Starving microorganisms capable of surviving in extreme conditions have already managed to “eat” a nail in just three days. In Chile, a scientist is testing “metal-eating” bacteria she hopes could help clean up the country’s highly-polluting mining industry.
In her laboratory in Antofagasta, an industrial town 1,100-kilometers north of Santiago, 33-year-old biotechnologist Nadac Reales has been carrying out tests with extremophiles—organisms that live in extreme environments.
(Bloomberg) — Lithium has gotten so hot that even China’s gold miners want a slice of the market, sky high valuations and all. Zijin Mining Group Co., a major Chinese gold and copper producer, announced on Friday its first foray into the booming lithium sector with its C$960 million ($770 million) purchase of Neo Lithium Corp.
It’s just the latest in a series of recent acquisitions, mostly involving Chinese bidders for South American assets owned by Canadian firms, amid surging demand for the key ingredient used to power electric vehicles.
The Lithium Road runs through Latin America. It crosses three countries – Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile – whose economies are as bone-shakingly unstable as a potholed highway.
Chris Berry, president of House Mountain Partners, told Capital.com that lithium production, “is set to ramp up dramatically in the next few years” in those countries. By 2025, the Lithium triangle is expected to provide 60 to 70% of the globe’s lithium used in products ranging from electric vehicles to cell phones and laptops.
Dialogo Chino
The landscape of global energy finance – and Latin American lithium mining – changed last week when China’s President Xi announced that his country would “step up support for other developing countries in developing green and low-carbon energy”, while also committing to end support for coal-fired power plants abroad.
The demand for renewable energy already exists: developing countries around the world have proposed 494 gigawatts in renewable energy projects through their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to the Paris Agreement. In Latin America and the Caribbean alone, energy sector analysts foresee a boom in renewable energy, with installed capacity expected to more than double in the next few years.
As investors weigh swirling macro-economic factors, market fundamentals for copper — a key metal in global construction and transportation — remain solid, according to an industry veteran.
Prices for the bellwether commodity this year will average more than $4 a pound, Diego Hernandez, head of Chilean mining society Sonami, said in an interview Tuesday. That would be a record annual average.
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The Guerrero gold belt (GGB) has grown to one of Mexico’s biggest yellow metal mining zones following less than 30 years of exploration – and it probably holds at least 10Moz yet to be found, David Jones, a geologist and renowned GGB expert, tells BNamericas.
The belt, a roughly 80km strip of mineralization, has established Guerrero as one of Mexico’s top four gold producing states, rivaling Chihuahua and only trailing Sonora and Zacatecas – all of which have far longer mining histories.
London-based private equity fund Appian Capital is said to be in advanced negotiations to sell its Atlantic Nickel unit in Brazil for around $1 billion, with Canada’s Teck Resources (TSX: TECK.A | TECK.B) (NYSE: TCK) cited as one of the likely buyers.
According to O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper, the Vancouver-based miner’s main interest is Atlantic Nickel’s Santa Rita open pit nickel-cobalt mine, in the northeastern state of Bahia.
Some of the world’s biggest miners say they like what they’re hearing from Peru’s new leftist government of late, further easing fears that drastic policy changes could stall future output in the No. 2 copper nation.
Freeport-McMoRan boss Richard Adkerson said at an industry event last week he was left “encouraged” from a recent meeting with President Pedro Castillo, a former rural union activist from a Marxist party. At the same conference two days earlier, BHP Group’s president for minerals in the Americas, Ragnar Udd, complimented the government’s “strategic” approach.
With the rising tide of battery electric vehicles making a splash all across the world, the most coveted natural resource needed to power our vehicles is no longer petrol but a mineral called ‘lithium’. While it’s debatable whether lithium is the most important element found in a lithium-ion battery, its extensive mining across certain global hotspots has come under heavy criticism.
The very process of mining lithium is not only energy-intensive and polluting, it may also be linked with destabilising the ecosystem nearby due to extensive saltwater depletion from the edge of the ‘salars’ through which lithium is extracted.
Less than a week after Vancouver-based Millennial Lithium Corp. asked shareholders to vote on a proposed all-cash buyout by China’s Ganfeng Lithium Corp., a second buyer has emerged and bid 6.1 per cent higher, offering $377 million in cash.
Millennial did not disclose the second buyer’s identity, but a source told the Financial Post it is Chinese battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited, or CATL, as Bloomberg News reported.
SANTIAGO (Reuters) – Indigenous communities living around Chile’s Atacama salt flat have asked authorities to suspend lithium miner SQM’s operating permits or sharply reduce its operations until it submits an environmental compliance plan acceptable to regulators, according to a filing viewed by Reuters.
Chile’s SMA environmental regulator in 2016 charged SQM with overdrawing lithium-rich brine from the Salar de Atacama salt flat, prompting the company to develop a $25 million plan to bring its operations back into compliance. Authorities approved that plan in 2019 but reversed their decision in 2020, leaving the company to start again from scratch on a potentially tougher plan.
Finding a place to stay is not so easy these days in the Brazilian mining town of Itabirito.
Hotel rooms are scarce and rents have climbed, say locals, as outsiders descend on the hilly settlement in search of their fortunes — or maybe just a steady wage — from the iron ore deposits found in this tropical region of green valleys and streams.
Prices for the steelmaking ingredient have rallied over the past year, turning the modest town of about 60,000 people into a hotspot of the global commodities boom.
LIMA, Aug 9 (Reuters) – Peru’s finance minister, Pedro Francke, told Reuters on Monday that the new leftist government can increase mining taxes to fund public spending without affecting private-sector competitiveness, all while reducing the fiscal deficit.
Peru, the world’s No. 2 copper producer, is highly dependent on mining taxes and new President Pedro Castillo has promised to deliver more social programs to lift the country’s poor.
The election of Castillo, a member of a Marxist-Leninist party, as president in June has spooked investors, with Peru’s Sol currency falling to a fresh record low against the dollar on Monday.
With 32 states and 5,800 miles of gorgeous coastline, urbanscapes and quaint colonial towns — in regions that each have their own special cuisine, distinct accents and beautiful biodiversity — Mexico has so many destinations worth visiting, it can be hard to know where to start.
I’ve gotten to know Guanajuato well during my 13 years in the country, and it still has nooks and crannies I have yet to explore. Tourists who head right to the state’s most famous attraction — the city of San Miguel de Allende — miss out on the plethora of places and activities the state has to offer.
By far, one of the state’s biggest and best destinations is Guanajuato city. As you approach, the multicolored facades of the houses creeping up the mountains glitter in the sunshine.
Chile’s senate has postponed for almost three weeks a vote on an opposition-sponsored bill that could hike taxes on miners by up to 75% depending on the price of copper, the country’s main export.
The bill, first introduced in 2018, calls for a 3% royalty on sales of over 12,000 tonnes of copper productions a year and 50,000t/y of lithium.
Half the funds obtained from the royalty would go into a convergence fund to finance regional and communal development projects. The other half would directly finance projects to mitigate, compensate or repair environmental impacts from mining activity in communities near mining projects.
