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Rare Earth Metals Electrified by China’s Illegal Mining Clean-Up (Bloomberg News – September 7, 2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Rare earths are booming again as a clampdown on wildcat miners in China crimps supply in the world’s biggest producer while the clean energy boom bolsters their use in everything from electric vehicles to wind turbines.

Prices for “light” rare earths including neodymium and praseodymium have exploded in recent months as traders and consumers snap up material that’s becoming scarcer. China’s shutting down illegal producers as the industry is swept up in the same kind of government clampdowns that have shaken other metals markets in 2017. Among many other applications, the elements are needed to make magnets used in motors and turbines.

“The prices of light rare earths still have upside for the longer term,” Alice Mu, a Beijing-based analyst at researcher Argus Metals, said via Wechat message. “There are shortages emerging from the supply side as China’s government shuts down illegal mines, purchases for state reserves, and implements tighter environmental policies.”

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Game-changing mine bill pits environmental groups, business interests against each other – by Lee Bergquist (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – September 9, 2017)

http://www.jsonline.com/

Ladysmith – During its four years of operation, the Flambeau Mine produced copper, gold and silver from a deposit that was relatively small, but rich. It closed in 1997, the last mine of its kind to operate in Wisconsin. That could soon change.

In a major policy shift for the state, a bill by Republican lawmakers would strike down restrictions on such mining, ushering in a new era of mineral exploration. The legislation is sparking a sharp political fight between environmental groups and business interests.

Environmentalists are highlighting the perils of mining rock from sulfide deposits, which have a history of leaching acidic material and polluting water. For months, they have anticipated the legislation and used their websites, social media and other forums to criticize changes in the law.

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Mining company plans to buy northern Maine mountain – by Kevin Miller (Portland Press Herald – Septemver 8, 2017)

http://www.pressherald.com/

Ontario-based Wolfden Resources Corp.’s plan to purchase Pickett Mountain, which is located north of Patten, comes three months after lawmakers passed a sweeping overhaul of Maine’s mining regulations.

AUGUSTA — A Canadian mining company plans to buy nearly 7,000 acres in northern Maine to explore for deposits of copper, silver and other minerals in what could be the first major mining project since lawmakers overhauled state environmental regulations.

Wolfden Resources Corp., which is based in Thunder Bay, Ontario, announced Thursday a purchase-and-sale agreement to buy the 6,871 acres of timberland and accompanying mineral rights on Pickett Mountain for $8.5 million. Located north of Patten along the border of Penobscot and Aroostook counties, Pickett Mountain was first listed as the site of a sizable mineral ore deposit – known as the “Mount Chase deposit” – nearly 40 years ago but has never been mined commercially.

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The Australian companies mining $40 billion out of Africa – by Eryk Bagshaw (Sydney Morning Herald – September 10, 2017)

http://www.smh.com.au/

Francina Nkosi chose to live in Lephalale because of the farmland. There was enough space to raise her daughter and as many women as there were men, a rarity in parts of the Limpopo province of South Africa. A year later, in 2007, the Medupi power station set up shop. It brought with it men, lots of them, some carrying HIV, others with wallets full of their living away from home allowance.

Prostitution followed, the town closest to the power station became famous for having the most expensive sex workers in the country. Teenage pregnancy came next. Now there’s two men for every woman in Lephalale. Nkosi worries there is more to come.

In 2011, an Australian company, Resgen, followed the power station into town. Residents claim it promised a school, water and industry, in return for a mine that would eventually produce 6.4 billion tonnes of coal.

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Going to school…underground: NORCAT research mine and simulators give students much-needed training for all aspects of the mining industry – by Karen McKinley (Northern Ontario Business – September 7, 2017)

https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/

With the Sudbury basin being a hub for mining technology, training people underground with real equipment would seem like a given. That isn’t always the case, but there is one place in the Sudbury basin with a unique distinction of being a training and testing mine.

NORCAT’s Underground Centre gives entrepreneurs and tech companies a laboratory to test their equipment, while also giving students a place to do real-world training and test theories.

Mining simulators by ThoroughTec at NORCAT on Maley Drive are also part of the training program, giving students more experience in everything from driving machines to tackling extreme scenarios like machine fires.

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UPDATE 4-Tanzania orders review of Petra Diamonds contract in mining crackdown – by Fumbuka Ng‘wanakilala (Reuters U.S. – September 7, 2017)

https://www.reuters.com/

DAR ES SALAAM, Sept 7 (Reuters) – Tanzanian President John Magufuli has ordered a review of a Petra Diamonds Ltd contract and asked senior public officials to resign over the outcome of an investigation into the mining sector, he said on Thursday.

One minister quit his post as requested, state-run television reported. The moves are the latest attempt by Magufuli to tighten control over the mining industry to boost government revenues and stamp out alleged corruption. “I have endorsed all the recommendations of the parliamentary probe committees for the review of the Williamson diamond mine contract,” Magufuli said in a televised broadcast.

London-listed Petra has a 75 percent stake in the mine, while the government owns the rest. The company’s shares fell as much as 3.5 percent, but had trimmed losses to trade down 1 percent at 90 pence by 1516 GMT.

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A Deadly Disease That Strikes Coal Miners Has Returned in Australia – by Perry Williams (Bloomberg News – September 8, 2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Claustrophobia never bothered Keith Stoddart as he sheared coal from the wall of a long, narrow and dusty tunnel hundreds of meters underground in northeastern Australia. Now, racked by a progressive, deadly lung disease, the 68-year-old gets panicked by pangs of shortness of breath.

His illness had been absent since the mid 1980s in Australia, the world’s top coal-exporting country. At least, that’s what records showed until May 2015, when mine-veterans like Stoddart began presenting in doctors’ rooms with an irreversible scourge from a bygone era: black lung disease.

Twenty-five cases of so-called coal workers’ pneumoconiosis have since been confirmed in Stoddart’s home state of Queensland, government records show. Many of them were missed by routine medical screening, and all of them point to weaknesses in modern mining technologies and dust controls that the government is now trying to fix.

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South African mining must be made globally competitive – Motsepe – by Martin Creamer (MiningWeekly.com – September 7, 2017)

http://www.miningweekly.com/

JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – All South Africans need to work together to ensure that the South African mining industry is a globally competitive investment destination, said African Rainbow Minerals (ARM) executive chairperson Patrice Motsepe on Thursday, when he declared the black-controlled company’s highest-ever dividend.

“We have a lot to be proud of and together we’ll make this industry the globally competitive industry that we want it to be,” Motsepe said at the company’s presentation of 204%-higher headline earnings to R3 196-million in the 12 months to June 30.

“As an industry, mining does not always get the respect and recognition that it deserves. A huge amount of truly world-class work is being done at huge sacrifice,” he said after declaring ARM’s 189%-higher dividend of 650c a share.

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Western Mining solves nickel mystery in Nigeria – by Paul Garvey (The Australian – September 8, 2017)

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

A year after revealing a Nigerian nickel discovery that looked too good to be true, former Western Mining Co chief Hugh Morgan believes his team has cracked the technical challenges presented by the mystery mineralisation.

Mr Morgan’s private company Comet Minerals has discovered what looks to be a vast and unique nickel deposit comprising an abundance of balls of almost pure nickel.

When he first unveiled the discovery at last year’s Africa Down Under conference, Mr Morgan was hopeful that separating the balls from the surrounding soil would be a relatively simple process.

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Underground expansion could extend Ekati mine life by 7 years, says new report – by Melinda Trochu (CBC News North – September 8, 2017)

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/

First diamond mine in the Northwest Territories could stay open until 2042

Further expansion of underground mining operations at the Ekati diamond mine could keep the mine in business until 2042, according to a preliminary economic assessment released by Dominion Diamond Corporation on Wednesday. Dominion operates the mine, and owns a controlling interest.

The Fox Deep project would expand the mine by developing an underground operation below the mined-out Fox open pit. It follows on the recently-approved Misery Deep project, which is already expected to expand the life of the mine from 2033 to 2035.

Tom Hoefer, executive director of the NWT & Nunavut Chamber of Mines, says Yellowknifers should be doing a happy dance. “A year ago we thought that Ekati had a life to 2021,” says Hoefer. “And so with their work on other pipes and now adding Fox in they’ve created a very exciting future for the N.W.T.’s mining industry.”

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State’s Abandoned Mine Lands program looks back on 30 years – by Adella Harding (Elko Daily Free Press – September 7, 2017)

http://elkodaily.com/

Thousands of potentially dangerous deserted mine workings from the past dot Nevada’s landscape, but the state’s Abandoned Mine Lands program has been securing these sites for 30 years, decreasing related accidents and fatalities.

Over the years, people have fallen into old mines or drowned in old pit lakes, but there have been no reported accidents at abandoned mines in more than three years, thanks in part to the program. “These aren’t playgrounds,” said Robert Ghiglieri, chief of the abandoned mines program for the Nevada Division of Minerals. “It’s not worth the risk to go into these.”

From 1961 to 2011, 20 people died in accidents at abandoned mine sites. The last fatality occurred March 2011, when a 28-year-old man fell 190 feet down a mine shaft in Pershing County. The last reported abandoned mine accident was in 2013, when a 17-year-old male incurred minor injuries in a fall down a 60-foot mine shaft in Lyon County.

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Merger of PotashCorp., Agrium slowed by regulatory hurdles – by Ian Bickis (Toronto Star – September 8, 2017)

https://www.thestar.com/

Canadian Press – CALGARY—The friendly merger of PotashCorp. and Agrium Inc. is now expected to close several months later than the previous target date due to concerns raised by regulatory bodies in four countries.

The two Canadian fertilizer producers say they have made progress on the approval process in all jurisdictions, but the deal likely won’t close until the end of the year, rather than midyear as originally expected.

When the deal was announced last September, it was estimated the combined company would have an enterprise value of $36 billion (U.S.) by joining PotashCorp’s extensive mining operations with Agrium’s mining and global retail network.

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Congo-Kinshasa: Resource-Rich DRC Losing U.S.$1.3 Billion Every Year in Unpaid Taxes – by James Anyanzwa (All Africa.com – September 8, 2017)

http://allafrica.com/

The Democratic Republic of Congo is losing up to $1.3 billion in revenue each year due to a failure by public bodies, tax agencies and the state mining firm Gécamines to remit levies, and the pillage of revenue in suspicious deals.

The DRC tops the list of African countries whose resources are being plundered. Zimbabwe, Mauritania, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Sudan and Eritrea have also featured in the complex corruption web in the production and sale of commercial crude oil, natural gas and minerals amounting to trillions of dollars in revenue.

Investigations by London-based lobby Global Witness have found more than $750 million of DRC’s revenue earned from mining went missing between 2013 and 2015, as the Kinshasa administration struggled with providing public services to the people.

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Pop open a can to toast — the aluminum can – by Tim Philp (Brantford Expositor – September 7, 2017)

http://www.brantfordexpositor.ca/

We live in a highly engineered world. Virtually everything that we touch has been engineered to be the best it can be for its purpose. Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than the ubiquitous pop can. These marvels of engineering science seem to be such simple devices.

We produce, by one estimate, about 200 billion of such cans every year. That is about 6,700 cans per second. If you placed these cans end to end, you would produce enough to circle the globe in a mere 17 hours. Aluminum cans use about 2.8 billion kilos of aluminum out of a total world production of about 10,680 billion kilograms. So, it is a small — but significant — fraction of the total production.

Aluminum is also one of the most recycled materials on Earth, which is a good thing because aluminum takes a great deal of energy to produce. In terms of energy requirements to mine aluminum, to make four cans requires the equivalent energy of filling one of those cans with gasoline.

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We’re Going to Need More Lithium – by Jessica Shankleman, Tom Biesheuvel, Joe Ryan, and Dave Merrill (Bloomberg News – September 7, 2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

There’s plenty in the ground to meet the needs of an electric car future, but not enough mines.

Starting about two years ago, fears of a lithium shortage almost tripled prices for the metal, to more than $20,000 a ton, in just 10 months. The cause was a spike in the market for electric vehicles, which were suddenly competing with laptops and smartphones for lithium ion batteries.

Demand for the metal won’t slacken anytime soon—on the contrary, electric car production is expected to increase more than thirtyfold by 2030, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Rest assured, Earth has the lithium. The next dozen years will drain less than 1 percent of the reserves in the ground, BNEF says. But battery makers are going to need more mines to support their production, and they’ll have to build them much more quickly than anyone thought.

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