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Jim Pattison warns B.C. to stand down on threat of thermal coal levy – by Brent Jang (Globe and Mail – June 28, 2017)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

VANCOUVER — B.C. billionaire Jim Pattison, the largest shareholder in a coal-exporting site in British Columbia, has a message for Victoria – keep your hands off thermal coal shipped from Westshore Terminals Investment Corp.

The BC Liberal government, which wants to impose a hefty carbon levy on thermal coal exports from B.C. ports, might be toppled as early as Thursday by an alliance of the BC NDP and Greens. The Greens support such a carbon tax, though BC NDP Leader John Horgan hasn’t made it a top political priority.

Industry observers say Mr. Horgan, should he become B.C. premier, is unlikely to act as swiftly on thermal coal as Premier Christy Clark pledged to do during the campaign for the May 9 provincial election. But Westshore still faces the political threat of a clampdown on thermal coal, which is used by power plants to generate electricity.

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Greenpeace mobilizes the literary elite in its fake ‘free speech’ defence against Resolute – by Peter Foster (Financial Post – June 28, 2017)

http://business.financialpost.com/

Montreal-based Resolute Forest Products has distinguished itself in the corporate community by being prepared to take on the lies and intimidation tactics of radical environmental juggernaut Greenpeace, but the price is having to suffer repeated low blows and threats to its business.

The latest came when Greenpeace pressured Arnaud Nourry, the head of Paris-based publishing giant Hachette, a major Resolute customer, to write a letter that appeared to threaten Hachette’s business with Resolute.

Greenpeace has for years been fundraising by harassing Resolute as a “Forest Destroyer.” Four years ago, Resolute CEO Richard Garneau threw away the usual playbook of corporate appeasement and sued Greenpeace for malicious defamation. Last year he upped the ante by bringing a suit against Greenpeace in the U.S. under RICO racketeering laws.

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Mine boy tended mules underground – by Bill White (The Morning Call – June 28, 2017)

http://www.mcall.com/

I have a great little coal mine story to share, and while I’m at it, I’ll include some of the other reminiscences and other reactions to my latest coal cracker columns. Just to review, I wrote Sunday about my tour of the No. 9 Coal Mine and Museum in Lansford and the week before about the Lehigh Anthracite surface mining operation in Tamaqua. Previous columns have featured people’s memories about life in the mines and in the coal region.

I got this first story over the phone, but I’ll repeat it more or less in the words of the caller, Robert Weed, 87, of Bethlehem, who got his only coal-mining experience in the Hudson Coal Co. mine in Peckville, Lackawanna County.

“I was 7 going on 8 years of age, and I desperately wanted a bicycle,” he said. “My father worked for the Hudson Coal Co. up in the Scranton-Wilkes Barre area, and he found me a job so I could earn money to buy a bicycle. “I went for nine months, I believe. At 5:15 in the morning, I rode the tram with the mine superintendent, I believe 180 feet underground. [The superintendent was there to walk the mine with a canary in a cage to check for methane gas.]

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Iron Ore Gets a Break—But This Hedge Fund Says It’s Going Lower – by Jasmine Ng (Bloomberg News – June 29, 2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Iron ore’s finally catching a break with a jump back into a bull market. But don’t bank on the recovery lasting through to the year-end, according to Academia Capital, a commodities and emerging markets-focused hedge fund, which warns that fundamentals will probably deteriorate.

“I expect iron ore prices to end the year lower, but that the market is vulnerable to a short-covering rally before we get there,” Ivan Szpakowski, chief investment officer at the fund, said in an email. “Iron ore supply and demand is likely to worsen in the second half.”

The raw material is closing out what’s been a bruising quarter on a very strong note, with spot prices climbing back into the $60s a metric ton and reaching the highest in eight weeks.

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BHP says work on Jansen mine moving ahead – by Ashley Robinson (Regina Leader-Post – June 28, 2017)

http://leaderpost.com/

Giles Hellyer is optimistic about the multi-billion-dollar Jansen potash mine project. The BHP president, Potash Canada, presented an update Wednesday during a Regina & District Chamber of Commerce luncheon.

Located about 140 kilometres east of Saskatoon, the massive Jansen project has experienced significant delays, but Hellyer stressed during the luncheon that plans and work on the mine are progressing.

Last month, BHP CEO Andrew Mackenzie told a conference in Barcelona that the mine’s first phase could go to the Melbourne-based company’s board of directors for approval next summer and be operational in 2023.

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Canada’s Gabriel Resources sues Romania for a record C$5.7bn – by Henry Lazenby (MiningWeekly.com – June 29, 2017)

http://www.miningweekly.com/

VANCOUVER (miningweekly.com) – Canadian project developer Gabriel Resources is suing Romania for a record C$5.7-billion before the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), the TSX-listed company revealed on Thursday.

The company hopes to tie up a drawn out dispute with the country’s fluid government, based on what it argues boils down to the effective expropriation, without compensation, of its flagship Roşia Montană gold/silver project – the largest undeveloped gold deposit in Europe and among the top 20 undeveloped gold projects globally.

“The ICSID arbitration seeks compensation for the loss and damage resulting from the Romanian State’s wrongful conduct and its breaches of protections against expropriation as set out under bilateral treaties, as well as its unfair and inequitable treatment and discrimination of the project and related licences,” Gabriel president and CEO Jonathan Henry told Mining Weekly Online.

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Amazon’s billion dollar gold rush leaves trail of toxins – by Chris Arsenault and Karla Mendes (Reuters U.S. – June 29, 2017)

https://www.reuters.com/

PORTO VELHO, Brazil/GUAYARAMERÍN, Bolivia (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Holding a plastic bottle of toxic mercury with his bare hands on an illegal gold mining barge in the Amazon basin, the 22-year-old miner says he is well aware of the dangers of the job.

In shorts and sandals, he lights a blow torch, training a blue flame on a piece of ore which his barge dredged up from the bottom of the Madeira River in Brazil’s northwestern Rondonia state, on the border with Bolivia.

Hundreds of similar barges – fashioned from plywood and metal and powered by roaring diesel motors – troll the rivers of the world’s largest rainforest leaving trails of destruction in their wake, according to government officials.

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NEWS RELEASE: SIXTY-SIX COUNTRIES STRUGGLING WITH GOVERNANCE OF OIL, GAS AND MINING SECTORS

http://www.resourcegovernanceindex.org/

New index shows promise in some developing countries, but raises alarms over sovereign wealth funds and citizens’ freedom to hold governments to account

LONDON, 28 June 2017—The majority of governments inadequately govern their oil, gas and mining sectors, according to the 2017 Resource Governance Index. Sixty-six countries were found to be weak, poor or failing in their governance of extractive industries. Less than 20 percent of the 81 countries assessed achieved good or satisfactory overall ratings.

The cross-country study of extractives governance, released today by the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), is the most comprehensive of its kind to date. It is based on new research into how countries’ governance affects their potential to realize value and manage revenues from their resources. It also incorporates existing assessments of countries’ “enabling environments”—a measure of how well citizens can access and use information, freely work together to voice their concerns and hold their governments to account, and of the quality of institutions in the areas of administration, rule of law and corruption control.

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Put Down the IPhone and Appreciate Its Genius – by Tyler Cowen (Bloomberg News – June 28, 2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Apple changed mining, and manufacturing, and the way we wait in lines. And made the music we listen to poorer.

Ten years after the introduction of Apple Inc.’s iPhone, and the broader category of smartphones, it’s worth stepping back to see what we have learned. As with most major technological innovations, it’s brought a number of collateral surprises about the rest of our world.

First, we’ve learned that, even in this age of bits and bytes, materials innovation still matters. The iPhone is behind the scenes a triumph of mining science, with a wide variety of raw materials and about 34 billion kilograms (75 billion pounds) of mined rock as an input to date, as discussed by Brian Merchant in his new and excellent book “The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone.” A single iPhone has behind it the production of 34 kilos of gold ore, with 20.5 grams (0.72 ounces) of cyanide used to extract the most valuable parts of the gold.

Especially impressive as a material is the smooth touch-screen, and the user’s ability to make things happen by sliding, swiping, zooming and pinching it — the “multitouch” function.

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Glittering prize: The booming demand for opals – by Serena Solomon (BBC.com – June 29, 2017)

http://www.bbc.com/

Coober Pedy, South Australia – As the 40ft (12m) drill rattles down through the red dirt, miner Craig Stutley makes a statement that sounds a lot like what he said 30 minutes ago. “This is the hole,” says the 45-year-old. Mr Stutley’s mining partner, Richard Saunders, who seems eternally caked in dusty soil, mumbles in agreement.

The two men are standing in the middle of the sun-bleached South Australian outback, hunting for opals, the rare gemstones that can sparkle with a rainbow of different colours. They sift through the earth that the test drill pulls up, searching for signs of opals that could potentially make them a fortune.

With the largest, best-quality Australian opals worth more than £600,000 thanks to soaring demand from jewellers around the world, there is a vast amount of money to be – potentially – made. The trouble is that opals are so scarce. Even in designated opal fields, you need luck, and months, or even years, of patience to find them.

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99 Ways To Die In Mineral Exploration – by Rob McLeod (CEO.ca – June 15, 2017)

http://blog.ceo.ca/

I recently heard a great story about the safety culture that has permeated the mining industry over the past decade, with probably a bit of overkill within the major miners. At an alleged meeting between 50+ mining execs from each side of Newmont and Barrick in New York City, discussing a possible business combo, the Newmont chair of the meeting started it off with a safety share: “when walking the streets of New York, make sure you put your blackberries away, since you might step in to the street and get hit by a car”.

Getting struck and killed while walking and trolling Facebook is a risk that transects all industries, but particular to the mining industry, there are no shortage of ways to meet your maker in mining or exploration. Oh, and the Newmont-Barrick merger didn’t happen!

A short list of hazards, in no particular order, include: helicopter or fixed wing crashes, rolling ATV’s, getting shot, avalanches, kidnapping, malaria and all manner of tropical diseases, freezing to death, boiling to death, mauled by a large carnivore, bitten by a small, poisonous critter, falling, or drowning.

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Rio Tinto shareholders okay $2.69 billion coal assets sale to China-backed Yancoal – by James Regan (Reuters U.S. – June 29, 2017)

https://www.reuters.com/

SYDNEY – Rio Tinto shareholders approved the sale of a suite of Australian coal assets to China-backed Yancoal Australia for $2.69 billion, ending a bidding war with commodities trader Glencore.

The sale was approved by 97 percent of shareholders of Rio Tinto’s UK and Australian-listed shares, Rio Tinto said on Thursday in a statement to the Australian stock exchange.

Rio Tinto Chairman Jan du Plessis said funds from the sale had yet to be allocated within the company amid some calls by shareholders to use the money to boost dividends or buy back shares.

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Chile’s miners eye expansion, but wait until political uncertainty lifts – by Fabian Cambero (Reuters U.S. – June 28, 2017)

https://www.reuters.com/

Mining companies operating in Chile are examining restarting projects that were put on hold in recent years due to a copper price slump, the mining minister and industry executives said, though final investment decisions will wait until political uncertainty lifts after the November presidential elections.

The price of copper, by far Chile’s most important export, started to slowly recover in October, after years of weak demand for the red metal. So far in 2017, prices have risen 7 percent, and analysts expect further increases as the copper market moves toward a deficit.

That, in turn, is causing miners to slowly examine projects put on the back burner years ago when prices begin to slide from historic 2011 highs. “One perceives more movement from the projects that were, one way or another, delayed by price,” Chilean Mining Minister Aurora Williams told Reuters in a recent interview.

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[Minnesota Iron Range] OUR VIEWS: ENOUGH ALREADY: IT ENDS IN VIRGINIA (Mesabi Daily News Editorial – June 28, 2017)

http://www.virginiamn.com/

Make no mistake about it, the Iron Range knows this is an attack on mining and
it will have no more of it. The region and its miners, laborers, businesses,
residents — everyone here — is committed to meeting and exceeding the standards
of the federal government’s environmental reviews. We are not here to destroy
the land we use everyday.

We have a deep pride in our history of mining. We helped the United States win
wars over dictators, the iron ore leaving here by train helps fuel the economy
of Duluth and Two Harbors. It builds safe, reliable infrastructure from U.S.-made
steel, and the minerals this region wants to mine will provide for the tech boom
in Silicon Valley. (Mesabi Daily News Editorial)

The Iron Range and its rich history of mining is in a fight for its future, and the deck is stacked against it.

There’s overreaching actions taken by a lame duck administration, there’s delays forced by lawsuit after lawsuit from deep-pocketed environmental groups, and there’s scare tactics to steer popular opinion against the region’s way of life. Enough is enough: It ends here. It started here, and the fight will end here.

The Iron Range is done being paraded around in the three-ring circus of hearings, resolutions and comment periods, which are really nothing more than putting the everyday Iron Ranger on trial by a jury of its uniformed peers.

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CLIFFS SHOWS IT’S FOR REAL – by Jerry Burnes (Mesabi Daily News – June 28, 2017)

http://www.virginiamn.com/

Lourenco Goncalves isn’t one for the quiet retreat, but anyone within shouting distance of the Iron Range already knew that. The chairman, president and CEO of Cleveland-based Cliffs Natural Resources is a dying breed. As the alpha CEO becomes a thing of the past — replaced by the more unimposing figures crafted by Silicon Valley — Goncalves remains a thunderous presence atop one the Iron Range’s most successful companies.

So in April, when the CEO stood in front of local stakeholders in Chisholm and asked why it’s so hard to believe his message, the point should have resonated: Why is it so hard for the business community take him at his word? To him, the promises have been filled, the checks written, and yet, there’s work left to be done on the Iron Range.

For the past half-decade, investors, Wall Street and industry types cautiously eyed Cliffs as it teetered on the brink of bankruptcy and clawed its way back to solvency. That battle kept the company, Goncalves said, focused on the Cliffs’ core operations as it shed coal mines and exited the Canadian iron ore scene.

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