Republic of Mining

Huge mining projects in works – by Robert Gibbens (Montreal Gazette – April 25, 2012)

April 26, 2012

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

Quebec-Labrador on track to be world’s third biggest iron-ore draw within decade

Two jumbo projects could turn Quebec-Labrador into the world’s third biggest iron-ore mining region in a decade – and one of them has just deepened its footprint in Quebec.

The jumbos are New Millennium Iron Corp., with international partner Tata Steel of India, and Adriana Resources Inc., with partner Wuhan Iron & Steel Corp., China’s third biggest steelmaker.

Their multi-billion-dollar projects, along with Iron Ore Co. of Canada’s ongoing expansion, a fast-track project by Alderon Iron Ore Corp. with Hebei Iron & Steel Group, China’s biggest steelmaker, and many smaller developments could triple the region’s annual capacity to 150 million tonnes.

Cliffs Natural Resources Inc., which bought Consolidated Thompson for $4.9 billion last year to merge it with Wabush Mines, is also expanding. Century Iron Mines Corp. and Champion Minerals Inc. are working on key properties. though Oceanic Iron Ore Corp.’s Ungava project is remote. Another contender is Labrador Iron Mines Holdings.

NEWS RELEASE: Newfoundland and Labrador helps Canada maintain its global mining superpower status

April 26, 2012

Rich resources, skilled workforce and large investments poise province for billions in new mining growth

ST. JOHN’S, April 25, 2012 /CNW/ – Newfoundland and Labrador’s economy will benefit from billions in mining investment in the near term as more than $140 billion in new mining investment is expected across Canada over the next five years. This growth is largely attributed to a number of promising projects located in the province, according to the Mining Association of Canada (MAC).

In a speech to members of the St. John’s Board of Trade, MAC President and CEO Pierre Gratton said strong commodity prices, driven by growing demand in rapidly developing nations such as China and India, are creating more opportunities for new mine development and major mine expansions not seen in many years.

“The overall strength of the mining industry is evident in virtually all regions of Canada and will result in numerous economic benefits. This includes the mineral-rich province of Newfoundland and Labrador, which is currently the fifth-largest mining jurisdiction in the country,” said Gratton.

MAC estimates that about $140 billion in mining-related projects are currently proposed in Canada. In Newfoundland and Labrador, that includes billions worth of investments in the iron ore sector from many of the world’s leading mining companies.

Chile $100bn copper push under threat on power scarcity – by Matt Craze (Mineweb.com – April 26, 2012)

April 26, 2012

www.mineweb.com

President of Chilean mining lobby group Consejo Minero, Joaquin Villarino, says the country will have to shelve many of its mining investments due to the high cost and scarcity of electricity.

(Bloomberg) – The biggest-ever pipeline of copper projects is under threat as Chile, the world’s top producer, struggles to contain rising opposition to new power plants.

At least 5,000 megawatts of capacity, including a $5 billion coal-fired plant proposed by Brazilian billionaire Eike Batista, are facing delays or have been shelved as companies including BHP Billiton Ltd. and Anglo American Plc spend as much as $100 billion on copper and metals projects in Chile.

The country, struck by a power blackout as recently as this week, needs to boost capacity by 47 percent within 8 years to keep pace with consumption. Protesters from fishermen to university students oppose the plants, prompting miners to consider their own projects to help meet China’s copper demand.

Vale sees profit halved – by Jeb Blout and Sabrina Lorenzi, Reuters (Sudbury Star – April 26, 2012)

April 26, 2012

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

RIO DE JANEIRO — Vale SA, the world’s largest iron ore miner, said on Wednesday that first-quarter profit fell by nearly half from a year earlier because rains limited exports, prices for its main products fell and spending on new mining projects rose.

Net income in the three months ended March 31 fell 44% to $3.83 billion compared with $6.83 billion a year earlier, the Rio de Janeiro-based company said in a filing to Brazil’s securities regulator.

Results were in line with the average estimate of six analysts surveyed by Reuters. They expected net income to fall to $3.8 billion, 45% less than the year-earlier period and 19.4% less than in the fourth quarter.

“The first quarter is generally the weakest of the year from a financial and operational perspective,” the filing said. “This year, the strong rain volumes in Brazil deepened the seasonal effect on sales and costs, that along with lower prices for iron-ore and pellets cut our operating margins and profit.” Profit was 18% lower than in the fourth quarter of 2011.

The drop in profit comes as Chief Executive Murilo Ferreira boosts investment to keep up with strong demand for iron ore, nickel, copper and coal from China and other Asian markets. The high demand comes as output from existing mines falls.

Will pipelines be activist B.C.’s latest trophy? – by Claudia Cattaneo (National Post – April 26, 2012)

April 26, 2012

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

VICTORIA – During the past few months, the main front in the fight against development of the Alberta-based oil sands has moved to British Columbia. It’s a situation the westernmost province is uncomfortable with and an expansion it’s unmotivated to defend.

The aggressive push by the oil sands industry and the Alberta and federal governments to open a new market for Canadian oil through shipments from the West Coast has been met by equally forceful resistance starting at the AlbertaB.C. border.

Anger has escalated since the start of public hearings in January into the Northern Gateway pipeline, proposed by Calgary-based Enbridge Inc., interrupting years of friendly relations between the neighbouring provinces, particularly on energy development.

Indeed, condemnation of the pipeline through B.C.’s rugged north and its associated oil tanker traffic has erupted into the type of popular revolt that is becoming a B.C. mainstay – from the campaign against the harmonized sales tax to the fight to preserve the Great Bear Rainforest and the moratorium on oil tanker traffic and offshore drilling.

Mining skills battle heats up – by Liezel Hill (Mineweb.com – April 25, 2012)

April 25, 2012

www.mineweb.com

Whether it be a junior, an intermediate or a major, it seems mining companies are scouting the world to find skilled workers for the latest mining boom.

TORONTO (BLOOMBERG) – Bruno Rizzuto’s father, Cesare, was 19 when he got off a boat in Halifax from southern Italy in 1951. With no coat, and “5 cents in his pocket” he headed for the gold mines of Timmins, Ontario, where he worked underground for 41 years.

Six decades later Rizzuto, a Calgary-based recruiter, is looking for people like his father, with a proposal to bring 10 to 20 miners to Canada from South America as companies scour the world to find workers for the latest mining boom.

“There are just simply not the people there, and I think it’s going to be the Achilles heel of the industry,” said Rizzuto, 38, managing partner at Cadre Staffing Inc. “A lot of these projects will not be able to get off the ground because they will not have either the management capacity to do so or the operational workforce.”

Mining companies such as Barrick Gold Corp. (ABX) are struggling to fill vacancies amid a skills shortage that stretches from the iron-ore pits of Western Australia to Chile’s copper mines and the gold deposits of Quebec.

NDP sells out the North – by Thomas Perry (Timmins Daily Press – April 25, 2012)

April 25, 2012

The Daily Press is the city of Timmins broadsheet newspaper.

Party trades away leverage for a few trinkets, bobbles

The NDP has sold out Northern Ontario for a few trinkets and bobbles. Instead of standing firm and voting against Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s budget unless the province agreed to halt its plans to divest Ontario Northland, the party caved.

“We tried to get the government to bend on the ONTC issue, but they just wouldn’t,” MPP Gilles Bisson (NDP — Timmins-James Bay) told our sister paper, the North Bay Nugget.

“We put proposals on the table, but the government wasn’t prepared to move on the ONTC. They were hanging on.” Just like they “tried” to get Xstrata to reverse its plans to close our smelter and save close to 700 jobs in Timmins.

Well, guess what? Tried just doesn’t cut it in our books! Are we supposed to hold our collective breath, as Mr. Bisson and his party brethren continue to tilt at windmills?

Budget passes, ONTC fate sealed – by Kyle Gennings (Timmins Daily Press – April 25, 2012)

April 25, 2012

The Daily Press is the city of Timmins broadsheet newspaper.

NDP backs down on ‘regional issue’ to avoid election

The fate of Ontario Northland is not worth triggering a provincial election. This was the message from MPP Gilles Bisson (NDP — Timmins-James Bay) minutes before stepping into the Legislative Assembly of Ontario to push the much-criticized Liberal budget forward.

“We will allow the budget motion to pass by not voting against it,” said Bisson. “We are essentially choosing to abstain from the issue. We aren’t voting for it because this is still a Liberal budget and there are still things in this budget that we don’t like.”

The provincial NDP are choosing to sit this one out, said Bisson, taking what they can from the budget for the province and hoping that the ONTC doesn’t fall through the cracks. A leap of faith, some might say.

“At this point, people don’t want an election, so we made some amendments to the budget and we are allowing it to move forward,” he said. “If the budget motion was to fail today, we would be in an election by this afternoon.”

Bartolucci brands NDP as ‘hypocritical’- by Jacob Touchette (Sudbury Star – April 5, 2012)

April 25, 2012

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

By not voting against the Liberal budget — which includes plans to get rid of Ontario Northland — the NDP has been “smoked out of their hole” on the issue and exposed as hypocrites, Sudbury’s Liberal MPP said Tuesday.

In a statement, Rick Bartolucci first thanked the NDP for not voting on the budget, which passed Tuesday by vote of 52-37. All Conservatives MPPs voted against the budget, while NDP MPPs simply didn’t vote at all.

It means the budget has passed first reading and that the minority Liberal government was not defeated, thus forcing a provincial election.

Bartolucci then tore into the NDP, which he said cut Ontario Northland Transportation Commission subsidies and services when it was in power almost 20 years ago.

Bartolucci’s post-budget reproach not productive – by Brian MacLeod (Sudbury Star – April 5, 2012)

April 25, 2012

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

Why on Earth did Sudbury Liberal MPP Rick Bartolucci feel it necessary to trash the NDP after his government’s budget passed in the legislature Tuesday with the help of a mass abstention by the New Democrats?

As the NDP and the Liberals came closer to a deal that would see Premier Dalton McGuinty’s minority government pass a budget that will allow the province to divest itself of the Ontario Northland Transportation Commission, the language from the two parties became more respectful, despite the obvious tension.

The NDP convinced the Liberals to agree to a 2% tax on those making $500,000 a year, boost child-care spending by $240 million, provide $20 million for northern and rural hospitals, and increase welfare and disability benefits by 1% ($55 million).

In return, the NDP dropped several demands, including a call to remove the HST on home heating and to retain the ONTC, which provides some bus, rail and communications services in the North.

Mining sector feels cold splash of reality – by Fabrice Taylor (Globe and Mail – April 25, 2012)

April 25, 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.

Fabrice Taylor, CFA, publishes the President’s Club investment letter. His letter and The Globe and Mail have a distribution agreement.

The biggest risk in mine investing isn’t geology or third-world dictators or metallurgy. The biggest danger is purely financial. It’s called dilution.

Most of us underestimate how devastating this process can be until it’s too late. Simply put, dilution is when your economic interest is watered down. If a company you’ve invested in sells new stock and the share count goes up more than the value of the company, your investment is diluted. The more it can sell its new shares for, the less you’ll be diluted.

Waves of dilution usually herald the beginning of the end of the investing cycle in mining. I think we’re close.

By way of example consider the travails of Baja Mining Corp. It’s a junior miner with a promising copper-cobalt-zinc project in Mexico. The company has spent hundreds of millions bringing the project to the cusp of production.

Yes, they do plan to mine asteroids – by Christine Dobby (National Post – April 25, 2012)

April 25, 2012

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

Consider this space mystery solved. After drumming up speculation through the circulation of a press release last week, Planetary Resources Inc. confirmed that, yes, it does in fact plan to travel to and mine asteroids for everything from water to precious metals.

In a press conference held at Seattle’s Museum of Flight and streamed online Tuesday, co-founders and co-chairmen Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson revealed the space exploration plans of the Bellevue, Wash.-based company.

“Since my early teenage years, I’ve wanted to be an asteroid miner – I always viewed it as a glamorous vision of where we could go,” Mr. Diamandis told the audience at the museum while as many as 7,000 viewers at times looked in online. “The vision of Planetary Resources is to make the resources of space available to humanity both in space and here on Earth,” he said.

Mr. Diamandis’s name was included on the cryptic press release the company put out last Wednesday, when it revealed few details but said it would “unveil a new space venture” during Tuesday’s news conference.

In Pursuit of Riches, and Travelers’ Supplies, in the Asteroid Belt [space mining] – by Kenneth Chang (New York Times – April 24, 2012)

April 25, 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/

Perhaps it will be a platinum rush that finally opens up the final frontier. On Tuesday, a new company called Planetary Resources Inc. will unveil its plans to mine asteroids that zip close by Earth, both to provide supplies for future interplanetary travelers and to bring back precious metals like platinum.

The venture may sound far-fetched — perhaps along the lines of Newt Gingrich’s campaign promise to colonize the moon — but it has already attracted some big-name investors, including Larry Page and Eric Schmidt of Google, as well as profitable technology development contracts.

“If you believe that resources in space are critical towards a space-faring future, you will inevitably come to the result that the asteroids — in fact, the near-Earth asteroids — are the steppingstones to the rest of the solar system,” Eric C. Anderson, one of the company’s co-founders, said in a telephone interview.

He was quick to add that the company’s business premise was not as impractical as it might sound. Because an asteroid is devoid of air and its gravitational pull is negligible, getting there is relatively easy.

Oil sands turns out as big winner – by Claudia Cattaneo (National Post – April 25, 2012)

April 25, 2012

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

Joe Oliver, the federal Natural Resources Minister, will find a partner in Alberta’s newly re-elected Premier in his efforts to promote the oil sands at home and abroad, a strategy he said is beginning to show results in Europe and in the United States.

Alison Redford’s Conservatives held on to power by a wide margin in Monday’s provincial vote, fending off a threat from the upstart Wildrose party.

Ms. Redford is pushing for a Canadian energy strategy to promote a national dialogue to encourage co-operation on energy and plans to spend billions in oil sands research to ensure environmentally responsible development. “This election was about choice, a choice to put up walls or build bridges,” Ms. Redford told supporters Monday evening. “Tonight Alberta chose to build bridges.”

While the federal government doesn’t see the need for an energy strategy, Mr. Oliver said Canada has a huge opportunity to sell its oil to new markets looking for energy security, but it will take a sustained and broad communication effort to defend the unconventional resource and he expects Alberta’s Premier to do her part.

NEWS RELEASE: [Ontario Conservative MPP] NORM MILLER DEMANDS ANSWERS FOR RING OF FIRE DELAYS (April 24, 2012)

April 24, 2012

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

QUEEN’S PARK – In advance of a trip to the Northwestern Ontario Municipal Association’s Annual General Meeting with Tim Hudak, Northern Development and Mines Critic Norm Miller demanded that the Minister explain his government’s lack of progress in the region during Question Period on Tuesday.

“We have at our fingertips one of the most lucrative resource finds in our province’s history,” Miller explained. “The government is eager to talk about the Ring of Fire and boast about the Ring of Fire, but won’t take any action beyond expanding an already bloated and uncoordinated bureaucracy.”

In his question to the Minister, Miller also asked about the lack of progress on the proposed road to the mining sites.

“This is such a basic requirement,” Miller argued. “If we can’t access it, we can’t mine it. Communities, miners, and First Nations groups are waiting. They’re getting impatient, and rightfully so. The government has been spinning its wheels for far too long.”