Twitter

Barrick plans board changes after ‘huge wake-up call’ from investors – by Jacquie McNish (Globe and Mail – June 25, 2013)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Barrick Gold Corp. plans to overhaul its board of directors in the wake of a backlash from powerful shareholders. Two of Barrick’s independent directors, Donald Carty and Robert Franklin, recently met or telephoned officials from eight major Canadian pension funds that spearheaded a revolt by shareholders complaining about lavish compensation practices.

More than 85 per cent of Barrick’s shareholders signalled in a non-binding vote in April that they opposed a $17-million (U.S.) paycheque for the company’s new vice-chairman John Thornton and multimillion-dollar payments to company founder Peter Munk and director Brian Mulroney.

According to people familiar with the meetings, Mr. Carty, a Dallas-based director with Virgin America and Porter Airlines Inc. described the vote as “a huge wake-up call” about the need for better governance at Barrick.

The directors told the pension funds the board has launched a search for independent directors with an emphasis on executives with mining operating experience. It is expected that some of Barrick’s current directors will be replaced but the number of departures is unclear.

Read more

Scientific curiosity fuels growth – by Carol Goar (Toronto Star – June 20, 2013)

The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Peter Howitt, a transplanted Canadian at an Ivy League American university, proposes a sensible science policy for Ottawa.

Heartsick scientists have lobbied, pleaded and rallied Canadians, but the prime minister’s resolve is unshakable. The National Research Council (NRC), with its proud history of scientific breakthroughs — from canola to the electric wheelchair — must become a business-directed agency focusing on commercial innovation.

But basic science can still thrive Canada, says Peter Howitt, an expert on technological change, economic growth and national productivity. In fact, the professor emeritus at Brown University — a transplanted Canadian — regards Stephen Harper’s move as a step forward, one that could lead to a badly needed reorganization of the way Ottawa fosters and disseminates leading-edge research.

Howitt has just written a paper for the C.D. Howe Institute, From Curiosity to Wealth Creation, showing how Canada can use Harper’s decision as a jumping-off point to modernize its underperforming, resource-dominated, economy.

His plan may be too bold for the Harper government and Canada’s tight-fisted corporate leaders. But it is economically sensible and scientifically sound. It proposes a four-step transformation.

Read more

Barrick Gold slashes 100 corporate jobs, mostly in Toronto – by Dana Flavelle (Toronto Star – June 25, 2013)

The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Company cuts 30 per cent of head office jobs as gold prices sinks.

As the price of gold continues to lose its lustre, some of the biggest miners in the world are feeling the strain. Barrick Gold Inc. is cutting about 100 jobs, mostly at its Toronto headquarters, the company confirmed Monday.

Meanwhile, Newcrest Mining Ltd., in Australia, wrote down the value of its mines by as much as $5.5 billion (U.S.), the biggest one-time charge in gold mining history. Global miners spent $195 billion buying new assets in the past decade as gold prices soared. But the precious metal has been sinking on talk of the end of low interest rates.

Goldman Sachs Inc. has cut its year-end price forecast for gold to $1,300 (U.S.) an ounce from $1,435. The spot price of gold slipped $12 to trade at $1,287 in New York Monday.

Gold is down 33 per cent from its peak of $1,921 in September 2011, with much of the losses coming since January. That’s been bad new for gold miners.

Read more

The state of mining in South America – an overview – by Keith Campbell (MiningWeekly.com – June 21, 2013)

http://www.miningweekly.com/page/americas-home

South America: home of the greatest, most alluring, most deadly of mining legends – the myth of El Dorado, the golden one. Over the past 500 years, the con-tinent’s mineral riches, real and imagined, have stimulated amazing feats of courage, daring and endurance, conquest, looting, terrible atrocities and appalling oppression.

From the Victorian era on, mining also resulted in what are still breath-taking engineering feats, such as railways through the mighty Andes mountains, complete with chasm-spanning bridges and impressive tunnels. Mining has helped promote at least some economic and infrastructural development in a number of countries, although this has tended to be uneven.

The continent of South America is the fourth largest continent but is composed of just 12 countries (plus the French territory of Guiana on the mainland and the UK self- governing dependency of the Falklands Islands in the South Atlantic). These countries are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela.

As a result, the continent possesses some of the geographically largest countries in the world, including the fifth biggest (Brazil), the eighth (Argentina), the 20th (Peru) and the 26th (Colombia) – South Africa ranks 25th. Bolivia, which looks quite small on a map of South America, is actually the 28th-largest country in the world.

Read more

Newfoundland: Out of gas – by Tom Adams (National Post – June 25, 2013)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Tom Adams is a Toronto-based energy blogger and consultant.

To understand the scale of the province’s lost gas opportunity, look to Angola at the forefront of LNG market

As North America’s newly abundant natural gas-driven energy renaissance builds, one of the last regions out of gas is Newfoundland & Labrador. Although the province is blessed with abundant proven off-shore gas resources on the Grand Banks and good potential for on-shore gas from ongoing oil exploration, none of that gas will get delivered to Islanders any time soon.

The earliest the province is likely to see any off-shore gas reaching some market is at best 12 years from now according to a preliminary proposal floated by Husky Oil, an off-shore operator. Husky says it is thinking of starting studies on gas development in 2016 at the earliest. One way to understand the scale of the province’s lost opportunity is to compare Newfoundland & Labrador with another jurisdiction economically dependent on its off-shore petroleum resources — the impoverished but now rapidly advancing sub-saharan nation of Angola.

Last week, Angola, working with Chevron Corp. and others, shipped its first load of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) to market. LNG development has provided the impetus to build a large infrastructure to pipe its raw gas ashore.

Read more

South Africans worried Nelson Mandela’s health more dire than officials saying – by Matthew Fisher (National Post – June 25, 2013)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

PRETORIA — With virtually no fresh information about the precarious state of Nelson Mandela’s health for four days, South Africans Tuesday feared his condition could be even worse than officially acknowledged.

“There are just so many rumours and nobody will tell us anything,” said Kgopotso Nkoe, a law student at Pretoria University. “We know nothing and it is frustrating. We want to know because we love him as a man who chose peace over revenge and because he did so much for our people.”

Ms. Nkoe and her friend, Faith Sithole, had come to the Mediclinic Heart Hospital to learn more than what the country had been told in three terse bulletins since Saturday, when Mr. Mandela was rushed to hospital in the wee hours.

As of late Tuesday, all that had been officially announced was South Africa’s revered first black president, the man who vanquished apartheid, was in intensive care in “serious, but stable condition.”

Despite the dearth of official news or perhaps because of it, the frail 94-year-old statesman’s anxious countrymen had been speculating — often wildly — about his health since he was hospitalized for the fourth time in seven months for urgent treatment for a recurring lung infection.

Read more

Questions linger as Northern Gateway hearings come to close – Claudia Cattaneo (National Post – June 25, 2013)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

TERRACE, B.C. – There were many times in the past when the people on the banks of the Skeena River wanted to be a part of something bigger.

They were swept up in gold rushes, logging rushes and settlement rushes. The town of Terrace was formed in the early 1900s, the result of a campaign for a station along the Grand Trunk railway by settlers eager to be connected to the rest of country. During World War I, the area’s Sitka spruce was used to build airplanes. During the Second World War, Terrace housed a major army base to guard the Northern Pacific Coast against a Japanese invasion.

Opportunity is knocking again today. It’s coming from Alberta, which is seeking permission to build the Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline from Edmonton to nearby Kitimat to boost Canada’s oil trade with Asia. But opposition has been mounting since it was first proposed a decade ago.

Much effort and money has been spent to change views. Epic public hearings by the National Energy Board (NEB) and Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA) that weighed all aspects and all views wound down here on Monday, bringing to an end an 18-month trek on the proposed right of way.

Read more

Kathleen Wynne backing away from McGuinty’s Ontario Green Energy Act – (National Post – June 24, 2013)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

It’s always instructive to see how a government frames an announcement that is backtracking on one of its own initiatives. Conveniently for the Ontario Liberals, they are amassing considerable experience in this regard.

So, when the government on Thursday dropped the news that it was restructuring its 2010 wind-power deal with Samsung, it presented it in terms of extended job commitments and savings to electricity ratepayers. Samsung was guaranteeing jobs until 2016, instead of 2015, and the government was now only committing to buy $6-billion of Samsung’s renewable power at well above market rates, down from $9.7-billion in the original contract. Hooray for savings!

Those extended job commitments, though, are a result of Samsung’s having missed targets in the original contract; it now has more time to meet them. And that reduction in spending? It comes as Samsung, which won the original contract absent a competition, agrees to drop its own investment in the province from $7-billion to $5-billion, with projects expected to generate 1,369 megawatts of energy, down steeply from 2,500 megawatts in the first deal.

Ontario will be paying less, and receiving less. This is probably not the result of a particularly hard-fought negotiation. What’s more notable are the things that the announcement from Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli did not mention, for example the 16,000 jobs that the original contract was said to create when it was announced in 2010.

Read more

Hemlo dodges Barrick cuts – by Carl Clutchey (Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal – June 25, 2013)

Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal is the daily newspaper of Northwestern Ontario.

Barrick Gold’s flagship Hemlo mining operation won’t be negatively affected by major job cuts that the company announced on Monday. But locals are worried that the operation will be hurt if the price of gold continues to lose its shine.

“The job reductions announced (Monday) do not impact the Hemlo mine,” Barrick spokesman Andy Lloyd said in an email.
Barrick is laying off about 100 corporate staff, mostly from its Toronto headquarters, as it struggles with falling gold prices and various internal challenges.

Barrick employs about 700 full-time workers and contract employees at its Williams and David Bell gold mines about 40 kilometres east of Marathon. The jobs that are being cut represent about 30 per cent of the total corporate office positions for the Toronto-based mining company, which is the world’s largest gold producer.

Most of jobs are at Barrick’s head office in Toronto, but some are at its regional offices. An email to The Canadian Press from Barrick says staff at a Barrick office in Salt Lake City, Utah, may also be affected.

The company advised staff last week that the layoffs were coming. The cuts affect a small portion of the 25,000 employees that Barrick has worldwide, but represent its ongoing efforts to streamline during a period of falling gold prices and internal challenges, including mounting costs at its Pascua-Lama project in South America and losses at its copper business in Africa.

Read more

Gold Miner Writedowns at $17 Billion After Newcrest – by David Stringer & Liezel Hill (Bloomberg News – June 24, 2013)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Newcrest Mining Ltd (NCM).’s decision to write down the value of its mines by as much as A$6 billion ($5.5 billion) will lead to the biggest one-time charge in gold mining history. It also heralds pain for competitors.

Barrick Gold Corp. (ABX), the biggest producer, Newmont Mining Corp. (NEM) and Gold Fields Ltd (GFI). may be next, according to Jefferies International Ltd. Nouriel Roubini, professor of economics and international business at New York University and known as Dr. Doom for predicting turmoil before the global financial crisis began in 2008, says gold may drop to $1,000 an ounce by 2015. The metal traded as low as $1,277.20 in New York today.

Gold companies that spent $195 billion on acquisitions in a decade-long price boom are at risk of taking writedowns like Newcrest’s. Producers face more stresses with brokers from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to Citigroup Inc. cutting price forecasts as bullion heads for its first annual drop since 2000.

“We would expect that there would be several, if not many companies, who would also in the next reporting period be coming to a list of impairments,” Michael Elliott, sector leader for Ernst & Young LLP’s global mining practice, said in a phone interview from Sydney. “It’s just a question of timing, and who had the largest exposures.”

Read more

Mining supply chain links up – by Maureen Arges Nadin (Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal – June 24, 2013)

Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal is the daily newspaper of Northwestern Ontario.

Maureen Arges Nadin is a Thunder Bay-based freelance writer.

The recent buzz of interest in the flourishing Ontario mining sector has left many people asking, “Where are the jobs?”
We tend to derive our information from what we see directly in front of us, and most mines are far away or, in many cases, remote. Job-seekers wanting to remain closer to home are left wondering if there are options for those who don’t want to work in a traditional mine setting.

There is a larger picture that might not be immediately evident to observers outside of the industry. It is the mining service and supply chain.

Jobs in mining have a multiplying effect, and although the numbers vary slightly according to the area, it is a generally accepted equation that for every direct job in mining extraction, there are two to four jobs in mining supply. The recently released Mining Readiness Strategy defines the supply chain as “spinoff activities that cycle through the entire economy through the provision of goods and services to the mining sector.”

In Thunder Bay and region, there is a lot more going on in the mining industry than meets the eye.

Read more

Is green energy fading to black in Ontario? – by Martin Regg Cohn (Toronto Star – June 23, 2013)

The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Queen’s Park has downsized its supersized Samsung renewable energy deal. Once hailed as the miracle cure for Ontario’s ailing industrial sector, it has been cut down to size — by a hefty $2 billion.

Is green energy fading to black? The outlook has certainly dimmed since Dalton McGuinty placed a big bet on a high-cost, high-risk, hybrid strategy that blended energy diversification with industrial incubation in 2010. Our then-premier promised to revive Ontario’s hollowed-out heartland with high-tech wind turbines and solar panels that captured the wind and the sun’s rays — riding the wave of green energy.

Three years later, McGuinty is gone. So too is George Smitherman, the ambitious energy minister who steered the strategy through a skeptical cabinet — and then bailed out. Now, Kathleen Wynne’s government wants to “bend the cost curve.” And cut its losses with damage control. The world has changed since 2010.

Industrial demand for power is down, while electricity prices have soared — stoking ratepayer resistance to expensive energy experiments. Low-cost competition from Chinese solar panels is also undercutting the green energy industry here and abroad.

Read more

Mackenzie River, the ‘Amazon of North,’ under threat – by Paul Watson (Toronto Star – June 23, 2013)

The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Scientists say the Mackenzie River and its tributaries play a crucial role in cooling a warming climate, acting as a ‘climate stabilizer.’

VANCOUVER—Alexander Mackenzie kept a careful record of his troubles 224 summers ago, scribbling about torments like cold, driving rain and clouds of ravenous mosquitoes as he paddled a bark canoe north to the Arctic.

For days on end in early June 1789, he journeyed along the shores of Great Slave Lake, blocked at each turn by ice, searching with native guides for a route to the river that would eventually take his name.

Some 600 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle, lake ice was a constantly shifting barricade, frustrating Mackenzie’s breakout on an epic voyage that would carry him 4,241 kilometres north to what he called the Frozen Ocean.

Today the country’s longest river is a vague memory from social studies class for most Canadians, a remote place out of sight, out of mind. But international scientists say the Mackenzie River and its tributaries, stretched across a sprawling basin that occupies nearly 20 per cent of Canada, plays a crucial role in cooling a warming climate.

Read more

China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities -by Ian Johnson (New York Times – June 15, 2013)

http://www.nytimes.com/

Articles in this series look at how China’s government-driven effort to push the population to towns and cities is reshaping a nation that for millenniums has been defined by its rural life.

BEIJING — China is pushing ahead with a sweeping plan to move 250 million rural residents into newly constructed towns and cities over the next dozen years — a transformative event that could set off a new wave of growth or saddle the country with problems for generations to come.

The government, often by fiat, is replacing small rural homes with high-rises, paving over vast swaths of farmland and drastically altering the lives of rural dwellers. So large is the scale that the number of brand-new Chinese city dwellers will approach the total urban population of the United States — in a country already bursting with megacities.

This will decisively change the character of China, where the Communist Party insisted for decades that most peasants, even those working in cities, remain tied to their tiny plots of land to ensure political and economic stability. Now, the party has shifted priorities, mainly to find a new source of growth for a slowing economy that depends increasingly on a consuming class of city dwellers.

The shift is occurring so quickly, and the potential costs are so high, that some fear rural China is once again the site of radical social engineering.

Read more

Pullout ‘disappointment’ for mining firm – by Staff (Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal – June 23, 2013)

Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal is the daily newspaper of Northwestern Ontario.

A Vancouver-based mining company looking to reopen the Griffith Iron Ore Mine near Ear Falls is temporarily scaling back operations after losing a potential partner in the project.

Ontario Iron Mining Inc. has notified Northern Iron Corp. that it will not conclude the purchase of Northern’s El Sol and Whitemud iron ore properties at this time.

Ontario Iron spokesman Jonas Struthers cited “difficult market and trading conditions in China’s steel industry” as the primary reason for pulling out of the proposed deal, despite satisfactory due diligence on the property.

“We believe in the location and established infrastructure of this project as being ideal for export to Asia in general and China in particular,” he said, adding that “there is still significant interest in the properties and in Northern Iron’s business plan, but the timing is not right for us to conclude the purchase.”

Northern Iron president Basil Botha noted that “this announcement is a disappointment for Northern and it’s shareholders.
“Fortunately, we have established good relationships with several other parties with whom we are discussing options ranging from direct investment to joint ventures and we continue to be well positioned to bring in an interested party in the not too distant future.

Read more