PolyMet mining issue cuts deep into DFL unity at state convention – by Baird Helgeson (Minneapolis Star Tribune – June 2, 2014)

http://www.startribune.com/

DULUTH – Democrats averted a nasty public fight Sunday over a controversial Iron Range copper-nickel mining proposal that has vividly split powerful party factions.

Activists at the state DFL convention decided against debating a proposal to make support of mining part of the state party platform. The move took on enormous implications as environmentalists and labor supporters are bitterly divided over PolyMet Mining Corp.’s proposal to extract copper and nickel from the long-closed LTV mine in Hoyt Lakes.

“The mining issue has the potential to rip up the last remaining hard-core Democrats,” said Joel Holstad, a DFL activist from Forest Lake. “I have no idea which way this is going to go, but I think this issue has the potential to be incredibly impactful on the future of the party.”

Some elected Democrats, who control the governor’s office and the House and Senate, were dreading a bruising public fight that would have overshadowed DFLers’ overwhelming endorsements of Gov. Mark Dayton and U.S. Sen. Al Franken, who are heading into tough re-election fights.

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Vale steels itself for changing times – by Joe Leahy (Financial Times – June 3, 2014)

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

The helicopter circles over a range of verdant mountains in the Carajás National Forest, a park in Brazil’s Amazonian state of Pará.

In spite of the thick jungle on their lower slopes, some of the peaks are strangely bare. This is a clue as to what lies below the surface – a giant iron ore body known by miners as Carajás Serra Sul S11D, which decodes as Carajás southern mountain range iron ore body 11, block D.

The discovery is so large it will boost the production of Brazilian miner Vale, the world’s second-largest iron ore miner by volume, by nearly a third after it comes on-stream in 2016 compared with the company’s expected production this year of 312m tonnes. Vale claims it is the largest such project in the iron ore industry.

“We are flying above the S11D,” says Jamil Sebe, Vale’s director of northern region ferrous metal projects, above the noise of the helicopter rotors. “Where you have iron, you don’t get trees, that’s one of the ways to discover iron ore.”
Conceived during the commodity supercycle of the past decade, the $20bn project to develop S11D comes as the environment for the industry is changing radically.

Iron ore prices in May suffered their sixth monthly consecutive drop, marking a record losing streak for the steelmaking ingredient.

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Yamana Gold’s Marrone Canada’s highest paid mining CEO – by Dorothy Kosich (Mineweb.com – June 3, 2014)

http://www.mineweb.com/

13 Canadian mining CEOs ranked among Canada’s highest paid CEOs of the 100 largest public companies in a Globe and Mail survey published Sunday.

RENO (MINEWEB) – Yamana Gold CEO Peter Marrone is Canadian’s highest paid mining CEO, ranking 15th in The Globe and Mail’s annual ranking of top paid CEOs from the 100 largest public companies.

However, Marrone’s total compensation dropped 11% to $10,708,817 as of the end of last year. The total value of the CEOs’ equity in Yamana was $27.61 million.

The only female mining CEO on the list, Turquoise Hill Resources’ Kay Priestly, was also the lowest paid, ranking 97th on the list at total compensation of $1,033,317. Priestly holds $511,384 in equity value in the parent company of the lucrative Oyu Tolgoi operation in Mongolia.

While 87th ranked-David Harquail of Franco Nevada was the second-lowest paid mining CEO on the list at total compensation of $2,709,412, up 7%; he ranked third in total equity held in Franco-Nevada, an astounding $68.2 million.

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TWO MINING BEHEMOTHS BATTLE AN ISRAELI BILLIONAIRE – by Patrick Radden Keefe (The New Yorker – June 2, 2014)

http://www.newyorker.com/

One day in November, 2008, two rival groups of mining executives convened for a meeting in a black office tower on the southern tip of Manhattan. They represented two of the largest mining companies in the world: Brazil’s Vale, and its Anglo-Australian competitor, Rio Tinto. Vale was interested in acquiring a stake in one of Rio Tinto’s most prized projects: a mountain range in the tiny west African nation of Guinea, which contained the planet’s richest deposit of untapped iron ore and was known as Simandou.

When they met that day, executives from Rio Tinto acknowledged that their legal claim to Simandou was under threat. In the summer of 2008, the government of Guinea had rescinded its right to develop the concession, and a new player had emerged on the scene: an Israeli billionaire named Beny Steinmetz, who had made his name in the diamond trade and now had designs on Simandou.

The negotiations between Vale and Rio Tinto eventually fell apart, but Rio Tinto’s concerns turned out to be well founded. Guinea granted Steinmetz’s company, B.S.G.R., exploration rights to half of the Simandou deposit. Then, in 2010, B.S.G.R. announced that it was forming a joint venture to develop the ore—with Vale. The leadership at Rio Tinto was incensed: not only had they lost half of their precious asset to Steinmetz but he had then gone into business with their chief competitor, with whom they had only recently been negotiating a joint venture themselves.

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Obama to Take Action to Slash Coal Pollution – by Coral Davenport (New York Times – June 2, 2014)

http://www.nytimes.com/

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Monday will announce one of the strongest actions ever taken by the United States government to fight climate change, a proposed Environmental Protection Agency regulation to cut carbon pollution from the nation’s power plants 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, according to people briefed on the plan who spoke anonymously because they had been asked not to reveal details.

The regulation takes aim at the largest source of carbon pollution in the United States, the nation’s more than 600 coal-fired power plants. If it withstands an expected onslaught of legal and legislative attacks, experts say that it could close hundreds of the plants and also lead, over the course of decades, to systemic changes in the American electricity industry, including transformations in how power is generated and used.

It is also likely to stand as President Obama’s last chance to substantially shape domestic policy and as a defining element of his legacy. The president, who failed to push a sweeping climate change bill through Congress in his first term, is now acting on his own by using his executive authority under the 1970 Clean Air Act to issue the regulation.

Under the rule, states will be given a wide menu of policy options to achieve the pollution cuts. Rather than immediately shutting down coal plants, states would be allowed to reduce emissions by making changes across their electricity systems — by installing new wind and solar generation or energy-efficiency technology, and by starting or joining state and regional “cap and trade” programs, in which states agree to cap carbon pollution and buy and sell permits to pollute.

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China Builds Sulawesi Smelters as Ore Ban Cuts Jobs: Commodities – by Yoga Rusmana (Bloomberg News – June 2, 2014)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Since Indonesia banned ore exports, the global nickel industry has been rocked by surging prices, Chinese workers like Zhang Qi Guang are building smelters in Sulawesi and business at Eva’s Jewel restaurant has collapsed.

Indonesia, the world’s largest producer of mined nickel, halted shipments Jan. 12, sending prices up as much as 56 percent and prompting Morgan Stanley to forecast a global output deficit over the next five years.

The government’s rationale for the ban was that too much wealth was leaving the country because the raw ore is worth far less than refined metal. It figured the world would come to its doorstep to build smelters that extract nickel from the red earth. While some of those investments have begun, the downside is idle mines, tens of thousands of lost jobs and piles of unwanted ore waiting to be processed. Sales at Eva’s Jewel in the town of North Konawe fell as much as 80 percent.

“You never get the sweet thing unless you eat the bitter thing,” said Alexander Barus, vice president of PT Sulawesi Mining Investment, a joint venture of Jakarta-based Bintangdelapan Group and Chinese steelmaker Tsingshan Holding Group, which is building two smelters on Sulawesi. “We feel sad about the people, but just you wait two or three years.”

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THE RARE-EARTHS ROLLER COASTER – by Alastair Gee (The New Yorker – May 24, 2014)

http://www.newyorker.com/

Starting in early 2010, a small Canadian company called Elissa Resources spent more than $1.66 million exploring a hilly scrap of desert dotted with cacti, creosote bushes, and Joshua trees, at the southern tip of Nevada. The company was looking for rare earths: obscure metals with magnetic and luminescent properties which are used in such products as high-efficiency light bulbs, smartphones, and TV screens. The metals are also of enormous value to the defense and renewable-energy industries.

To find them, Elissa Resources employees mapped the landscape and used special devices to figure out where radiation was unusually high. The firm contracted an aircraft to measure the land’s magnetism, surveyed the area from a helicopter, and drilled twenty-one holes to figure out what was down below. But, in 2013, Elissa Resources halted major work at the site. A slump in the rare-earths market has made it hard to attract the investment needed to continue the investigations.

Most of the world’s rare earths are mined in China. In recent years, amid fears that China’s control of the market could jeopardize Western strategic interests, firms such as Elissa pursued deposits elsewhere—in the United States, Kyrgyzstan, Namibia, Vietnam, Greenland, Australia, and other countries. A boom was on. “A geologist would pick up a rock, lick it, and say, ‘Oh, I’ve got rare earths,’ and suddenly you’ve got a rare-earths company,” Gareth Hatch, a co-founder of the market-intelligence firm Technology Metals Research, said. The industry acquired an air of glamour, thanks to the futuristic uses of the metals, and a moniker suggestive of preciousness.

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Canadian Miner’s Saga Spotlights Concerns on Paid Research – by Alistair MacDonald and Ben Dummett (Wall Street Journal – June 2, 2014)

http://online.wsj.com/home-page

Western Potash Stock Jumps After Analyst Linked to a Major Investor Writes of a Bidding War

One day a few months ago, the stock of Western Potash Corp. WPX.T +9.76% abruptly jumped 20% after a research report said potential buyers were likely circling the Canadian miner.

The analyst who wrote the report, Zurich-based Stephan Bogner, has another job: investor relations at one of Western Potash’s biggest investors, Zimtu Capital Corp. ZC.V +1.56% Zimtu says it hired Mr. Bogner and his firm, Rockstone Research Ltd., to, among other things, prepare materials on Zimtu’s equity holdings. As published on March 13, the report by Rockstone didn’t disclose this relationship.

In the days that followed the publication of Mr. Bogner’s report, David Hodge, a director on Western Potash’s board and president of British Columbia-based Zimtu, sold shares of the mining company. John Costigan, a senior executive of Western Potash, also sold shares during that period. Messrs. Hodge and Costigan said they sold the shares for personal reasons and the sales weren’t related to the report.

Some of the provincial regulators who police Canadian markets are increasingly expressing concern that retail investors aren’t being adequately informed when analysts or newsletter writers are paid by companies they write about, or by their investors.

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UPDATE 1-New Caledonia allows conditional restart of Vale nickel mine – by Cecile Lefort (Reuters U.S. – June 1, 2014)

http://www.reuters.com/

SYDNEY, June 2 (Reuters) – New Caledonia authorities said on Monday they have authorised a conditional restart of Brazil-based Vale’s nickel operations, which were suspended more than three weeks ago after acid-tainted effluent spilled into a river.

The leak sparked violent riots by young Melanesians that caused more than $20 million in damage to buildings, equipment and vehicles and left three policemen with gunshot wounds.

Police remained on alert as protesters maintained a presence near the plant. “The situation is calm and some (protesters) are still camping near the plant,” said a local government spokeswoman.

Some protesters, who have been frustrated by the lack of response from indigenous Kanak chiefs to the chemical spill, are seeking the permanent closure of the mine – something Vale said last week was not on the table. Vale could not immediately be reached for comment on when production would restart.

The Southern Province of the French-administered Pacific island noted it was Vale’s sixth major incident at the $6 billion Goro site and set hightened safety standards as a condition of the mine operations resuming.

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Under fire Australian miners look to repair their image – by Jamie Smyth (Financial Times – June 1, 2014)

 

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

Bulga, Australia – Tony Brown typically spends his days ferrying tourists to and from the Great Barrier Reef. But last month, the charter boat operator flew to Europe where he helped persuade Deutsche Bank and HSBC not to fund the expansion of a coal port that green groups claim could destroy the Unesco World Heritage-listed site.

“The dredging required to build the port is a risk to the reef and the A$6bn tourist industry that depends on it,” says Mr Brown, who has vowed to continue the fight to block what would become the world’s largest coal port at Abbot Point in Queensland.

The decision by the banks is the latest victory in a global campaign being waged against the funding of fossil fuel projects and companies by green groups, which allege they are causing catastrophic global warming.

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Rio Tinto leader Ray Ahmat cuts a trail for others – by Sarah-Jane Tasker (The Australian – May 31, 2014)

 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business

RAY Ahmat, the first local Aboriginal superintendent at Rio Tinto Alcan’s bauxite mine in Weipa, has outlined the opportunities to develop local talent after taking out a top award at an industry function.

Mr Ahmat received the Overall Indigenous Award at the Queensland Resources Council’s Indigenous Awards last night for his contribution as a role model in the state’s sector.

He leads a large operational team of more than 170 people at the mine, on the Western Cape of York Peninsula in Queensland, managing pre-mining and post-mining activities.

Mr Ahmat, born and bred in the region, said his parents were strong role models in his life. His father had worked at the mine for 32 years and his mother spent 28 years at the operation.

“I got to where I am to seeing what they did,” he said. Mr Ahmat, who is a Yupungathi traditional owner, joined the miner 15 years ago as a truck driver before moving up the chain to superintendent — a path he hopes he can encourage others in his community to follow.

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China prospects forged in steel – by Barry Fitzgerald (The Australian – May 31, 2014)

 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business

MINERS, commodity experts and China watchers believe this year’s dramatic fall in iron ore is a short-term issue, suggesting that the price of Australia’s biggest export earner will rally to around $US110 a tonne in response to China’s ¬urbanisation and industrialisation demand imperative.

A procession of speakers at the Australia in China’s Century Conference in Melbourne yesterday cautioned against reading too much into the near 30 per cent decline in iron ore prices so far this year to $US95.70 a tonne — a price at which Australia’s highest-cost producers will be feeling the pinch.

They cited a combination of reasons for their faith in the ability of iron ore prices to rebound to around $US110 a tonne. While that would represent a 15 per cent improvement on the current price, it would nevertheless still be 18 per cent below the full-year average in 2013, which matched the year-end price of $US135 a tonne.

Fortescue chairman and major shareholder Andrew Forrest told the conference that Chinese steel production was continuing to run at record levels despite patchy economic indicators.

“The Chinese ability to manage poverty out of its country is unprecedented and their consumption of steel is still running at record rates,” Mr Forrest said.

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The War On Coal Miners: How Companies Hide The Threat Of Black Lung From Watchdogs And Workers – by Dave Jamieson (Huffington Post – May 29, 2014)

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/

The dust was so thick that Justin Greenwell could barely see what was in front of him.

A 29-year-old miner, Greenwell had grown accustomed to working in the coal dust below ground in the Parkway Mine in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. Yet the prevalence of the dust in the air bothered Greenwell more and more. He’d labored for seven years in the mines, and already he was experiencing shortness of breath when he worked on his farm on the weekends.

Prolonged exposure to coal dust leads to coal worker’s pneumoconiosis, known colloquially as black lung. It’s a miserable disease that forces miners to live out their last days coughing and gasping for air. To protect employees, mine operators are required by law to keep their coal dust levels in check. While inspectors do some of the monitoring, the operators themselves also collect samples and provide them to federal regulators to prove they’re in compliance.

According to Greenwell, there was a simple reason the Parkway Mine managed to avoid fines despite all the dust: Its operator, Armstrong Coal, a subsidiary of St. Louis-based Armstrong Energy, was submitting misleading samples to regulators.

“It’s been going on since I started there,” Greenwell alleged in an interview. “All these guys in management, they know it’s wrong. But they don’t care about our health.”

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Breaking the bloody links in the smartphone supply chain – by Bryce Druzin (Silicon Valley Business Journal – May 30, 2014)

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/

Blood diamonds. Blood chocolate. Blood smartphones.

Silicon Valley technology companies are racing to comply with new federal rules that require them to disclose efforts to determine if their products contain materials that fund armed groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

By June 2, companies whose products use tantalum, tin, tungsten or gold — widely used in semiconductors, mobile phones and other electronics — are required by the Securities Exchange Commission to disclose steps taken to trace the origin of those minerals.

Companies must describe their efforts to determine the country of origin of these minerals, collectively known as “3TG.” If they have a reason to believe their minerals come from Congo or bordering countries, they must try to determine the minerals’ complete chain of custody, including the source mine if possible.

The rule is a result of years of pressure from human rights organizations such as the Enough Project, Amnesty International and Global Witness. They hope that increased transparency will pressure companies to make sure their minerals are not funding violence in Congo, where 5.4 million people have died since 1998 due to conflict-related causes according to an International Rescue Committee report.

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Campaign against tin mining in Bangka island targets Microsoft – by Sajid Shaikh (The Guardian – May 30, 2014)

http://www.theguardian.com/uk

Company singled out for direct action for ignoring tin mining’s enviromental impact on Indonesian island

A campaign against tin mining in Bangka and Belitung islands of Indonesia is targeting tech giant Microsoft. The islands, off the coast of Sumatra, are being stripped off their forests and marine wealth and dug up for tin, used widely in the electronics and IT industry by major brands making mobile phones, tablets, laptops, computers and other gadgets.

Friends of Earth Netherlands, an environmental group fighting for sustainable sourcing of tin, said they are targeting Microsoft for “refusing to take steps to end irresponsible mining practices on Bangka and Belitung islands.” Asus, HTC and Huawei are other brands named by the group using tin sourced unethically.

“Big brands such as Apple, Philips and LG openly support projects to produce tin in a better way. It is unacceptable that other brands still refuse to follow this lead and take responsibility. They have been made aware Bangka-Belitung islands are being destroyed and miners are dying every week. All brands use tin from Bangka-Belitung since a third of global tin production comes from these Indonesian islands,” said FoE campaigner Evert Hassink.

The group has launched an online petition against Microsoft. “We ask people to support our petition. In the Netherlands we will be collecting signatures on the streets and at festivals. We will take direct action against Microsoft,” Hassink said.

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