Republic of Mining

PRESS RELEASE: United States Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources – Senators Introduce Bipartisan Bill to Improve Critical Minerals Supply Chain

May 26, 2011

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: ROBERT DILLON (202) 224-6977
MAY 26, 2011 MEGAN HERMANN (202) 224-7875

Senators Introduce Bipartisan Bill to Improve Critical Minerals Supply Chain

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, today introduced the Critical Minerals Policy Act, along with Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska), Jim Webb (D-Virginia), James Risch (R-Idaho), Kay Hagan (D-North Carolina), Roy Blunt (R-Missouri), John Barrasso (R-Wyoming), Mike Enzi (R-Wyoming), Kent Conrad (D-North Dakota), Thad Cochran (R-Mississippi), Mark Begich (D-Alaska), Dean Heller (R-Nevada), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan), John Hoeven (R-North Dakota), Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri), and Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia).

The legislation seeks to revitalize the United States’ critical minerals supply chain and reduce the nation’s growing dependence on foreign suppliers by directing the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to establish a list of minerals critical to the U.S. economy and providing a comprehensive set of policies to address each economic sector that relies upon critical minerals.

Murkowski: “Minerals shape our daily lives, our standard of living, and our ability to prosper. We rely on minerals for everything from the smallest computer chips to the tallest skyscrapers, and yet the United States somehow lacks clear policies to ensure an affordable and abundant domestic supply. The Critical Minerals Policy Act will help solve that problem by modernizing our policies for production, processing, environmental protection, manufacturing and recycling. Through this Act, we will ensure more opportunities for domestic jobs, technological innovation, increased national security and greater competitiveness.”

Speech by Tim Hudak, MPP, Ontario PC Leader to the Federation of Northern Ontario Municipalities (FONOM) – May 12, 2011

May 26, 2011

This speech was given in Timmins, Ontario on May 12, 2011

“It took 23 Premiers 136 years to accumulate Ontario’s first $148 billion in debt. Dalton
McGuinty will single-handedly double that number in his eight years in office. Over the
past decade, the economic performance of Ontario – as measured by GDP per capita –
has been the worst of any Canadian province. We have fallen into have not status.”
(Ontario PC Leader Tim Hudak, Timmins, May 12, 2011)

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Good morning et bonjour!

C’est un plaisir d’être ici avec vous à Timmins.

I want to thank you all for having me here today – it’s always a pleasure to be back in Timmins.

I’d also like to recognize Vic Fedeli (PC Candidate, Nipissing) who is joining us today. In his eight years as mayor for North Bay, Vic brought real change to northern families – we’re delighted he’s now working with us to bring change for all of Ontario.

And Vic isn’t alone in the experience he brings to the PC Party – we’ve also recruited Joe Chapman, mayor of Northeastern Manitoulin & the Islands, to run for us in Algoma-Manitoulin.

Joe couldn’t be here today but he sends his regards. And of course, thank you Alan [Spacek, President of FONOM and Mayor of Kapuskasing] for that kind introduction. I met with Alan just a couple of months ago to discuss FONOM’s priorities. His passion for not just Kapuskasing, but the whole of northern Ontario, is incredible.

Not only has he shown decisive leadership at FONOM, I had the pleasure of working with him at the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund when I was Minister of Northern Development and Mines.

Canadian Mining in Africa: “Do As You Please” Approach Comes at High Cost – by Bonnie Campbell (Canadian Dimension – Jan/Feb 2011)

May 26, 2011

Canadian Dimension is a Canadian leftist magazine founded in 1963 by Cy Gonick and published out of Winnipeg, Manitoba six times a year.

Bonnie Campbell is a professor of political economy at the Department of Political Science at the University of Québec in Montreal where she heads the Research Chair C.-A. Poissant on Governance and Aid for Development.

While Canadian miners have expanded to all continents, Africa now accounts for about 17 percent of Canadian mining assets abroad, up from 11 percent in 2001. Next to South African investments, companies registered on Canadian stock exchanges now represent the most important source of investment in mining in Africa. From a total amount of C$ 2.87 billion in 2001 and $6.0 billion in 2005, Canadian mining investment in Africa exceeded $23.6 billion in 2010. The trend illustrating the growing presence of Canadian companies in Africa is given in Graph 1 and the 2010 distribution of assets by countries in Graph 2. The country distribution of that investment and the minerals concerned as of December 2008 are in the pictures above.

The map shows that 91% of Canadian investments are concentrated in eight countries, with the order of countries’ importance being the following: South Africa (25.6%), DR Congo (17.8%), Madagascar (13.8%), Zambia (9.9%), Tanzania (9.5%), Ghana (6.5%), Burkina Faso (4.7%) and Mauritania (3%).

Issues of violence, environmental damage and human rights abuses abound in mineral rich Africa and according to a 2009 report produced by the Canadian Centre for the Study of Resource Conflict, Canadian mining companies have been the most significant group involved in such violations.

Thinking About the Ontario North: Too Many Planners or Too Many Plans? – by Livio Di Matteo

May 26, 2011

Livio Di Matteo is Professor of Economics at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Visit his new Economics Blog “Northern Economist” at http://ldimatte.shawwebspace.ca/

The process of Northern Ontario economic development has recently taken an even more convoluted turn given what seems to be a proliferation of task forces, steering committees and summits in the wake of the release of the Northern Growth Plan and the recent provincial budget. There has been a call for the establishment of “pilot economic development planning areas” in Northern Ontario and regional leaders here in the Northwest decided that there needed to be another group to steer this process and formed the Joint Task Force (JTF) on Northwestern Ontario Economic Development Planning.

The JTF (not to be confused with JTF2 which is the Canadian Armed Forces Special Operations Force) is to play a lead role in developing a proposed model and implementation plan for regional economic planning in northwestern Ontario.

The JTF joins the Northern Ontario Development Network (NODN), the Northwestern Ontario Municipal Association (NOMA), the City of Thunder Bay (CTB), Common Voice Northwest (CVNW) and the Thunder Bay Community Economic Development Commission (CEDC) together to begin a process with counterparts in Northeastern Ontario who no doubt also have a large number of organizations with confusing acronyms.

Barrick Gold’s May 19th and 25th Web Responses to Seven Tanzanian Deaths

May 25, 2011May 25, 2011

North Mara’s 2010 Responsibility Report (PDF): click here

Recent police action at North Mara, Tanzania

Update May 25, 2011 — There is a great deal of misinformation circulating in the local community at North Mara, and being reported by media. Barrick and African Barrick Gold have been unable to verify a number of allegations circulating involving Tanzanian police activity. The police are the appropriate authority to confirm or deny those allegations. We are continuing to focus our efforts on re-establishing a constructive dialogue with the local community and also continuing our efforts to work together to improve the situation in the area surrounding our property.

Further updates and information will be provided as required.

Message concerning recent police action at North Mara

May 19, 2011 — The recent violent confrontation and loss of life at African Barrick Gold’s (ABG) North Mara mine is deeply concerning to Barrick and ABG. African Barrick Gold is working with the Tanzanian government and police to address this situation.

Bodies of men shot at Barrick mine stolen and dumped by police: families – by Jocelyn Edwards (Toronto Star – May 25, 2011)

May 25, 2011

The Toronto Star, which has the largest circulation in Canada, has an enormous impact on Canada’s federal and provincial politics as well as shaping public opinion. This article was originally published May 25, 2011.

Grim warning near African Barrick mine

TARIME, TANZANIA – It was on the side of a dirt road in northern Tanzania that relatives found a coffin containing the body of Emmanuel Magige on Tuesday morning.

The 27-year-old man was one of seven people killed and more than 12 injured on May 16 when villagers at African Barrick’s mine in northern Tanzania clashed with security forces.

Late Monday night, police stormed a mortuary in the small northern town of Tarime and removed bodies belonging to four of the dead in a bid to prevent a memorial planned at the mine for Tuesday, witnesses said. After finding the bodies of the victims forcibly returned to their villages, families instead held small burial services at their homes in the afternoon.

“It was inhuman. They did this like animals,” said Magige’s 20-year-old wife, Mary.

Can the Sault plug into Ring of Fire potential? – by Dan Bellerose (The Sault Star – May 24, 2011)

May 24, 2011

The Sault Star is the daily newspaper in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario and is owned and operated by Osprey Media.

It has the potential to be one of the most significant mineral developments in Ontario in over a century.

Think of what the discovery of nickel meant to Sudbury, and gold to Red Lake and Timmins, that is the potential of the remote mineral-rich Ring of Fire in the James Bay Lowlands, about 500 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay.

It’s a vast deposit of more than 5,100 square kilometres of chromite, copper, zinc, gold and kimberlite and communities throughout Northern Ontario are scrambling to make themselves known to the development’s major players.

Cliffs Natural Resources, known in these parts as the primary iron-ore supplier of Essar Steel Algoma, wants to begin mining and processing a world-class chromite deposit within The Ring within five years, by 2015.

How Will Resources Constrain Asian Growth? – Jack Lifton (Resource Investor.com – December 9, 2011)

May 24, 2011

ResourceInvestor.com is a free service for the global community of individual and institutional investors, financial and mining professionals, and other stakeholders who can use the website for important research on natural resources investment strategy.

Jack Lifton is a leading authority on the sourcing and end use trends of rare and strategic metals. He is a founding principal of Technology Metals Research LLC and president of Jack Lifton LLC, consulting for institutional investors doing due diligence on metal-related opportunities.

Jack Lifton

The absolute importance of access to natural resources for a country’s future, can be well-illustrated by speculating on what could happen to China’s seemingly unstoppable growth, if the production rate of all metals does not grow in parallel to the world economy.

Figure 1 below, appeared last month in the Wall Street Journal, in an article by the distinguished British historian Niall Ferguson, titled “In China’s Orbit”. It projects GDP growth over the next 40 years for the world’s currently wealthiest (the USA) and the world’s two most populous nations (China and India). In his article, Professor Ferguson touches upon the extraordinary growth in China’s demand for metals over the last generation, but he doesn’t either examine the situation in depth nor draw any conclusions about this rate of growth as a limiting factor on the possibility of further such growth. Look at the chart, and I will then make a few remarks.

Rare Earth Elements and Strategic Mineral Policy – by Jaakko Kooroshy, Rem Korteweg and Marjolein de Ridder (2010)

May 24, 2011

This report was produced at the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS) and TNO

Introduction

Newspapers report almost daily on international tensions around ‘strategic’ or ‘critical’ minerals such as rare earth elements. The temporary freeze of rare earth exports from China to Japan in retaliation of the capture of a Chinese sea captain near the disputed Senkaku islands in the East China sea is but one example of the strategic use of non-fuel minerals in international relations today.

Ensuring and safeguarding access to rare earth elements and other strategic mineral resources is quickly emerging as a strategic policy priority and a number of states are designing and implementing new policies aimed at increasing material security.

By analyzing the strategic mineral policies of three countries, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan, this report provides an insight into what drives policies on strategic non-fuel mineral resources.

Mineral policies do not develop in a vacuum.

Pentagon in Race for Raw Materials – by Liam Pleven (Wall Street Journal – May 3, 2010)

May 24, 2011

The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. Published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, the Journal has the largest newspaper circulation in the United States. Liam Pleven at liam.pleven@wsj.com

Stockpiling Minerals Takes on Greater Urgency as Global Supply Gets Squeezed

The U.S. military is gearing up to become a more active player in the global scramble for raw materials, as competition from China and other countries raises concerns about the cost and availability of resources deemed vital to national security.

The Defense Department holds in government warehouses a limited number of critical materials—such as cobalt, tin and zinc—worth about $1.6 billion as of late 2008. In the coming weeks, the Pentagon is likely to present a plan for Congress to overhaul its stockpiling program.

The new plan, dubbed the Strategic Materials Security Program by the Pentagon, would give the military greater power to decide what it stockpiles and how it goes about buying the materials. It would also speed up decision making at a time when military technology evolves rapidly, commodity markets swing widely and countries around the world fight to secure access to natural resources.

Harold Morrow: ‘Mr. Potash’ knew where to look for Saskatchewan’s new buried treasure – by Nora Ryell (Globe and Mail – February 08, 2011)

May 24, 2011

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous impact and influence on Canada’s political and business elite as well as the rest of the country’s print, radio and television media.

Working for the government and as a consultant, he helped big players develop a new industry

Harold Morrow’s involvement in early mining exploration first led him to the gold mines of Northern Ontario, but it was in the Devonian layers of sedimentary rock found in Saskatchewan that he discovered a real find.

As he would later write to a colleague: “The Saskatchewan potash deposit is the most valuable single ore body ever found in Canada. … The Texas Gulf Kidd Creek ore body (in Timmins, Ont.), although a great one, will be gone and forgotten centuries before the demise of the Saskatchewan potash deposits.”

An area once entirely under ancient seas was uniquely rich in deposits of potassium chloride – or potash, as it is now commonly called, which is used almost exclusively in fertilizers. What started out as the “gold bug” quickly became the “potash bug,” and Morrow became a leading consultant in how to find it.

He was so successful at discovering deposits that in 1966 he was named “Mr. Potash” by the editor of the Northern Miner newspaper.

Memorial for dead banned at Canadian [Barrick] gold mine in Africa – by Jocelyn Edwards (Toronto Star – May 24, 2011)

May 24, 2011

TARIME, TANZANIA—Families of the five men killed by security forces of a Canadian mine are furious after that were denied permission to hold a memorial service Tuesday at African Barrick’s gold mine in North Mara.

“When you have lost your loved ones and you are in a grieving period, for someone to do this to you, it is not right. It would be better if they would take you too,” said Magige Gati, whose 27-year-old son Emmanuel Magige was among the dead.

Five men were killed, and at least a dozen injured, when about 800 locals clashed with security on May 16 at a mine in the area owned by African Barrick, a subsidiary of Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corporation.

The clash is the latest episode in an ongoing conflict between residents of North Mara, who come to the mine to scavenge for gold and Barrick, which took over the mine in 2006.

[Canada] Mining: Miracle on the St. Lawrence – by Brian Dunn (Canadian Business Magazine – May 9, 2011)

May 23, 2011

Founded in 1928, Canadian Business is the longest-publishing business magazine in Canada.

Sept-Îles is booming, and the numbers are there to prove it. The mining community of 30,000 on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, some 960 kilometres from Montreal, added 5,200 new jobs last year, for an impressive 10.7% increase in employment, the best in Quebec. Based on its population, the 5,200 new jobs is equivalent to Montreal adding 105,000 new jobs, where only 30,000 were created last year.

A lot of the credit for this growth goes to Serge Lévesque, Sept-Îles mayor since November 2009. He knows the region lives or dies on the fortunes of the mining industry, having worked for both the Iron Ore Co. of Canada and Aluminerie Alouette Inc., a global aluminum industry leader.

In early April, Russian steelmaker OAO Severstal and its South African partner, Iron Mineral Beneficiation Services Pty. Ltd. (IMBS) announced they were conducting a feasibility study for the construction of a $1-billion iron-ore processing plant in Sept-Îles that could create up to 500 new jobs in the area.

India vies with China for influence in Africa – by Geoffrey York (Globe and Mail – May 23, 2011)

May 23, 2011

The latest global scramble for Africa, with China now in the lead, is escalating to new heights this week as India sends a planeload of gift-bearing political leaders to Africa in an effort to compete with Beijing’s fast-growing influence.

It would have been unthinkable a decade ago, but China and India are now emerging as key players in the African game, and both are boosting their presence so swiftly that they are becoming major competitors of the Western nations that traditionally dominated the continent.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, accompanied by dozens of business executives and cabinet ministers, is arriving in Ethiopia this week for an Africa-India summit on a scale rivalling China’s recent summits with African leaders.

Codelco Waning Copper Pressures $17.5 Billion Bet to Catch Boom – by Matt Craze (Bloomberg Markets Magazine – May 2011)

May 23, 2011

Bloomberg Markets magazine brings the inside view of professional investing with unparalleled access to the most influential people in global business and finance.

(Bloomberg) — Diego Hernandez, chief executive officer of Codelco, talks with Bloomberg’s Matthew Craze about the company’s financing plans and the outlook for the copper market. The world’s largest copper producer, may seek bank loans to raise the $600 million it needs to finance expansions at its Chilean copper mines this year, Hernandez said. (Source: Bloomberg)

Andres Avendano steps out of his Toyota Hilux pickup halfway down a 20-kilometer-long tunnel under Chile’s Chuquicamata copper mine. He lifts a cylindrical chunk of rock from the diamond-bit-studded drilling machine that extracted the sample.

“The copper is quite disseminated,” Avendano says, adjusting the light from his white hard hat to identify a sprinkling of gold-colored specks. In the mine’s early days, a similar specimen would have been brimming with the metal, he says.

Avendano, 33, who is in charge of mine design, and geologists from government-owned copper giant Codelco are searching around the clock for new deposits at Chuquicamata, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its June issue. The complex, 1,650 kilometers (1,025 miles) north of Santiago in the Atacama Desert, is so massive the open pit is visible from space.