targets for production and supply. What private mining existed in India was thrown into chaos recently by court rulings that found the allocation of coal blocks by the previous government had been illegal, and that these areas would be returned to the state and Coal India.

Analysis Iron ore and rare earth metals mining: an industry under siege? – by Wayne Visser (The Guardian – October 24, 2014)

October 27, 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/us

Resource scarcity and human rights issues surrounding metals extraction, coupled with unrelenting global demand mean the industry is facing some tough realities

The good news: the number of people living in extreme poverty could drop from 1.2 billion in 2010 to under 100 million by 2050, according to UN projections. The bad news is that the flotilla of hope currently rising on the tide of economic growth in emerging countries is at serious risk of being dragged down under the waves. The reason is growing resource scarcity and the environmental disasters that could ensue.

As always, the poorest will be worst affected. The UNDP projects that, under an environmental disaster scenario, instead of reducing the population living in extreme poverty in south Asia from over half a billion to less than 100m by 2050, it could rise to 1.2bn. In sub-Saharan Africa, the numbers may rise from under 400m to over a billion. For the world as a whole, an environmental disaster scenario could mean 3.1 billion more people living in extreme poverty in 2050, as compared with an accelerated development scenario.

The message is simple: unless these booming economies – and the high-income countries they churn out ‘widgets’ for – can lighten the weighty anchor of resource consumption, we will all, sooner or later, get that sinking feeling. To illustrate the point, demand for steel – driven in no small part by a global car fleet doubling to 1.7bn by 2030 – is expected to increase by about 80% from 1.3bn tonnes in 2010 to 2.3bn tonnes in 2030. These trends raise red flags about material shortages of many metals in the future.

A Kingdom of riches: Saudi Arabia looks to strike it rich with mining sector – by Adam Leach (Mining Technology – October 23, 2014)

October 27, 2014

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

While Saudi Arabia remains the world’s largest petroleum producer, the prospect of US shale gas eating into its dominance of the energy export market has highlighted a need for it to diversify its economy. Having already established itself in the gold market, the kingdom is now setting its sights on ruling the copper, zinc and phosphate markets.

The history of mining in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia stretches back thousands of years. The first record of it has been dated to 2100 BC, while carbon dating has shown that operations at Madh Ad Dahab mine were underway at around 1000 BC. Archaelogists have claimed that a copper mine was generating revenue for King Solomon in the 10th century BC. But despite its early rising in the development of mineral extraction, resources in Saudi Arabia have remained relatively untapped.

Controlling around a quarter of the world’s reported petroleum reserves, Saudi Arabia has been under little pressure to exploit other resources it may have access to, with the ever growing global demand for oil enabling the country to get richer and richer.

However, over the past decade the globalisation of oil exploration, an increase in climate change pressure and an influx of US shale gas and oil to the market have served to slightly ease the monopoly of Saudi Arabia and its fellow OPEC members. In response to recent reports that US exports would reduce demand for Saudi oil, the kingdom announced that it would be cutting production to 400,000 barrels per day, the lowest since 2011, in order to preserve the current price of $100 per barrel.

Coal, Climate and Orangutans in Indonesia – by Daniel Stiles (The Epoche Times – October 24, 2014)

October 27, 2014

http://www.theepochtimes.com/

What do the climate and orangutans have in common? They are both threatened by coal – the first by burning it, and the second by mining it.

At the recent United Nations Climate Summit in New York, world leaders and multinational corporations pledged a variety of actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation to avert a looming disaster caused by global warming.

Indonesia, home to most of the world’s orangutans, is a major player in both emissions and deforestation, with the third largest tropical forest area in the world, after the Amazon and the Congo Basin. In 2012, Indonesia surpassed Brazil as the country with the highest annual rate of primary forest loss. The country is also ranked the fourth top emitter of greenhouse gases in the world (after China, the U.S., and the European Union) during some years, largely due to high deforestation rates and peatland fires.

The New York Declaration on Forests, announced at the UN Climate Summit, called on partners to work to at least halve the rate of natural forest loss globally by 2020 and strive to end natural forest loss by 2030. It also targeted achieving a reduction in deforestation-related emissions by 4.5-8.8 billion tons per year by 2030.

The now-former Indonesia president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, announced in 2009 a voluntary commitment to reduce the country’s carbon footprint by 26 percent.

BHP CEO defends iron ore strategy as best play in gloomy market – by Silvia Antonioli (Reuters U.S. – October 23, 2014)

October 24, 2014

http://www.reuters.com/

LONDON – (Reuters) – BHP Billiton’s chief executive said its strategy of high-volume iron ore production was the best way to profit in a gloomy market, defending a plan that has come under growing criticism for depressing prices.

Iron ore, the biggest earner for global miner BHP Billiton, has lost about 40 percent of its value this year, reaching five-year lows, as big increases in new supply from top three miners Vale, Rio Tinto and BHP have exceeded lackluster demand.

Analysts expect the price decline to continue in the next few years under the weight of extra supply.

BHP has said it intends to boost production at existing assets by 65 million tonnes to 290 million a year by June 2017 and plans to cut its production costs to overtake rival Rio Tinto as the cheapest iron ore supplier to China.

“The lowest-cost producer has a right to continue to produce at very high margins in a free market,” BHP Chief Executive Andrew Mackenzie told reporters after the company’s annual general meeting in London.

“We have always been of the view that the iron ore market is more likely to decline than rise, and therefore producing the maximum amount we can now is very sensible.”

Coal Miners Fired in Appalachia Getting Hired in Wyoming – by Tim Loh (Bloomberg News – October 23, 2014)

October 24, 2014

http://www.bloomberg.com/

It’s boom times in Wyoming for embattled U.S. coal companies, where the mining industry is hiring workers while shedding them in Appalachia.

Alpha Natural Resources Inc. (ANR), the second-largest U.S. producer, hasn’t posted a profit in three years and is closing money-losing mines in West Virginia amid plans to increase production out West by as much as 30 percent.

Miner Steven King is going along for the ride. After losing his job last month at the company’s Black Castle operation, King, 42, is getting ready to move his family 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) to a state he’s never visited to work at an Alpha site in Wyoming.

With the U.S. coal industry in its worst decline in decades, companies including Alpha and Peabody Energy Corp. (BTU), the biggest producer, are pivoting toward pockets of future profit. No prospect is bigger than the Powder River Basin, a high, mineral-rich plain of yellow grass and sagebrush stretching from central Wyoming to southern Montana.

“It’s going to be running a good while in Wyoming, because of how much coal they put out,” said King, who expects to start work by next month. While he doesn’t know what he’ll be earning, a friend made the move a year ago and since then his base pay has increased to about $35 an hour from $25.

Vale Coming of Age as Nickel Heavyweight as Prices Sink – by Juan Pablo Spinetto (Bloomberg News – October 23, 2014)

October 24, 2014

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Vale SA (VALE5), whose $18 billion base-metal incursion was beset by a slew of delays and stoppages, is growing nickel output at the fastest pace in six years at a time of tumbling prices for the stainless steel ingredient.

The Rio de Janeiro-based company beat analysts’ estimates to post a 16 percent jump in nickel production in the third quarter, taking total output of the metal this year to 201,400 metric tons. That puts Vale, which plans to produce 289,000 tons of nickel in 2014, on track to challenge top producer OAO GMK Norilsk Nickel, which targets as much as 230,000 tons.

After winning a battle to take over Inco Ltd. in 2006, Vale is leaving behind a series of setbacks including strikes in Canada, plant faults in Brazil and an acid spill in New Caledonia. While its earnings outlook was boosted by nickel’s first-half rally, prices have plunged 24 percent from a Sept. 8 peak and are down about 50 percent since the Inco deal.

“It’s not the best timing in the world,” Marcel Kussaba, an equity analyst at Quantitas, which oversees 16.6 billion reais ($6.6 billion) including Vale shares, said from Porto Alegre, Brazil. “There is the feeling that Vale is starting to deliver when the environment is bad.”

Vale said in its third-quarter production report yesterday that nickel climbed to 72,100 tons, beating a 68,800-ton average forecast by nine analysts surveyed by Bloomberg, the unit’s best performance for a third quarter since 2008, despite a planned maintenance at its Thompson project in Canada.

AFRICA INVESTMENT-S.Africa platinum town, wider economy still hurting from strike – by Zandi Shabalala (Reuters India – October 24, 2014)

October 24, 2014

http://in.reuters.com/

MARIKANA, South Africa, Oct 24 (Reuters) – Mamsi Ngobeni sat alongside the main road of the South African platinum belt town of Marikana, hunched over a table with a pile of onions, apples, loose cigarettes and tomatoes.

By just after noon she had sold about 20 rand ($1.8245) worth of goods, well down from what she said was her usual 1,000 rand take before a five-month strike against the world’s top platinum producers drained this gritty town of cash.

Although miners here have been back at work since June with higher wages and the strike-hit operations of Anglo American Platinum and Lonmin are back at full production, money is not gushing back into local businesses.

Africa’s most advanced economy is also struggling to shake off the shock of the strike, the longest in its history, and will only manage growth of 1.4 percent this year, down from the 2.7 percent predicted in February. Finance Minister Nhlanhla Nene cited “labour market disruptions” as a key reason for the revision.

In Marikana, where 34 striking miners were shot dead by police during a wildcat strike against Lonmin in 2012, the length of this year’s stoppage has left many miners cash-strapped despite wage hikes of up to 20 percent as they have to repay debt that piled up when they didn’t have a pay cheque.

Zinc bull Michelmore puts the case – by Lawrence Williams (Mineweb.com – October 24, 2014)

October 24, 2014

http://www.mineweb.com/

MMG CEO Andrew Michelmore is very bullish on zinc, in part resulting from the impending closure of his company’s Century mine next year with nothing of comparable size to replace it.

LONDON (MINEWEB) – At the tail end of a very interesting East meets West seminar put together by Bloomberg in London during LME Week, Andrew Michelmore, the CEO of MMG (the Australian-based subsidiary of China’s Minmetals), talked about his company and in particular about the massive Las Bambas copper property it is building in the Peruvian Andes.

But perhaps his most interesting comments came in a Q&A session at the end with his remarks on the global zinc market.

Michelmore is bullish on copper, but VERY bullish on zinc, and he is in a good position to understand the market as MMG is the operator of the massive Century zinc mine in Australia which is due to cease production next year. Century will produces some 400 000 tonnes of zinc this year, around 7% of global mined supply and is reckoned to be the world’s second largest zinc mine after Hindustan Zinc’s Rampura Agucha in Rajasthan, India.

Century is due to run out of open pittable ore by the end of the current year, but can probably continue processing material until Q3 2015. Beyond that production will cease said Michelmore in an answer to a direct question on the Century closure schedule.