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Electric cars spark lithium, nickel and cobalt mining boom – by Marcus Leroux (The Australian – December 28, 2016)

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

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.

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Excerpt: How Aluminum Revolutionized The Canoe – by Mark Neuzil and Norman Sims(Gear Junkie – December 26, 2016)

https://gearjunkie.com/

After World War II, the manufacture and performance of American-made canoes experienced a surge thanks to a new material: Aluminum.

Before man first wrought tools of bronze, before ancient Egyptians built the pyramids or even before written language, there were canoes. Despite newer, stronger, lighter materials, the canoe remained largely unchanged for the last 5,000 years. Canoes: A Natural History in North America reveals the evolution and design of this ancient watercraft.

This excerpt explores the then-revolutionary advancement into the first aluminum canoes—made right here in the U.S.A.

THE FIRST OF THE POST-WORLD WAR II CANOES to hit the market successfully in a material other than wood were built of aluminum—not a synthetic material, but not an element with a huge market share in mass-produced boats. Aluminum had a brief history with watercraft, full of stops and starts and mostly dead ends.

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Tumbler Ridge to ring in new year with return of mining jobs – by Andrew Kurjata (CBC News B.C. – December 29, 2016)

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/

Second coal mine restarting prompts hiring of 220 more people

Ami Strang was working as a lab technician at the Wolverine coal mine in Tumbler Ridge when it was shut down in April 2014. “I moved back in with my parents, I put all my stuff back in storage,” she said. She later found work in Fort McMurray, but it involved being away from home for long stretches of time.

“Luckily for me I’m single and don’t have any kids,” she said. “I know a lot of families here whose dads are gone to camp and aren’t home very often. So it was very hard on the community.”

Strang was one of more than 700 Tumbler Ridge residents to lose their jobs in 2014 and 2015 as dropping demand for coal led to a series of mine closures in the community of just under 3,000 people. “We went to work one day and found out we weren’t working,” Strang recalled. “It was pretty rough.”

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Chest-Puffing Grouse to Test Trump’s Conservation Approach – by Jennifer A Dlouhy (Bloomberg News – December 29, 2016)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

The Obama administration teed up plans to block hard-rock mining on as many as 10 million acres in the western U.S. to protect the greater sage grouse, setting up a test for Donald Trump on how he will weigh business interests and the environment.

The final decision about whether to block activity under new mining claims in sagebrush territory across six western states rests with the president-elect, but may be influenced by the draft environmental analysis and proposal the U.S. Interior Department issued Thursday.

The Obama administration determined in 2015 that the greater sage grouse didn’t warrant listing as an endangered species, yet unveiled land-use plans meant to protect the prickly sagebrush plants seen as critical to the survival of the chicken-like bird known for its colorful courtship ritual.

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Black Lung, Incurable and Fatal, Stalks Coal Miners Anew – Editorial (New York Times – December 24, 2016)

http://www.nytimes.com/

Appalachian health officials report a shocking rise in cases of black lung — the deadly coal-mining disease thought to have been reined in by a landmark federal law passed in 1969.

Young miners are proving particularly vulnerable because the thinner coal seams now being worked in Appalachia leave them vulnerable to a more volatile black lung strain rooted in silica dust, according to an investigative report by National Public Radio.

The emergence of a new generation of miners gasping for their lives should give President-elect Donald Trump, who has vowed to revive the industry, reason to reflect on a safer course for the very workers he claimed to prize as a candidate. There is no known cure for black lung, a wearying disease responsible for 78,000 deaths since 1968.

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The new OPEC: Who will supply the lithium needed to run the future’s electric cars? – by Justina Crabtree (CNBC.com – December 30, 2016)

http://www.cnbc.com/

The automotive industry’s focus on electrification has accelerated in 2016. Volkswagen Chairman Herbert Deiss told CNBC at the Paris Motor Show in November that “electric mobility will take off by 2020,” while Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced in May his aim for annual production to be at 1 million vehicles by this same year.

The onus is now on rechargeable batteries – rather than petrol – to propel the automotive industry into its proposed greener future, with lithium ion cells being the prevailing form of this technology.

“Lithium is a pretty abundant element naturally,” Jamie Speirs, a fellow in energy analysis and policy at Imperial College London, told CNBC via telephone. But, though worldwide production of the metal is increasing year on year, he detailed that “the current supply chain will not match up with lithium demand by, say, 2040.”

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No cobalt, no Tesla? – by Sebastien Gandon (Tech Crunch.com – January 1, 2016)

https://techcrunch.com/

The battery industry currently uses 42 percent of global cobalt production, a critical metal for Lithium-ion cells. The remaining 58 percent is used in diverse industrial and military applications (super alloys, catalysts, magnets, pigments…) that rely exclusively on the material.

Approximately 97 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt comes as a by-product of nickel or copper (mostly out of Africa). Freeport-McMoRan Inc. and Lundin agreed to sell to Chinese players their respective stakes in the Tenke Fungurume mine, one of the largest known cobalt sources, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Tesla has stated that the cobalt it needs will be sourced exclusively in North America, but the math doesn’t seem to add up. Is Tesla doomed? Not necessarily…

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Glencore back in the good books of Wall Street – by Eric Reguly (Globe and Mail – December 31, 2016)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

In the late summer of 2015, Glencore was evidently sized up by the hedge funds as a potential Lehman Bros.

Debt at the world’s biggest commodities trader, and one of the biggest miners, was way too high, at almost $30-billion (U.S.). Prices for copper and other metals were sinking. The situation became critical when South African investment firm Investec on Sept. 28 of last year said Glencore’s equity value “could evaporate” if commodity prices did not rise and CEO Ivan Glasenberg did not implement a “substantial restructuring.”

Much to the delight of the hedge funds, which had been shorting the shares with alacrity, Glencore fell 29 per cent the next day, hitting an all-time low of 67 pence on the London Stock Exchange – 87 per cent below their 2011 initial public offering price of 530 pence. They were even more delighted by Mr. Glasenberg’s curious inaction. Typically hard charging, he seemed to be resisting a deleveraging exercise that could restore confidence in the company.

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Bre-X tale rich with Hollywood drama – by Jennifer Wells (Toronto Star – December 30, 2016)

https://www.thestar.com/

Nearly two decades later, the gold-digging investment fraud gets the silver-screen treatment.

It’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre meets Wall Street! How could it not be a movie? That was the husband speaking, lo these many years ago now. Certainly the component parts were all there. For atmospherics: the steam heat of the Indonesian jungle, replete with tigers and cobras and a gator infested river.

Greed? The muscle-bound tactics of some of the largest gold mining companies on the planet would fit that bill, their actions adorned by a cadre of bedazzled brokers and enabling analysts. Corruption? The Suharto regime was rich in the stuff. Intrigue? Surely the surprise helicopter exit of a geologist — a 250-metre plunge into a tropical rainforest — would tweak a viewer’s interest.

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Over $350-million spent to clean up abandoned mine in Yukon and not an inch has been remediated – by Genesee Keevil (National Post – December 26, 2016)

http://news.nationalpost.com/

WHITEHORSE — More than $350 million of taxpayer dollars in the past two decades — over a quarter billion dollars in the past decade alone — has been spent to clean up the abandoned Faro mine site, a moonscape of waste rock and mustard yellow ponds in the mountains of south-central Yukon.

But, according to the Treasury Board of Canada’s annual reports posted online, nothing has been remediated: Zero. Zip. Nadda. “Actual cubic metres remediated: zero; actual hectares remediated: zero; actual tonnes remediated: zero.”

Off limits and out of sight — overlooking the Pelly River Valley on the territory of the Ross River Dena First Nations — the 2,500-hectare Faro mine property is one of Canada’s largest contaminated sites. And one of its costliest secrets. Few outside of the North have paid attention to this toxic mess. And, managed by several layers of government since the mine was abandoned in 1998, accountability appears astonishingly absent.

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[Mining] SPACE: America Needs a New Moon Mission – by Adam Minter (Bloomberg News – December 25, 2016)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Fifty years ago, the U.S. had the moon to itself. Starting in 1969, when the first of six Apollo missions touched down, it seemed likely that American astronauts would make a long-term home on the lunar surface. Instead, the U.S. sent its last manned mission there in 1972, and won’t be returning any time soon. That’s a shame: The moon is now a more compelling destination than ever.

Other countries, seeing new scientific and commercial potential there, have started to fill the exploration gap, including China, Russia and Japan. Perhaps the most ambitious effort is the European Space Agency’s “moon village,” which is intended to be a permanent international outpost on the lunar surface.

In recent weeks, the concept has gained considerable momentum as Europe’s science ministers and private space companies have embraced it. If the U.S. wants to join them, and resume its historic role as the leader in lunar exploration, it’ll need a major shift in priorities.

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Challenge 2017: What’s next for forgotten coal towns like Alberta’s Forestburg as plug pulled on industry – by Claudia Cattaneo (Financial Post – December 24, 2016)

http://business.financialpost.com/

For a village of 831 on the gentle plains of East Central Alberta, Forestburg is shouldering a disproportionate cost of Alberta’s — and Canada’s — greenhouse gas reduction ambitions.

Coal has been Forestburg’s lifeblood for a century and been central to the village’s two major economic transitions. The first brought unprecedented prosperity when the coal industry arrived in the mid-1950s. The second, unfolding today, could take it all away as governments phase coal power out by 2030 to transition to greener energy.

The powers in Edmonton and Ottawa may think 13 years is a long time to build new industry, but in Forestburg, located 300 kilometres northeast of Calgary, the blows have already started, and they’ve been harsh.

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Tibetans in anguish as Chinese mines pollute their sacred grasslands – by Simon Denyer (Washington Post – December 26, 2016)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/

JIAJIKA, CHINA — High in western China’s Sichuan province, in the shadow of holy mountains, the Liqi River flows through a lush, grassy valley, dotted with grazing yaks, small Tibetan villages and a Buddhist temple. But there’s poison here.

A large lithium mine not only desecrates the sacred grasslands, villagers say, but spawns deadly pollution. This river used to be full of fish. Today, there are hardly any. Hundreds of yaks, the villagers say, have died in the past few years after drinking river water.

China’s thirst for mineral resources — and its desire to exploit the rich deposits under the Tibetan plateau — have spread environmental pollution and anguish for many of the herders whose ancestors lived here for thousands of years. The land they worship is under assault, and their way of life is threatened without their consent, the herders say.

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Rob McEwen’s predictions for 2017 (Northern Miner – December 21, 2016)

http://www.northernminer.com/

Rob McEwen, chairman and chief owner of McEwen Mining (TSX: MUX; NYSE: MUX), looks back on the year that was, and ahead to what the next year may hold in store for gold.

The Northern Miner: It’s been one of the toughest years on record for commodities and we thought we’d ask you to reflect on the past year and offer your views on what the mining industry might expect in 2017.

Rob McEwen: 2016 was a surprise in many ways — pleasant in the beginning and perplexing as we approach the year end. Right now the election of Trump and Republican control of the Senate and Congress has introduced a brand new variable that I know most investors never contemplated.

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