The Superstack, which has dominated the Sudbury skyline since 1970, will soon be no more.
Vale announced plans Tuesday to decommission the iconic smokestack, which rises some 381 metres from the company’s smelter in Copper Cliff, by 2020. The Superstack will be replaced by two smaller and more efficient stacks, about 137 metres each, and eventually torn down.
“This certainly marks an end of an era and a new chapter in our journey as a responsible and sustainable operation,” said Stuart Harshaw, vice-president of Vale’s Ontario operations, during a press conference at Dynamic Earth on Tuesday.
“This is very historic for our operations and for Sudbury. We know a lot of people view the stack as an icon, something you see coming over the hill or coming up from the south.
(L to R) Dave Stefanuto, Vice-President of Vale’s North Atlantic Projects and Base Metals Technology; Chris Hodgson, President of the Ontario Mining Association; Paul Lefebvre Member of Parliament for Sudbury; Glenn Thibeault, Ontario Minister of Energy and Member of Provincial Parliament for Sudbury; Stuart Harshaw, Vice-President of Vale’s Ontario Operations; Marc Serrè, Member of Parliament for Nickel Belt; Al Sizer, Deputy Mayor of the City of Greater Sudbury; Rick Bertrand, President of United Steelworkers, Local 6500; Mike McCann, Director of Milling & Smelting for Vale’s Sudbury Operations.
Emissions to be reduced to the point that the Superstack will no longer be required
SUDBURY, January 24, 2017 – Due to the significant reduction of atmospheric emissions at Vale’s operations in Sudbury, Ontario, today Vale announced its plans to take the iconic 1,250 foot (381 metre) Superstack out of service by the second quarter of 2020. The Superstack will be replaced with two smaller and more efficient 450 foot (137 metre) stacks.
“We are proud to be reducing emissions to a point where the Superstack is no longer required,” said Stuart Harshaw, Vice-President of Vale’s Ontario Operations. “Taking the Superstack out of service is a great symbol of how far Vale has come in terms of shrinking our environmental footprint and making Greater Sudbury a better place to work and live.”
Stuart Harshaw, Vice-President of Vale’s Ontario Operations.
The two smaller and more efficient stacks will require far less energy to operate than the Superstack, which will reduce greenhouse gas emissions from Vale’s Copper Cliff Smelter by approximately 40%. At the same time, Vale’s Clean AER Project will reduce particulate emissions by 40% and dramatically reduce SO2 emissions by 85%.
Accent: Union, families feel criminal charges warranted through Westray provision
The silence was gut-wrenching in a Sudbury courtroom last year for the families of two men attending preliminary proceedings into charges in the deaths of their loved ones May 6, 2014 at Lockerby Mine.
The families of Norm Bisaillon and Marc Methe attended court after eight charges were laid against mine owner First Nickel Inc. and five were laid against Taurus Drilling Services by the Ministry of Labour.
Bisaillon, 49, and Methe, 34, were killed by a fall of ground at FNI’s Lockerby Mine, just hours after they contacted an FNI employee to discuss a concern about the area in which they were working, their families say.
On Sunday, May 4, 2014, Norm Bisaillon was considering his options. Bisaillon, 49, was employed by Taurus Drilling Services, but was thinking about leaving Sudbury for another job. He told partner, Romeena Kozoriz, “I’m going to be going to the Yukon.”
Bisaillon was working for Taurus at First Nickel Inc.’s Lockerby Mine. He had 23 years’ experience at several companies.
“He never, ever was afraid to work in a place, OK, and he worked in South Africa where there’s no safety, there’s nothing,” said Kozoriz of Bisaillon’s 18-month stint there. “He wasn’t as concerned (there) for his safety as Lockerby.”
VANCOUVER (miningweekly.com) – Despite reporting progress with discussions between stakeholders, the largest landholder in the emerging Ring of Fire (RoF) mining camp of Northern Ontario, Noront Resources, said Tuesday that it expected further delays to the development of its cornerstone Eagle’s Nest mine.
The precious and base metals project developer said the Canadian federal government, the Ontario provincial government, First Nations and itself were advancing negotiations to establish a joint infrastructure plan for the region.
However, this process intersects with discussions between the province and the Matawa Tribal Council at the Regional Framework Table that are taking longer than expected, and that have the potential to delay the provincial government’s stated goal of having shovels in the ground by 2018.
Russell Hess, of Plainview, is political coordinator of the Laborers District Council of Minnesota and North Dakota and a board member of Jobs for Minnesotans.
There is no doubt that we all want to protect the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. It is an undisputed national treasure, and we’re fortunate that it is in our own backyard.
That said, anyone implying that potential mining activities would destroy this pristine area shows a lack of understanding of the strict existing environmental and regulatory protections at the state and federal levels.
Twin Metals Minnesota, the company for which the federal government denied renewal of its mineral leases, has yet to even propose a project. The federal leases in question have been in place for more than 50 years and have been twice renewed by the federal government without controversy and with acknowledgment that the leases pose no adverse environmental impacts.
On Friday, the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service filed with the Federal Register its intent to close off more than 234,000 acres in the Superior National Forest to mining activity. To do so, the request has to go through comment periods and an environmental review, with the Interior secretary giving the final decision.
The potential irony of that process should not be lost. In its actions the BLM and USFS circumvented years of federal due process for the very mining projects at risk of being blocked. That process, most notably denied to Twin Metals, will sound familiar: a proposal, comment periods and environmental reviews.
The hypocrisy should also not be lost.
This effort by the BLM and USFS seeks a two-year moratorium on new mining projects and ultimately a 20-year ban on mining in the Rainy River watershed near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
Jan 13 Almost exactly three years ago Indonesia rocked the global nickel market by banning the export of unprocessed minerals. At the stroke of a presidential pen the flow of nickel ore feeding China’s massive stainless steel sector was cut off.
Now Indonesia has done it again, this time by part reversing that ban. The London Metal Exchange nickel price initially slumped 5 percent on the news to a four-month low of $9,660 per tonne before recovering to $10,275 at the Thursday close.
The tremors have spread to the equities market with the shares of Australia’s nickel producers and Indonesia’s own PT Vale Indonesia experiencing similar turbulence.
A bitterly contested copper-nickel mine proposed for northeast Minnesota cleared another major hurdle Monday, when the U.S. Forest Service approved a deal to trade 6,650 acres of federally owned forests and wetlands to PolyMet Mining Corp. in exchange for 6,690 acres scattered elsewhere across that part of the state.
The exchange, while expected, is a critical part of PolyMet’s plan because it provides the company access to mineral ore it owns beneath the publicly held land.
“This is an incredibly important milestone for PolyMet,” said Jon Cherry, president and chief executive of the company. It means PolyMet has the rights to 30 square miles of land for its planned $650 million project near Hoyt Lakes, which the company says could create up to 350 jobs.
The China boom has come and gone but miners say a new scramble for resources looms, triggered by the dawn of the electric car age.
The motor industry is placing huge bets on electric cars becoming mainstream over the next decade. Miners have been busily looking under the bonnets and inside batteries and decided that they will have to dig up a lot more lithium, copper, nickel and cobalt.
Tesla, the electric vehicle manufacturer controlled by Elon Musk, has said that it would require today’s entire worldwide production of lithium ion batteries to meet demand for its target of half a million cars in the second half of the decade.
MURMANSK –Vladimir Potanin, chairman of the giant and notoriously polluting Norilsk Nickel, has said his company’s biggest problem is environmental – and he knows how to fix it.
The company is looking stem sulfur dioxide emission that pollute Northwest Russia and Northern Norway by shutting down its nickel smelting facility in the Murmansk regional industrial town of Nikel.
In an interview to the business daily Vedomosti, Potanin said in order to transform Norilsk Nickel from a polluter into an example of ecological cleanliness, he’s willing to spend up to $14 million in a process that he says should take about seven years.
Company’s vice-president seeking $1.4 B from investors to continue deep mining operations in Sudbury
Glencore’s vice-president Peter Xavier says unless the company can raise $1.4 billion from investors, the life of its mining operations in Sudbury will end in 2021.
But in the face of “disruptive changes” from Asian exports — which Xavier estimates supply between one-third and a quarter of the world’s nickel — the company is trying to extend its presence by opening two new deep mining projects in the area.
And to mine deeper, the company needs to raise money. “The challenge for us in our future operations are at depth so you can imagine finding the time to find to develop, the challenge economically to bring those to a positive business case are getting more difficult,” Xavier said.
Feds say Twin Metals plan poses too big a risk to BWCA.
In a major victory for environmentalists, the federal government said it will not renew two mineral leases held by Twin Metals Minnesota, saying its proposed copper mine near Ely poses too great a risk of contaminating the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
“The Boundary Waters is a national treasure, special to the 150,000 who canoe, fish and recreate there each year, and is the economic life blood to local businesses that depend on a pristine natural resource,” U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in announcing the decision Thursday.
The ruling slams the brakes on one of two copper-nickel mines proposed for northern Minnesota, and is likely to intensify an emotional debate that pits the region’s storied mining industry against a rare and much-loved forest wilderness.
Vladimir Potanin makes an unlikely environmentalist. The Russian tycoon, worth $17 billion at last count, derives half his wealth from a mine operator that’s the biggest polluter in the nation’s dirtiest city.
The smelting of nickel and other metals from the mines pumped about 2 million metric tons of waste into Norilsk’s air as recently as 2013, eight times the level of Russia’s next most-polluted metropolis.
Yet if Potanin makes good on plans to spend billions of dollars on the largest modernization of MMC Norilsk Nickel PJSC since the Soviet era, he’ll have cut annual sulphur-dioxide emissions equal to the entire output of the toxic gas from Europe’s five biggest economies.
Norman West, located north of Capreol, is Glencore’s current pearl in the oyster in the Sudbury area, city councillors were told Tuesday.
“We got a pretty significant hit there last year and we’ve been following up ever since, and it’s looking more promising by the day,” said Peter Xavier, vice president of Sudbury Integrated Nickel Operations. “There’s still quite a bit of drilling to do from surface before we get to the next step.”
While the local operations are solid, Xavier did point out a few challenges the company faces. For example, low nickel prices and high hydro costs, as well as regulatory uncertainty around climate change and emissions can cause headaches.
