Republic of Mining

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

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.”

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

September 8, 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.

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

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.

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)

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.

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

September 8, 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.

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

September 8, 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.

The Return of Gold Fever – by Roger Lemoyne (The Walrus – January 12, 2011)

September 8, 2017

https://thewalrus.ca/

One of Canada’s pre-eminent photojournalists explores one of man’s oldest obsessions in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon

We’ve all heard tales of the men who followed the lure of gold into harsh wilderness, turning over the land with brute force, often finding little more than the community of fellow dreamers. Legendary gold rushes took place in California, Victoria, and the Klondike in the second half of the nineteenth century, right around the time the camera was invented.

But while portrait photography caught on quickly in cities, hauling giant glass plates into the bush was next to impossible, so the gold rush phenomenon went almost completely undocumented visually. Not until the advent of hand-held cameras like the Leica could photographers portray stories unfolding in remote locations—which is exactly what Sebastião Salgado did when the Serra Pelada gold rush broke out deep in the Brazilian Amazon, circa 1980.

When I was starting out in photography, Salgado was king. He had taken the “concerned photographer” mission global, producing massive books on broad social themes, with an unprecedented combination of artistry and salesmanship. His Serra Pelada—black and white shots of some 80,000 mud-caked miners—was an account of epic, almost biblical human undertaking.

Move more civil service jobs out of Toronto – it worked in Peterborough – by Rosemary Ganley (Peterborough Examiner – August 31, 2017)

September 8, 2017

http://www.thepeterboroughexaminer.com/

Coming back from a Northern Ontario Business conference one day in 1986, Premier David Peterson asked his fellow passengers, including me, in the government aircraft: “Is there anything tangible that we can do to help northern and other regional communities that are suffering economically?”

I was at the time deputy minister of Northern Development and Mines and I said, “We could help them by transferring a lot of government jobs out of Toronto, which is booming, and into places that need them.” This prompted a series of meetings with him and senior Queen’s Park staff, the result of which was a decision to proceed with a number of transfers, including my ministry (to Sudbury).

Two years later I had moved to the Ministry of Natural Resources. I was informed that the MNR head office was also to be transferred and we should decide quickly on our preferred destination. The following day, my executives and I selected Peterborough and our recommendation went to the Premier and cabinet.

Lost resource opportunities mean higher taxes – by Colin Craig (Toronto Sun – September 7, 2017)

September 7, 2017

http://www.torontosun.com/

But it’s not just the oil and gas sector that is constantly being obstructed.
Ontario’s “ring of fire” – an immense mining opportunity in northern Ontario
– has yet to ignite and the massive Site C hydro dam in B.C. is facing
opposition from the province’s new government. In 2016, the Financial Post
identified “35 projects worth $129 billion, that have been stalled or cancelled
due to opposition from environmental, aboriginal and/or community groups.”

Every Canadian should reflect on four words Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin recently shared at a conference in Banff. After describing how she had heard about several oil and gas companies cancelling their multi-billion dollar projects in Canada, Fallin quipped – “opportunity here, opportunity there.”

The inference was that she could approach those companies and try to convince them to invest in her flourishing oil and gas state. Fallin of course wants the thousands of jobs those companies would bring, the billions in tax revenues they would pay and all the other positive spinoff effects.

So why is Canada letting all those jobs, and the billions of tax dollars they would contribute, slip between our fingers?

Brookfield Prepared to Exit Palladium Stake as Metal Soars – by Danielle Bochove (Bloomberg News – September 7, 2017)

September 7, 2017

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Brookfield Asset Management Inc. is laying the groundwork for the possible sale of one of the world’s only dedicated palladium companies even as prices for the metal used in car pollution control devices soar.

Canada’s largest alternative asset manager is the majority owner of North American Palladium Ltd., whose main asset is a mine near Thunder Bay, Ontario with reserves of 21 million metric tons. Brookfield’s involvement began in 2013 when the company almost collapsed amid a poorly conceived expansion.

What began as a $130 million loan became a 92 percent equity stake after the company’s situation deteriorated further and it failed to find a buyer. Since then, North American Palladium has redesigned the asset and managed to post its first quarterly profit in six years as prices of the precious metal rallied.

Gold, greed and garimpeiros: Corruption allegations roil failed venture at Brazil’s most notorious mine – by Matt Sandy (Al Jazeera America – July 21, 2015)

September 7, 2017

http://projects.aljazeera.com/

Standing on the steps of her pale blue wooden shack overlooking one of the world’s most notorious gold mines, Maria Rita Ferreira Rodrigues was so incensed she could not stop shouting.

The 58-year-old said she had lived in this house in Serra Pelada for 28 years, since it was a gold-rush town of violence, greed and intrigue amid the vestiges of the rain forest. But she had never seen anything like this.

“They humiliated us and treated us with contempt,” she said in February of the Canadian energy company Colossus Minerals, which spent $300 million over the past eight years trying to reopen the mine. “Everyone powerful here was bought by Colossus. There was not one judge, police chief or prosecutor on our side.”

The hell of Serra Pelada mines, 1980s (Rare Historical Photos – February 24, 2016)

September 7, 2017

Serra Pelada, Brazil – Sebastião Salgado Wiki Photo

http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/

Serra Pelada was a large gold mine in Brazil 430 kilometres (270 mi) south of the mouth of the Amazon River. In 1979 a local child swimming on the banks of a local river found a 6 grams (0.21 oz) nugget of gold. Soon word leaked out and by the end of the week a gold rush had started. During the early 1980s, tens of thousands of prospectors flocked to the Serra Pelada site, which at its peak was said to be not only the largest open-air gold mine in the world, but also the most violent.

At first the only way to get to the remote site was by plane or foot. Miners would often pay exorbitant prices to have taxis drive them from the nearest town to the end of a dirt track; from there, they would walk the remaining distance—some 15 kilometers (9.3 mi) to the site.

Huge nuggets were quickly discovered, the biggest weighing nearly 6.8 kilograms (15 lb), $108,000 at the 1980 market price ( now $ 310,173 in 2016). During the peak of the gold rush the mine was known for appalling conditions and violence, whilst the town that grew up beside it was notorious for both murder and prostitution.

Indonesia and Freeport end their squabble over Papua mine – by Erwida Maulia and Wataru Suzuki (Nikkei Asian Review – September 7, 2017)

September 7, 2017

https://asia.nikkei.com/

JAKARTA The chief executive of U.S. mining company Freeport-McMoRan and two Indonesian ministers publicly declared on Aug. 29 an end to an acrimonious dispute over a giant copper mine in Papua that has raged for months.

The deal is seen as a testament to Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s resolve to balance foreign investment with national interests. CEO Richard Adkerson told a press conference that Freeport has agreed to relinquish a majority stake in its subsidiary, Freeport Indonesia, to local interests in exchange for extending the Papua mining contract by 20 years to 2041.

Dressed in a traditional batik shirt, Adkerson cut a very different figure to his last public appearance in Jakarta in February, when he wore a black suit and threatened the government with arbitration.

Nunavut Planning Commission gets started on Mary River expansion – by Jim Bell (Nunatsiaq News – September 6, 2017)

September 7, 2017

http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/

After nearly three years, Baffinland’s Phase 2 scheme starts moving through the Nunavut regulatory system

Nearly three years after Baffinland Iron Mines Corp. first proposed its Phase 2 expansion plan for the Mary River iron mine, an updated version of the project will finally start moving through Nunavut’s regulatory system.

And more than two years after Bernard Valcourt, then the Conservative minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs, exempted the first version of the scheme from the scrutiny of the Nunavut Planning Commission, the NPC will get to look at it after all.

The planning commission, in a public notice issued Aug. 31, now seeks comment from governments, organizations and individuals on an application from Baffinland to change the North Baffin Regional Land Use Plan to allow for a 110-kilometre railway between Mary River and Milne Inlet, and for winter sealifts during the months of December, January and February.

Aroland anxious for ‘gateway’ role in Ring of Fire – by Carl Clutchey (Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal – September 7, 2017)

September 7, 2017

http://www.chroniclejournal.com/

As efforts continue to obtain unanimous indigenous consent for two major access roads into Northern Ontario’s Ring of Fire mining belt, at least one First Nation is sounding reassured that its interests are being met.

Aroland First Nation Chief Dorothy Towedo said Wednesday the province has agreed to work with the band and fulfil its goal of becoming the Ring of Fire’s “gateway.” “Ontario is now clear,” Towedo said in a news release. “It is committed to working with Aroland and other First Nations for planning potential mining and related infrastructure developments.”

She added: “This commitment is a necessary part of obtaining consent.” Towedo said her community, located adjacent to an existing provincial highway near Nakina, felt assured after receiving a supportive letter from Northern Development and Mines Minister Michael Gravelle.