Republic of Mining

The cost of moving Alaska’s Pebble mining project forward – by Marilyn Scales (Canadian Mining Journal – May 15, 2012)

May 4, 2015May 16, 2012

Marilyn Scales is a field editor for the Canadian Mining Journal, Canada’s first mining publication. She is one of Canada’s most senior mining commentators.

I know an engineer who says anything is possible if you throw enough money at it. The costs associated with the development of the Pebble copper-gold-molybdenum project in Alaska come to mind when thinking in this vein.

The Pebble Partnership, a joint venture of Vancouver’s Northern Dynasty Minerals and Anglo American plc of London, UK, is shepherding the US$5-billion project toward production. The deposit is estimated to contain 80.6 billion lb of copper, 107.4 million oz of gold, and 5.6 billion lb of molybdenum.

Pebble is a deposit worth going after even if it takes and investment of $400 million and more to conduct work programs, research and comparative studies so far. Move than $100 million has been spent on environmental and socio-economic studies, resulting in a 27,000-page environmental baseline document.

This year’s budget is $107 million to be spent on engineering studies to complete a project description.

Methane hydrate technology fuels a new energy regime – by Neil Reynolds (Globe and Mail – May 16, 2012)

May 16, 2012

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.

In a joint announcement two weeks ago, the United States and Japan (along with ConocoPhillips, the U.S.-based multinational oil company) announced the world’s first successful field trial (in Alaska) of a technology that uses carbon dioxide to free natural gas from methane hydrates – the globally abundant hunks of porous ice that trap huge amounts of natural gas in deposits, onshore and offshore, around the world. It’s a neat feat. You use CO2, which isn’t wanted, to produce natural gas, which is. But it’s more than neat – much more.

Methane hydrates constitute the world’s No. 1 reservoir of fossil fuel. Ubiquitous along vast stretches of Earth’s continental shelves, they hold enough natural gas to fuel the world for a thousand years – and beyond. Who says so? Using the most conservative of assumptions, the U.S. Geological and Geophysical Service says so.

The U.S. now produces 21 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas a year. But it possesses 330,000 tcf of natural gas in its methane hydrate resource – theoretically enough to supply the country for 3,000 years (give or take). Using less conservative numbers (for example, a methane hydrate resource of 670,000 tcf), the U.S. is good to go for 6,000 years (give or take).

Is Canada grappling with Dutch Disease? – by Barrie McKenna (Globe and Mail – May 16, 2012)

May 16, 2012

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.

Conventional wisdom says that Canada is fighting a crippling bout of Dutch Disease. Canada’s petro-infused currency, which has risen 55 per cent against the U.S. dollar in the past decade, continues to linger around parity with the greenback. That is clobbering exports, making Canadian auto plants uncompetitive and hammering the manufacturing heartland of Ontario and Quebec – or so the thinking goes.

But the conventional wisdom is wrong, according to three researchers who will publish a study Wednesday that largely debunks the Dutch Disease theory, which has become a frequent talking point amid rising tensions between the oil-rich West and battered factories of the East.

Several key manufacturing industries often linked to the phenomenon show no symptoms at all of currency damage, including autos, food, aerospace and heavy industry, according to the report, Dutch Disease or Failure to Compete?, being released Wednesday.

Don’t blame the Dutch – by Ryan W. Lijdsman (National Post – May 16, 2012)

May 16, 2012

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

Most Canadians are probably more familiar with Dutch elm disease than the similarly named “Dutch disease,” so when NDP leader Thomas Mulcair diagnosed Canada’s economy as suffering from the ailment it made headlines. According to Mr. Mulcair, “In six years since the Conservatives have arrived, we’ve lost 500,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs” because of a high petro-dollar. But is his diagnosis correct?

Dutch disease describes an ailment that the Netherlands contracted in the 1960s, when its broad economy faltered as it became a major exporter of natural gas. The currency became overvalued and the economy suffered from deindustrialization directly linked to the loss of exports and an increase in cheaper imports. Since then, the phenomenon has been discovered in other petroleumbased economies, such as Venezuela and several West African nations.

A superficial comparison of the Canadian economy and Dutch-diseased economies does show similarities, but not a more substantive look focusing on Dutch disease’s two major components: a high currency caused by an increase in natural resource exports and a directly linked decline in manufacturing.

NEWS RELEASE: Impact of “Dutch disease” on manufacturers smaller than feared

May 16, 2012May 16, 2012

Founded in 1972, Institute for Research on Public Policy seeks to improve public policy in Canada by generating research, providing insight and sparking debate on current and emerging policy issues facing Canadians and their governments.

Click here for: Dutch Disease or Failure to Compete?

For immediate distribution – May 16, 2012

Montreal – Although the resource boom has been widely blamed for the woes in the manufacturing sector and cited as a textbook example of the so-called “Dutch disease,” this diagnosis requires a second opinion, according to a new study published by the Institute for Research on Public Policy.

In Dutch Disease or Failure to Compete? A Diagnosis of Canada’s Manufacturing Woes, authors Mohammad Shakeri, Richard Gray and Jeremy Leonard find that while a booming energy sector in Canada has indeed contributed to the strong Canadian dollar, only one-quarter of total manufacturing output has been adversely affected by the dollar’s increased strength.

The authors examine the linkages between energy prices, the exchange rate and manufacturing output in Canada for 80 different manufacturing industries.

Group wants North to share [Ring of Fire] benefits – by Star Staff (Sudbury Star – May 16, 2012)

May 16, 2012

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

All of Northern Ontario must benefit from plans to build a chromite mine and smelter says a group representing the North’s municipal leaders.

“We are pleased that a decision has been made concerning one of the jewels of the North,” Alan Spacek, president of the Federation of Northern Ontario Municipalities, said in a release Tuesday.

“In a deal as big as this, the ‘devil is in the details.’ We want all communities to benefit from this mammoth find — First Nations, adjacent communities and communities right across the North.”

Last week, Cliffs Natural Resources said pending further studies, it would spend $3 billion to build a chromite mine in the Ring of Fire region of northwestern Ontario and ship the ore to be processed at a smelter in Capreol. Chromite is used to harden stainless steel, a key building component.

Potash fails to fertilize the Canadian economy – by Colby Cosh (Maclean’s Magazine – May 21, 2012)

May 15, 2012

Maclean’s is the largest circulation weekly news magazine in Canada, reporting on Canadian issues such as politics, pop culture, and current events.

The Tories’ decision to protect the ‘strategic’ asset in 2010 has backfired on shareholders.

Stock analysts who are bullish on potash have two powerful arguments in their corner: people have to eat, and land is something that nobody’s making any more of. As billions in Asia adopt middle-class habits to go with their rising affluence, their food needs will need to be met by global agriculture—somehow. The Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan (PCS) sees its product, used as a yield-enhancing fertilizer component, as part of the solution; it’s a tale told as often in PCS investor documents as the Christmas story is in December.

“Each year, the global population grows by about 75 million,” says the company’s 2011 online overview. “It is a simple reality that more people mean more food must be produced.” Most of the growth, the slide show adds, is in urban areas—and “urban consumers tend to eat higher-quality diets that include meat, fruits and vegetables.”

But while people have to eat, there’s nothing that says they have to eat the most land-intensive agricultural products—which means, basically, beef. (In Simon Fairlie’s meat-friendly 2010 sustainability book Meat: A Benign Extravagance, he estimates that it takes about 10 lb. of feed grain to produce a pound of beef.)

North Dakota’s oil-rich Bakken region: boom, busts and trouble – by Richard Warnica (Maclean’s Magazine – May 21, 2012)

May 15, 2012

Maclean’s is the largest circulation weekly news magazine in Canada, reporting on Canadian issues such as politics, pop culture, and current events.

Cross-border crime is only one of the issues affecting ‘the Fort McMurray of the U.S.’s north’

The strip clubs in Williston, N.D., are the rowdiest that Tatiana, an exotic dancer who has performed in Las Vegas and New York, has ever seen. Oil workers coming off the nearby rigs pack the city’s two clubs, Whispers and Heartbreakers, every night. They smell like work. They wear dirty T-shirts. They fall asleep face first on the bar. And then there are the prostitutes. Tatiana, who asked that her real name not be used, noticed them wandering though the crowd looking for customers on her first night in North Dakota. “They’re not in there to tip the dancers,” she says with a laugh.

Williston is the heart of Bakken oil country, the Fort McMurray of the U.S.’s north, for all the good, and bad, that brings. There are at least 3.1 billion barrels of recoverable oil trapped in the Bakken shale, a teardrop-shaped formation spread between North Dakota, eastern Montana and Saskatchewan, and likely many billions more. In recent years, new technology and high prices have made that oil both easier to get at and more valuable to sell. Today the race to pump it out—via a complex process known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”—is running at an Olympic pace.

As a result, North Dakota’s economy is the hottest in the U.S. Unemployment there was just three per cent in March, the lowest in the country. In neighbouring Montana, where oil exploration has been far more modest, the jobless rate stands at six per cent, well shy of the national average of nine per cent.

Silver, and gold, lining to Haiti’s geological vulnerability – by Martha Mendoza (Globe and Mail – May 12, 2012)

May 15, 2012

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.

TROU DU NORD, HAITI— Its capital is blighted with earthquake rubble. Its countryside is shorn of trees, chopped down for fuel. And yet, Haiti’s land may hold the key to relieving centuries of poverty, disaster and disease: There is gold hidden in its hills – and silver and copper, too.

A flurry of exploratory drilling in the past year has found precious metals worth potentially $20-billion deep below the tropical ridges in the country’s northeastern mountains. Now, a mining company is drilling around the clock to determine how to get those metals out.

“If the mining companies are honest and if Haiti has a good government, then here is a way for this country to move forward,” said Bureau of Mines director Dieuseul Anglade.

Haiti’s geological vulnerability is also its promise. Massive tectonic plates squeeze the island with horrifying consequences, but deep cracks between them form convenient veins for gold, silver and copper pushed up from the hot innards of the planet. Prospectors from California to Chile know earthquake faults often have, quite literally, a golden lining.

Ottawa’s industrial policy divides Canada against itself – by Lawrence Martin (Globe and Mail – May 15, 2012)

May 15, 2012

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.

In the decades prior to 2000, Canada made progress in moving away from being an economy of resource extraction. By that year, as labour economist Jim Stanford has pointed out in an analysis for the Centre for Policy Alternatives, well over half of Canada’s exports consisted of an increasingly sophisticated portfolio of value-added products in areas such as automotive assembly, telecommunications, aerospace technology and more.

But in the past decade, the clock has been turned back. Because of a boom in the oil and gas sector and a range of other factors, the economy has reverted toward being a staples-driven enterprise. “In July, 2011, unprocessed and semi-processed resource exports accounted for two-thirds of Canada’s total exports, the highest in decades,” Mr. Stanford wrote. “Compare that to 1999, when finished goods made up almost 60 per cent of our exports.”

That’s quite a change. A tilt, to be sure, that fits the old cliché about Canadians being hewers of wood and drawers of water. Our fur-trading legends, Radisson and Groseilliers, would no doubt heartily approve. But didn’t someone say the way to go in the 21st century is the knowledge economy?

NEWS RELEASE: New Clean Mining Alliance to Promote Advancements in Technology in the Mining Industry

May 14, 2012

Industry association to draw attention to clean technology innovation

VANCOUVER, BC – May 14th, 2012 – The Clean Mining Alliance is pleased to announce the unveiling of its new industry association aimed at supporting and advocating technological advancements to make the mining industry cleaner and more environmentally responsible.

“Frameworks exist to increase social responsibility in mining, but despite advancements in exploration, extraction, production and reclamation technology, the industry has struggled to present itself as having grown beyond the mining days of old,” says Dallas Kachan, Executive Director of the Clean Mining Alliance. “The Clean Mining Alliance exists to help promote new and emerging technology developments that are making mining more environmentally responsible.”

The Clean Mining Alliance is a newly formed international non-profit organization based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It is being introduced during British Columbia Mining week, a time when the province celebrates the contributions the mining industry brings to the province, its communities and businesses.

Members of the Clean Mining Alliance include companies on the forefront of innovative breakthroughs in the mining industry, as well as leading research organizations.

B.C.’s controversial former Britannia mine now serves as museum – by Scott Simpson, Postmedia News (Canada.com – May 13, 2012)

May 14, 2012

http://www.canada.com/index.html

VANCOUVER — Marshall Tichauer was still in his teens when his father decided it was time for him to make his own way in the world. “I turned 18. My father said, ‘Get a job’ and kicked me out,” Tichauer recalled.

Jobs weren’t difficult to find in the early 1960s. Tichauer lived in West Vancouver. He landed a job just up the highway at Britannia mine, which was still very much the Howe Sound company town it had been in its heyday in the 1920s and ’30s as the largest copper mine in the then-British Empire.

Like many of British Columbia’s major early industrial mines, Britannia got its start after a series of gold rushes that began in the Fraser River system in 1858 before spreading east and north to Rossland and Barkerville.

Those early prospecting opportunities threw open the door to waves of European and Asian adventurers across the British Columbia mainland — mining, not fish, furs or timber, was the catalyst for the settlement of the province.

Road route [into Ring of Fire] may change picture – by Bryan Meadows (Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal – May 14, 2012)

November 3, 2015May 14, 2012

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

Provincial support of a north-south corridor for Ring of Fire mining resources has Noront Resources officials shaking their heads. “Right now we’re trying to get some clarity as to what that means,” company spokesman Paul Semple said Saturday.

Cliffs Natural Resources announced Wednesday that it would build a ferrochrome smelter near Sudbury, and that ore would be trucked south from the mine site along a $600-million all-weather road to Nakina. The provincial government said discussions would begin soon on the proposed road to run south from the Ring of Fire.

Noront’s preferred route for transporting base metals and other minerals from its Eagle’s Nest mining project is an east-west link with Pickle Lake and CN Railway in Savant Lake. It had the support of at least four First Nations in the north.

“We don’t know yet if that will affect our plans, or what. We’re trying to get a clearer picture of what it means,” Semple said.