Republic of Mining

Arrested Development: For the town of Inuvik, the Mackenzie Valley pipeline was the lifeline that never came – by Jesse Snyder (Financial Post – December 13, 2016)

December 13, 2016

http://business.financialpost.com/

INUVIK, N.W.T. — “I’m older than this town,” Fred Carmichael says as he steers his lumbering Ford F-350 truck through a residential neighbourhood of Inuvik, Northwest Territories. But Carmichael, 81, is among a shrinking generation of Gwich’in who remember a time when this small northern outpost was nothing more than a few tents erected along the Mackenzie River.

Carmichael grew up in his family’s log cabin and worked on his father’s trap lines, eking out a living from the region’s dwindling numbers of fox, hare, wolf, minx and muskrat. He set out on his own when he was 17, and eventually established a small aviation business that still operates today. “We soon realized that in order to survive up here you have to get into some kind of business or find a steady job, which was hard to do,” he said.

The people of the town, like Carmichael, are acutely aware of their ancestral way of life, and many southerners still maintain an outdated view of the North. Yet Inuvik embodies an undeniably industrial character.

Trudeau’s climate non-deal just kicked off a whole new era of carbon quarreling – by Kevin Libin (Financial Post – December 13, 2016)

December 13, 2016

http://business.financialpost.com/

You might have never before heard a national leader declare a trade deal done, or a peace pact achieved while the signatories are still squabbling over the terms but, as usual, when it comes to climate policy the normal realities don’t apply. There was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau late Friday, flanked by the premiers, announcing that they had “developed a framework” of a climate plan.

This, while Saskatchewan’s premier stated he was adamantly opposed to its most fundamental terms, Manitoba’s premier said he wouldn’t accept the conditions, and B.C.’s premier, Christy Clark, after first saying she wouldn’t sign, agreeing only with the proviso that the federal model for annual national carbon-tax hikes, which underpins the entire framework, might never unfold as planned.

The prime minister resorted to a mushy porridge of twee to describe the framework to cover for its severe defectiveness, pronouncing that he and the premiers had done “what Canadians expected of us, and of themselves, to do all we can to make our world better for our children and grandchildren.”

Agnico Eagle buys into Yukon’s White Gold district – by Andrew Topf (Mining.com – December 12, 2016)

December 13, 2016

http://www.mining.com/

Canadian gold miner purchased 19.3% stake in thousands of mining claims originally owned by renowned Yukon prospector Shawn Ryan

Canadian gold miner Agnico Eagle Mines (TSX,NYSE:AGM) is grabbing a significant land position in a well-known Yukon gold play that has already yielded two purchases by major gold mining companies.

Agnico Eagle announced Dec. 5 it has bought a stake in thousands of mining claims in the White Gold district originally owned by Shawn Ryan, the Yukon prospector whose unique soil sampling method turned him into a millionaire almost overnight.

A press release states that Agnico Eagle, which owns half of the Canadian Malarctic gold mining operation in Quebec and also has the Meadowbank open-pit gold mine in Nunavut, northern Canada, bought 19.3% of the shares in a company that will soon be named White Gold Corporation, for $14.52 million.

Gold Turnaround King Follows Biggest Deal With Plan for More – by Kevin Crowley (Bloomberg News – December 12, 2016)

December 12, 2016

https://www.bloomberg.com/

The mastermind behind the biggest overseas acquisition by a South African mining company for 15 years promises more to come. “There must be more expansion,” Sibanye Gold Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Neal Froneman, 56, said in an interview. “You can never get complacent and sit on your hands.”

That’s after Froneman agreed to pay $2.2 billion for Montana’s Stillwater Mining Co., and what he calls the world’s highest-grade platinum group metals deposit. It’s a step up for Sibanye, created just three years ago as a spinoff of Gold Fields Ltd.’s South African gold mines.

The miner previously agreed smaller deals to buy Aquarius Platinum Ltd. and three Anglo American Platinum Ltd. operations in its home country.

Bound by wild desire, Sault mayor falls into burning Ring of Fire – by David Helwig (Soo Today – December 11, 2016)

December 12, 2016

https://www.sootoday.com/

Mayor Christian Provenzano is pushing hard to keep his foot in the door of Noront Resources Ltd. – the Ring of Fire developer that wants to build a ferrochrome smelter somewhere in Ontario

Plans by a Toronto-based mineral exploration company to build a ferrochrome smelter somewhere in Ontario may come up for discussion at Monday’s meeting of Sault Ste. Marie City Council.

Mayor Christian Provenzano has placed a letter he wrote to Noront Resources Ltd. on the meeting’s agenda. Noront has the largest land position in the Ring of Fire, the massive emerging multi-metals development project located in the mineral-rich James Bay Lowlands of Northern Ontario.

This fall, the company disclosed that it is considering the Sault, Hamilton, Thunder Bay, Timmins and Sudbury as possible locations for a ferrochrome smelter to service the Ring of Fire project. Ferrochrome is primarily used in making stainless steel with a chromium content of 10 per cent to 20 per cent.

Ghost Town Chronicles Meltdown of Botswana’s Metals Industry – by Mbongeni Mguni and Michael Cohen (Bloomberg News – December 12, 2016)

December 12, 2016

https://www.bloomberg.com/

The streets of Selebi Phikwe in northeastern Botswana no longer teem with trucks, and once-busy shop assistants and bank tellers wait for the rare customer.

Since state-owned mining company BCL Ltd. closed its loss-making copper and nickel operation that was the economic lifeblood of the area two months ago, the settlement of 50,000 has become a virtual ghost town.

The government says it can’t afford the 8 billion pula ($752 million) needed to recapitalize the mine. Instead, it’s asked former central bank Governor Linah Mohohlo to oversee a plan to rescue the region. “There is despair, anguish and sorrow,” said Dithapelo Keorapetse, one of the town’s two members of Parliament. “The future for many is uncertain. For some there is no future.”

Teck CEO Don Lindsay looks to longer-term plans as miner rebounds – by Brent Jang (Globe and Mail – December 12, 216)

December 12, 2016

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

VANCOUVER — It has been heartening this fall for Don Lindsay to watch ships in the Port of Vancouver as they transport steel-making coal headed for Asia. The coal ships plying the waters of Burrard Inlet have again become a welcome sight for Teck Resources Ltd.’s chief executive officer, who has a panoramic view of the inlet from the company’s head office in downtown Vancouver.

The market for metallurgical coal – a raw material that is used in the steel-making process – began edging up earlier this year and started surging even higher in September.

Canada’s largest diversified mining company has staged a remarkable comeback in 2016. It hasn’t been solely lucky timing owing to rising commodity prices. Teck managed to bounce back by maintaining a healthy balance sheet through paying down debt and preserved its core assets while avoiding any issuance of shares, Mr. Lindsay said in an interview on Teck’s 34th floor of a Vancouver office tower.

Coal demand drops 15%, its worst decline ever, but it’s not dead yet, says IEA – by Sunny Freeman (Finanicial Post – December 12, 2016)

December 12, 2016

http://business.financialpost.com/

Global demand for the world’s most controversial energy source, coal, dropped by 15 per cent this year in the industry’s largest-ever annual decline, according to the latest analysis released Monday by the International Energy Agency.

In Coal: Medium-term market report for 2016, the IEA said coal demand was likely lower this year than it was in 2013, continuing a path of declining consumption after it fell in 2015 for the first time this century. “While this has happened before, most recently in the 1990s, it is a notable change from the 4 per cent annual growth seen over 2000 to 2013,” the IEA said. “Yet it is too early to say that coal is dead.”

Weaker demand in the U.S. and China, the engines of the global economy, is not being offset by increasing demand in emerging economies such as India, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Arrested Development: Prince Rupert divided over ‘location, location, location’ and imminent economic growth – by Geoffrey Morgan (Financial Post – December 12, 2016)

December 12, 2016

http://business.financialpost.com/

PRINCE RUPERT, B.C. – Lelu Island looks like any of the dozens of tree-covered islands set in the waters off northern British Columbia’s picturesque coast when the tide is in.

When the tide goes, however, an elongated shoreline covered in eelgrass appears. The embankment, called the Flora Bank, is both a critical salmon habitat and at the centre of a fight between environmentalists, First Nations, multiple levels of government and Pacific Northwest LNG, a proposed $11.4-billion facility by Petronas, Malaysia’s state-owned energy producer, that would supercool natural gas until it reaches a liquid state so it can be exported to Asia.

Ken Lawson, house leader with the Gitwilgyoots tribe, describes his opposition to the LNG export project as “location, location, location.”

The location has infuriated environmentalists and First Nations people such as Lawson determined to protect the Flora Bank, where millions of juvenile salmon from the Skeena River acclimate between freshwater and saltwater every year.

Be afraid: The brains behind Ontario’s energy disaster are now advising PM – by Graeme Gordon (CBC News Opinion – December 7, 2016)

December 12, 2016

http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/opinion/

Phasing out coal, a feverish pursuit of green energy, new tax regimes — where have we heard all this before? It is uncontroversial to call Ontario’s energy situation a disaster. As Premier Kathleen Wynne has herself conceded: Ontarians are now having to “choose between paying the electricity bill and buying food or paying rent.”

Wynne’s polling numbers suggest that most Ontarians know where to square the blame, with a pitiful 15 per cent approval rating and 58 per cent of the electorate believing she should resign.

However, Wynne alone shouldn’t bear the burden for the fact that hydro bills for the average consumer have skyrocketed over recent years; it was former premier Dalton McGuinty and his Liberal team from 2003 to 2012 — including his former principal secretary and “policy guru” Gerald Butts — who set Ontario on this financially bleak, dead-end road. And now, Butts is headed on the same path, leading not the premier, but the prime minister, on the way down.

Jets stir up stronger aluminum, reduce casting waste – by David Szondy (New Atlas.com – December 10, 2016)

December 12, 2016

http://newatlas.com/

Aluminum is ubiquitous in our modern age, but it’s surprisingly hard to produce alloys for it without putting up with significant waste from bad mixtures. MIT researchers Antoine Allanore and Samuel R. Wagstaff have been studying how aluminum alloys harden and have come up with a way to use jets to produce more even distributions of copper and manganese in castings.

Direct-chill casting is a semicontinuous way of producing aluminum alloy ingots by quickly cooling the molten metal as it’s poured into chilled molds. It’s a very effective process, but according to Allanore and Wagstaff it leaves something to be desired in terms of quality control.

Though an ingot may look perfectly sound on the outside, it may have patches high or low in copper or manganese ranging in size from inches to feet, resulting in weaker slabs of cast metal. This can mean large amounts of aluminum being relegated to the scrap pile.

Year’s Best Miner Cliffs Says Trump to Keep Good Times Rolling – by Joe Deaux (Bloomberg News – December 9, 2016)

December 12, 2016

https://www.bloomberg.com/

The head of Cliffs Natural Resources Inc. was preparing for a “worst-case scenario” next year. Instead, he got Donald Trump.

Cliffs, the world’s best-performing raw materials producer this year, will probably generate “a lot” of cash, with which it will pay down debt, Chief Executive Officer Lourenco Goncalves said. He assigned President-elect Trump’s focus on infrastructure building and a crackdown on unfair trade as reasons his company and the steel industry are poised for more good times.

Shares of the Cleveland-based company almost quadrupled this year through early November amid signs of improving demand and successful U.S. trade cases against steel imports, which helped boost domestic steel prices. With Trump pledging to spend $1 trillion on infrastructure and to further clamp down on trade cases against countries including China, the shares have surged an additional 69 percent since the election.

NEWS RELEASE: Arizona Mining Refutes Misleading Article on Taylor Deposit

December 12, 2016

VANCOUVER, BC–(Marketwired – December 12, 2016) – Arizona Mining Inc. (TSX: AZ) (“Arizona Mining” or the “Company”) wishes to address an article published by The Global Mining Observer on Sunday, December 11, 2016 regarding the Company’s Hermosa Project in Santa Cruz County, Arizona, which the Company believes is misleading. The Company is issuing this statement to provide its shareholders and the market with accurate information.

First, the article appeared to infer that the Taylor deposit was a re-named version of the Central Deposit. There are, in fact, two distinct deposits at the Hermosa project — the Taylor zinc-lead-silver sulfide deposit and the Central deposit, which is a manganese-silver oxide deposit. The article implies these deposits are one and the same, which is incorrect.

The metallurgical testwork on the Taylor Deposit was conducted by Resource Development Inc. (RDi) and has returned excellent results to date which were initially published in a January 7, 2016 press release, subsequently on February 1, 2016 with the maiden resource calculation, and reiterated by RDi within the Technical Report released on November 29, 2016.

[South Africa] HIV/Aids in the mining industry: what are we doing about it? – by Dale Benton (Mining Global – December 11, 2016)

December 12, 2016

http://www.miningglobal.com/

More than 40 million people worldwide are infected with HIV, and it is estimated that 26 million of these are workers aged 15-49 – the prime of their employable years. As such, the impetus is on workplaces in affected countries to action wellbeing programmes for their people.

Apart from the obvious – and absolutely paramount – moral and human incentive of encouraging testing and providing treatment, the benefits of workplace testing can have a ripple effect: bettering not only the lives of those infected, but their families, co-workers and the population at large. The strength of a prevention programme is important to prevent new cases from occurring. Research has shown that continuous gender inequality and poor knowledge on sexual and reproductive health, certainly among adolescents, feeds the spread of the virus.

All parties – from employers to co-workers – benefit when infected parties are detected as early as possible and provided with the correct treatment to allow them to survive.

Nordic Mining: Incentive for Innovation – by Simon Walker (Engineering and Mining Journal – October 31, 2016)

December 12, 2016

http://www.e-mj.com/

Producers are viewing today’s tough conditions as an incentive to explore the feasibility of introducing new operating systems

Using a nautical metaphor, to say that mining and exploration in the Nordic countries is in the doldrums is perhaps as apt as it gets at the moment. Operating in respected, stable fiscal and legal environments comes at a price, which, in this case, relates to higher labor and social costs.

Add on the challenge of maintaining operations in remote, sometimes sub-Arctic locations, and it becomes easy to see why industry participants are being cagy about spending.

Across the board, the message appears to be the same—costs must be trimmed wherever possible to keep existing mines viable.