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High Teck: The Canadian miner’s reinvention as a critical-metals player—via its massive copper mine in Chile’s Andean foothills— could prove its undoing as an independent company – by Eric Reguly (ROB/Globe and Mail – March 24, 2025)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

The Canadian plan to evolve into global critical-metals player by opening one of the biggest copper mines in South America got off to an unlucky start. On Sept. 25, 1996, Frank Pickard, the Sudbury, Ont., native who was the CEO of Falconbridge, then one of Canada’s top two diversified mining companies (the other was Inco), boarded a small aircraft on the Chilean coast and flew to the Collahuasi mine in the Atacama Desert, in the far north of the country, in the Andean foothills near the Bolivian border.

Within minutes of stepping out at 4,400 metres (14,400 feet)—half the height of Everest—he was felled by a heart attack and died. He was 63. A retired mining engineer and consultant friend of mine, Jeffrey Franzen, who worked for a subsidiary of Falconbridge at the time, told me that based on the story he’d heard, Pickard’s failure to acclimatize before reaching the Andean heavens, where effective oxygen levels are far lower than those at sea level, probably triggered his death. (Legend says he was buried in a coffin made of nickel, Falconbridge’s main product, as was his wish.)

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Spain eyes boom in ‘neglected’ strategic mining sector – by Valentin Bontemps (CBS 19 News – March 20, 2025)

https://www.cbs19news.com/

Spain is aiming to tap its unexplored strategic mining resources as the European Union urgently seeks to ramp up production, but local resistance could frustrate the government’s plans. The European mining heavyweight has 2,600 mines generating 3.5 billion euros ($3.8 billion) in annual revenue and is the second-largest EU producer of copper and magnesite, but sector specialists believe its potential is largely untapped.

“Spain possesses huge wealth in its subsoil” and “must continue investigating” to quantify it, said Ester Boixereu, a geologist and natural resources specialist at the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain.

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Canada scraps federal review of large projects – by Colin McClelland (Northern Miner – March 23, 2025)

Global mining news

Canada’s federal government will permit major infrastructure and mining projects with provincial and territorial approvals alone, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Friday evening after meeting with the country’s 13 premiers.

“We will eliminate federal duplicative requirements by recognizing provincial assessments for major projects, the so-called mutual recognition,” Carney told reporters in Ottawa. “So, one project, one review, and we will work with the provinces and other stakeholders, Indigenous groups, to identify projects of national significance and accelerate the time frame to build them.”

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Indonesian watchdog demands prosecution for environmental crime ‘cartels’ – by Hans Nicholas Jong (Mongabay.com – March 14, 2025)

Mongabay – Conservation News

JAKARTA — Indonesia’s largest environmental group, Walhi, has filed a formal complaint with the Attorney General’s Office, accusing 47 companies of environmental destruction and corruption. The companies, which operate in industries like palm oil, mining and forestry, are accused of being responsible for 437 trillion rupiah ($26.5 billion) in state losses.

Based on field investigations and spatial analysis, Walhi says it has identified 18 forms of gratuities paid by the companies to officials in the 47 cases. In some of these cases, Walhi found that officials had approved the rescinding of forest status for certain areas by revising zoning plans, thereby allowing the companies to clear forests for their concessions.

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Australia’s lithium dream is fading. Can tax breaks revive it? – by Elouise Fowler and Mark Wembridge(Australian Financial Review – March 24, 2025)

https://www.afr.com/

The prime minister believes he can revive hopes of turning Australia into a minerals processing powerhouse. Is this anything other than wishful thinking?

The $1.2 billion lithium hydroxide refinery on the shores of Perth’s southern beaches was once heralded as vital to Australia’s dream of becoming a battery minerals processing powerhouse. Today, the Tianqi Lithium plant sits in an uneasy state – its expansion plans in tatters, its future bleak. Conveyor belts that once ferried lithium-rich rock to a 1000-degree kiln and onto a vat of chemicals lay idle for long periods at the start of the year.

Plans to double the size of the plant – a short drive from Perth in the industrial suburb of Kwinana – were shelved in January. High costs, low lithium prices, technical problems and unfavourable economics are conspiring to kill off the facility entirely, and with it another slice of Australia’s dream.

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Wab Kinew ignores Manitoba’s trillion-dollar critical minerals opportunity – by Kevin Klein (Winnipeg Sun – March 21, 2025)

https://winnipegsun.com/

While New Brunswick’s Premier Susan Holt and her Liberal government are making serious moves to capitalize on their province’s critical mineral resources, here in Manitoba, Premier Wab Kinew and his NDP government are silent. Not a word. Not a dollar. Not even a photo op with a hardhat and shovel.

This is a missed opportunity on a scale that’s hard to ignore — unless, of course, you’re the NDP. On Wednesday, New Brunswick’s Natural Resources Minister John Herron stood in their legislature and said what every leader who takes economic growth seriously should be saying. He told his team to get a strategy together to mine their rich deposits of critical minerals.

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Quebec’s aluminum product producers are feeling the sting of Trump’s tariffs – by Nicolas Van Praet (Globe and Mail – March 22, 2025)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

There are roughly 1,700 companies shaping aluminum into components or finished products in Quebec, cranking out everything you can think of with the malleable metal – from ambulance doors to window frames. Half of them are based in the greater Montreal area. And all of them have one major problem at the moment: Donald Trump.

Industry groups have been warning for weeks of the pain to come from the U.S. President’s 25-per-cent tariffs on Canadian aluminum and steel, which came into effect March 12. But on the factory floors of Quebec’s aluminum-product makers, and in the hallways and offices of manufacturers where net profit margins are typically in the single digits and payrolls rarely tally more than 200 employees, those warnings have become reality.

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WA’s need for EVs comes at a cost for mining towns – by Isabella Breda (Seattle Times – March 24, 2025)

https://www.seattletimes.com/

THACKER PASS, Nev. — Cody Davis is part of a global energy transition. He mined coal in North Dakota before taking a job at what’s slated to be one of the most productive lithium mines in the world. Davis says miners can help the world dig up resources it needs to expand energy production, including for renewables.

“Mining is what we do,” said Davis, the mine’s operations and safety manager. “Just take that skill set and it’s just a different mineral.” American coal mines are shutting down as coal-fired power plants are yanked offline, making way for cleaner sources of power. Washington state’s last remaining coal power plant in Centralia is set to shutter this year.

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Sudbury, Ont., mayor not fazed over what tariffs could mean for nickel mining – by Jonathan Migneault (CBC News Sudbury – March 21, 2025)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/

The U.S. only has one nickel mine and it would take years to start new ones

Sudbury’s mayor says he’s not worried that an ongoing trade war between Canada and the United States will hurt the city’s nickel exports to the south.

“I believe critical minerals, which obviously we are endowed with here in Greater Sudbury, play a role to maybe bridge that divide that we are currently living with the U.S. administration,” said Sudbury Mayor Paul Lefebvre. “For them to realize the importance that they can’t source this in the U.S.”

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Prime Minister Carney commits to the North – by Shane Lasley (North of 60 Mining News – March 20, 2025)

https://www.miningnewsnorth.com/

Just four days after being sworn in as Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney flew to Nunavut to reaffirm Ottawa’s commitment to strengthening Arctic security and unlocking the economic potential across Canada’s mineral-rich North.

“Our government will strengthen Canada’s Arctic security, bolster partnerships with our closest Allies, unleash the North’s economic potential, and reaffirm reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples,” Prime Minister Carney said ahead of his trip North. “Canada will remain a strong, secure, and sovereign nation.”

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China flexes rare earth dominance with million-tonne discovery – by Staff (Mining.com – March 19, 2025)

https://www.mining.com/

China solidified its global dominance in rare earth elements mining with a new discovery that its experts say is likely to be the largest middle and heavy rare earth deposit in the country. The discovery was first reported in the Chinese paper Workers’ Daily late January, then confirmed and published by the China Geological Survey (CGS) under the Ministry of Natural Resources.

According to the CGS, the deposit could host as much as 1.15 million tonnes of resources containing key rare earth elements such as praseodymium, neodymium, dysprosium and terbium, which are being sought after globally. Once tapped, it would yield about 470,000 tonnes of these strategic minerals, it estimated.

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The US Uranium Dilemma: Domestic Production Challenges in an Era of Growing Nuclear Energy Demand – by Scot Anderson (Womble Bond Dickinson.com – March 20, 2025)

https://www.womblebonddickinson.com/

At present, Kazakhstan, Canada and Namibia account for nearly two-thirds of global uranium production. The United States produces less than one percent of the world’s uranium, and most of the uranium used in the United States is imported, primarily from Canada. As discussed elsewhere in this series, there is increasing commitment to nuclear energy as a fundamental component of domestic and global energy production.

Despite its emphasis on the development of fossil fuels, the Trump administration is likely to support more nuclear energy development, especially in the form of small modular reactors. The Executive Order on “Unleashing American Energy” includes a direction to the U.S. Geological Service to consider adding uranium to the list of critical minerals.

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[Ring of Fire] For the love of peat — how Liberals let moss block development of the ‘oilsands of Ontario’ – by Jesse Kline (National Post – March 21, 2025)

https://nationalpost.com/

The Grits have mired the development of vast wealth in a bureaucratic nightmare. The Tories pledge to change that

A video posted by Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre on Wednesday highlights one of Canada’s enduring problems: our chronic inability to get anything done and, by extension, our propensity to handicap our own economic prosperity.

In the video, and at a pre-campaign stop in Sudbury, Ont., Poilievre highlighted a story that should have sparked a modern-day gold rush. In 2007, prospectors found vast deposits of critical minerals — including chromite, which is used to produce stainless steel, cobalt, nickel, copper and platinum — in a remote part of northern Ontario, about 500 kilometres north of Thunder Bay, that came to be known as the “Ring of Fire.”

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Trump to expand critical mineral production using wartime powers – by Ari Natter and Joe Deaux (Bloomberg News – March 20, 2025)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

President Donald Trump is invoking emergency powers to boost the ability of the US to produce critical minerals — and potentially coal — as part of a broad effort to ramp up the development of domestic natural resources and make the country less reliant on foreign imports.

An executive order signed by the president Thursday taps the Defense Production Act as part of an effort to provide financing, loans and other investment support to domestically process critical minerals and rare earth elements, according to a White House official. The US International Development Finance Corporation, working with the Department of Defense, will provide financing for new mineral production projects.

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“The Narrative About Lab-Grown Diamonds Is Changing” – by Victoria Gomelsky (JCK Online.com – March 19, 2025)

JCK.com

After years of growth driven by retailers hooked on enormous margins, the lab-grown diamond market may be at an inflection point, says Paul Zimnisky, a diamond industry analyst who’s closely followed the lab-grown sector for more than a decade.

“I can definitely feel the narrative changing,” Zimnisky tells JCK. “There’s been this incessant narrative that lab-grown diamonds are God’s greatest gift. There’s nothing wrong with them, but I think the industry is putting itself in a difficult position given how heavily it’s promoting lab-grown.

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