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Greening up mine tailings with municipal waste: Terrapure Environmental brings award-winning solution to Sudbury – by Colleen Romaniuk (Northern Ontario Business – October 15, 2019)

https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/

Terrapure Environmental and Vale Canada have now won so many awards for their innovative mine tailings rehabilitation project that their team members have almost lost count.

The Burlington-based advanced waste management and field services company broke ground when they approached Vale’s Sudbury Operations in 2012 with an idea to solve a municipal and mining problem.

They wanted to apply treated biosolids to Vale’s Central Tailings Area in Copper Cliff for reclamation and revegetation. The result of the discussion was a wildly successful collaboration. Last May, both companies jointly won an Environmental Leader Award for Project of the Year. By June, they took home a Tom Peters Memorial Mine Reclamation Award, among others.

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Indonesia state miner agrees to buy 20% stake in Vale Indonesia (Reuters U.S. – October 13, 2019)

https://www.reuters.com/

JAKARTA (Reuters) – Mining Industry Indonesia, the state miner formerly known as PT Inalum, said on Monday it has signed an initial agreement to buy a 20% stake in nickel miner PT Vale Indonesia (INCO.JK) for an undisclosed sum.

The planned sale was flagged by the Indonesian government last week as Vale Indonesia seeks to comply with rules that require foreign controlled miners to reduce their ownership to 49% or below within 10 years of starting operations.

Vale Indonesia is currently around 59% owned by Brazil’s Vale SA (VALE3.SA) and around 20% by Japan’s Sumitomo Metal Mining Co Ltd.

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Fortescue confirms bid for vast Simandou iron ore deposit – by Cecilia Jamasmie (Mining.com – October 7, 2019)

https://www.mining.com/

Australia’s Fortescue Metals Group (ASX:FMG) has confirmed its interest in a slice of the giant Simandou iron ore deposit, handed back this year to the Guinean government by billionaire Beny Steinmetz’s BSG Resources.

The committee in charge of an international tender for the project’s blocks 1 and 2, launched in mid-July, should come to a final decision in November, sources close to the matter told Reuters.

Both the consortium of Société Miniere de Boke (SMB) and Singapore’s Winning, which is Guinea’s biggest bauxite exporter, have already acknowledged they submitted an offer. Brazil’s Vale (NYSE: VALE), the world’s largest producer of iron ore, is also said to have paid for documents needed to submit an offer, but decided not to do so.

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UPDATE 1-Indonesia govt appoints Inalum to buy stake in Vale Indonesia -official (Reuters U.K. – October 7, 2019)

https://uk.reuters.com/

JAKARTA, Oct 7 (Reuters) – Indonesia’s government has appointed state miner PT Inalum to purchase a stake that PT Vale Indonesia intends to sell, the Director General of Coal and Minerals, Bambang Gatot Ariyono, said on Monday.

Vale, one of Indonesia’s largest nickel miners, is set to divest around 20% of its stake to local investor to meet new regulations aimed at limiting foreign ownership of its mining resources.

The company had said it aims to conduct the stake sale in October.

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Vale’s digital evolution takes shape: Sudbury nickel miner moving to world’s largest underground wireless network – by Len Gillis (Northern Ontario Business – September 19, 2019)

https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/

Vale Canada Ltd. is charging forward to provide LTE communications in its Canadian underground mining operations. In some cases, this will be an all new level of wireless communication, while in other cases it will mean switching away from existing Wi-Fi.

Vale said this means the company will soon be operating the largest privately owned underground LTE network in the world. LTE, or long-term evolution, is a higher form of wireless communications that most people associate with their cellular phones. In the mines, LTE will support a host of wireless devices and live connections to people and mobile equipment.

Vale described their new LTE system as an enabler, something that will allow the company to carry out significant changes for integrated operations scheduling, autonomous and tele-remote mining machines and huge efficiencies and cost savings for underground mine ventilation systems.

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Vale to restart Onça Puma nickel complex – by Cecilia Jamasmie (Mining.com – September 24, 2019)

https://www.mining.com/

Brazil’s Vale (NYSE: VALE) has begun working on resuming operations at its $3 billion Onça Puma nickel mining complex, as the country’s Supreme Court suspended injunctions against the miner earlier this month.

Nickel mining at Onça Puma, in Brazil’s northern Pará state, has been halted since September 2017 as the company failed to undergo a requested environmental impact on local indigenous communities affected by pollution caused by the mine.

The complex, which also had to suspend nickel processing in June this year, produced a record 7,100 tonnes of nickel in the third quarter of 2017, up 29% compared with the prior three-month period and up 7.6% from the third quarter of 2016, Vale said at the time.

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After Dumping Vale, Church of England Says Miner Has ‘Way to Go’ – by Isis Almeida and Sabrina Valle (Bloomberg News – September 24, 2019)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

The Church of England has dumped Vale SA, and it doesn’t look like the Brazilian miner will make it back into the good books any time soon.

The church sold its shares in Vale after a tailings dam collapse in January killed at least 249 people in the Brazilian town of Brumadinho. It has also blocked investments in the miner through an ethical exclusion process, according to Adam Matthews, director of ethics and engagement at the church’s pension board.

There’s a “long way to go” before the church is ready to backtrack, he said by phone before the Financial Times Commodities Americas Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where he is scheduled to speak.

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Vale misled public on dangerous dams, prompting Brazil probe: source – by Marta Nogueira, Jake Spring and Christian Plumb (Reuters Canada – September 17, 2019)

https://ca.reuters.com/

RIO DE JANEIRO/BRASILIA/SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Faced with public outrage after its second mining dam collapse in four years killed at least 240 people in Brazil, Vale SA misrepresented what it had done to shut down its riskiest dams, a review of the company’s statements shows.

Fabio Schvartsman, Vale’s then-chief executive, said at a nationally broadcast news conference days after the dam burst in late January that the company had already decommissioned nine “upstream dams” in the wake of a 2015 disaster involving the same type of structure, and planned to dismantle 10 more over the next few years. The company repeated the claim in a statement on its website.

Reuters asked Vale for details on these moves on February 5, seven days after Schvartsman’s news conference. In March, some five weeks later, Vale gave Reuters a list of nine dams that it said it had closed since 2014, a year before the Mariana disaster.

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Global mining panel looks to boost accountability after Brazil disaster – by Christian Plumb (Reuters U.S. – September 11, 2019)

https://www.reuters.com/

BELO HORIZONTE, Brazil (Reuters) – New safety standards being drawn up by a global mining industry panel will include rules to better define management accountability after Vale SA’s (VALE3.SA) January tailings dam disaster, a top industry official said on Wednesday.

The governance standards would help ensure independent reviews of dams and adequate disclosure of risks, said Tom Butler, president of the International Council on Mining and Metals.

“The engineers know what they’re doing with these things but the implementation and the management and the change management, that all involves humans,” Butler told Reuters in an interview in Brazil.

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Nickel Ore Export Ban Is Good for Indonesia: Vale – by Nur Yasmin (Jakarta Globe – August 27, 2019)

https://jakartaglobe.id/

Jakarta. Vale Indonesia, the country’s largest nickel producer, said the government’s planned ore export ban will give the country a strategic advantage and bring positive impact to the local nickel industry and the Indonesian economy in the long term.

The government now wants the ban to start taking effect in October, three years earlier than the initial plan’s 2022 target.

The Indonesian Nickel Mining Association has voiced their objection to the plan, saying that it would disrupt their members’ contractual obligations and business plans.

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Voisey’s Bay underground development hits 10% completion (CBC News Newfoundland and Labrador – August 28, 2019)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/

Workers staying on floating hotel while work on new living quarters underway

The quest to mine nickel from beneath the ground at Voisey’s Bay in Labrador is picking up steam with more than 430 workers on site. Joao Zanon, the project director for Vale, said the team ran into challenges in the early stages of the project during the harsh northern Labrador winter.

Once the snow melted and summer arrived, the project ramped up. A little over 10 per cent of the underground development is now complete, with a goal to be operational in the first half of 2020.

“We’ve picked up the development quite a lot in the past months and the speed will continue to increase as we … are able to mobilize more people to work underground,” Zanon said.

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Gold rush-era rules to stop mining pollution are still in use – but they’re failing – by Susan Lawrence and Peter Davies (The Conversation – August 14, 2019)

https://theconversation.com/

Bento Rodrigues, Brazil, 6 November 2015

Wet, orange mud covers everything: streets, houses, cars, animals, trees, fields. The violent force of a torrent of mud has overturned cars and left them hovering on top of buildings. It has torn the roofs off houses and pushed over their walls.

The view of the town from helicopters flying above reveals a desolate landscape: sludge-caked animals struggle to free themselves, and rescue teams search desperately for survivors. Mud dyes the river orange for hundreds of kilometres downstream, and two weeks later it will flow out into the Atlantic in an expanding orange stain.

This devastation is the result of the catastrophic failure of a tailings dam: a vast settling pond built to store the muddy waste from Samarco’s Germano iron ore mine.

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A dam collapse in Brazil has some worried about PolyMet’s plans. Why the DNR says it won’t happen here – by Walker Orenstein (MinnPost.com – August 13, 2019)

https://www.minnpost.com/

In January, the tailings dam at a Brazilian iron ore mine collapsed, killing nearly 250 people. The wave of toxic waste and mud also wrecked two dozen buildings and polluted water for five miles.

In Minnesota, the disaster raised eyebrows among opponents of a copper-nickel mine planned near Hoyt Lakes. That’s because the design of the dam in Brumadinho was similar to one PolyMet Mining hopes to build. In fact, the Vale mining company had used a method to judge dam safety created by a PolyMet adviser.

And the tragedy in Brazil embodied the worst fears of some Minnesota environmental activists and the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, who warn PolyMet could pollute the St. Louis River.

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Brazil’s Vale dam disasters trigger $2 billion in fresh writedowns – by Christian Plumb (Reuters U.S. – July 31, 2019)

https://www.reuters.com/

SAO PAULO (Reuters) – Brazilian miner Vale SA (VALE3.SA) on Wednesday said it swung to a quarterly loss as the company announced more than $2 billion in fresh writedowns related to two deadly dam bursts suffered by the company over a period of less than four years.

In late January, the collapse of a Vale tailings dam storing muddy mining waste near the town of Brumadinho killed nearly 250 people, less than four years after a deadly disaster at the company’s Samarco joint venture with BHP Group (BHP.AX).

The world’s largest iron ore exporter has since been grappling with the fallout, which has forced it to shake up its board, replace its CEO and made it the target of various criminal and regulatory probes.

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Rio Tinto to take iron ore crown as Vale struggles – by Peter Ker (Australian Financial Review – July 23, 2019)

https://www.afr.com/

Rio Tinto is on track to become the world’s biggest iron ore exporter in 2019 after trouble-prone Brazilian miner Vale revealed weaker-than-expected exports over the past three months.

The surprisingly weak performance from Vale came as African iron ore miner Kumba joined the industry trend for reduced export targets, and as Vale reiterated that it could be three years before it resumed shipping at full speed.

Vale was always expected to ship less iron ore this year after the catastrophic dam failures in January that killed hundreds of people and forced the company to halt about 90 million tonnes of annual production capacity.

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