For the first time in history, Australia has blocked the creation of a coal mine under environmental laws. The government on Thursday rejected a proposal for a new mine about 10km (6.2 miles) from the Great Barrier Reef.
Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said the project posed an unacceptable risk to the World Heritage area, which is already highly vulnerable. The mine’s owner, the controversial Australian billionaire Clive Palmer, has not yet responded to the rejection.
A federal judge on Monday ordered regulators to reexamine a state permit allowing Lithium Americas Corp.’s Thacker Pass mine to produce and store mining waste on more than a thousand acres of public land.
Chief Judge Miranda M. Du, however, rejected opponents’ claims that the project would cause “unnecessary and undue degradation” to the environment or wildlife, meaning construction of the mine can continue.
Diversified miner Anglo American has agreed to acquire a 9.9% minority interest in Canada Nickel Company, which owns the Crawford nickel project in Ontario, Canada. The major will make a C$24-million investment in Canada Nickel at a price of C$1.95 a common share – a 10% premium to the 30-day volume weighted average price.
Anglo will provide technology expertise to the Crawford project and has the exclusive right to buy up to 10% of recoveries of nickel concentrate, iron and chromium contained in the magnetite concentrates and any corresponding carbon credits from the Crawford project.
https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/
Ryan Sistad of Duluth is executive director of Better In Our Back Yard (betterinourbackyard.com), which promotes responsible industrial development.
In her Jan. 25 column in the News Tribune, Lynn Anderson of the Tamarack Water Alliance attempted to convince Minnesotans that the high-grade nickel deposit discovered in the deep bedrock of Aitkin County by Talon Metals is actually not needed in the energy transition.
She even asserted that Tesla made a mistake by partnering with Talon Metals to source nickel because the company is moving to batteries that don’t use nickel and that any day now President Joe Biden will reverse course and remove nickel from the U.S. critical-minerals list. None of this is true.
VANCOUVER, BC, Feb. 9, 2023 /CNW/ – The Honourable Jonathan Wilkinson, Minister of Natural Resources, and the Honourable Joyce Murray, Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, released a statement confirming Canada’s position on seabed mining:
The protection, conservation, restoration, and sustainable and equitable use of the global ocean is essential for all life on earth, and we must continue to safeguard its integrity and connectivity. Canada will continue to lead global and national efforts toward enhancing the protection and restoration of vulnerable marine ecosystems and wildlife, including through active international engagement to improve oceans governance.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/
‘If the water becomes contaminated by the mine, I don’t see how we can limit the damage’
Type the word “Nemaska” into a search engine and most results refer to Nemaska Lithium, the company that sought bankruptcy protection in 2019 before being partly bought out by the Quebec government’s investment agency. The episode resulted in tens of thousands of small investors losing significant savings.
However, Nemaska is above all a Cree community in the heart of the boreal forest, more than 1,500 kilometres from Montreal. They share their territory with a wide variety of species, and caribou herds have long visited the area, drawn by its abundance of lichen.
Analysts wonder if Newmont’s $17-billion bid for Newcrest will create a company too large for its own good
Newmont Mining Corp.’s US$17-billion bid for Australia’s Newcrest Mining Ltd. would be the largest merger in the history of the gold mining sector, so Newmont chief executive Tom Palmer’s splash over the weekend naturally has prompted lots of questions.
But one simple query kept coming up as analysts studied the proposal. Why? Specifically, is Newmount, already the world’s largest gold miner, seeking to get bigger merely for the sake of increasing scale?
https://www.nationalobserver.com/
More than a billion tonnes of climate pollution pours out American tailpipes every year. For scale, that’s more than the combined emissions from the 100 least-polluting nations.
Ending this gargantuan climate pollution disaster will require a sharp increase in new lithium extraction to build the zero-emission alternatives — battery electric vehicles. A new report by the University of California, Davis and the Climate and Community Project (CCP) reveals just how much more lithium will be needed.
LONDON, Feb 7 (Reuters) – Cobalt prices have crashed over the last six months with demand growth slowing just as a wave of new supply washes through the market. After hitting a four-year high of $40 per lb in May last year, cobalt has slumped to $17 per lb, extending a long history of boom-and-bust price cycles.
There were hopes that this time might be different, thanks to rising demand from the electric vehicle (EV) sector but not all battery inputs are equal when it comes to the bullish narrative around “green” metals.
Read the room next time you step into a jewellers. You may sense a gnaw of anxiety. The cause is laid bare in Nothing Lasts Forever, Jason Kohn’s funny, caustic documentary of panic in the diamond industry.
Having just about persuaded consumers to forget its grisly history in African war zones, the existential threat to the trade these days is “synthetics”: lab-grown stones impossible to tell from the real thing. Technology is killing even bling.
A copper deficit is set to inundate global markets throughout 2023 — and one analyst predicts the shortfall could potentially extend throughout the rest of the decade.
The world is currently facing a global copper shortage, fueled by increasingly challenging supply streams in South America and higher demand pressures. Copper is a leading pulse check for economic health due to its incorporation in various uses such as electrical equipment and industrial machinery.
https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/
Vic Fedeli predicts exciting year ahead for Northern Ontario on the critical minerals development front
There’s a window of opportunity for Ontario to be part of the electrical vehicle revolution, said Vic Fedeli, the province’s economic development minister, and Ontario needs to move fast to secure its global position.
Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and Northern Ontario’s place in the global transition to clean energy technologies took up much of Fedeli’s speech before a Greater Sudbury Chamber of Commerce crowd on Feb. 6.
The transition from fossil fuels to electrified transportation and renewable energy is predicated on two assumptions: that there will be enough raw materials to make this change; and that eventually we won’t require fossil fuels anymore. Both of these claims are false.
The United States and its allies, such as Canada, the UK, the European Union, Australia, Japan and South Korea, face a dilemma when it comes to the global electrification of the transportation system and the switch from fossil fuels to cleaner forms of energy.
Joseph Stiglitz is testifying in a Sudbury, Ont., courtroom why First Nations may have been short-changed under a revenue-sharing treaty signed in 1850
He is a Nobel prize winner, former vice president of the World Bank and one of the globe’s most famous economists.
And this week Joseph Stiglitz is testifying in a Sudbury, Ontario courtroom, explaining why First Nations in the province’s centre-north may have been short-changed by more than $100 billion under a revenue-sharing treaty signed in 1850.
As Freddy Jolly’s pickup truck travels the dusty roads through the spruce forests outside Nemaska, Que., the one radio station fades in and out, and Jolly fills the gaps between country ballads with conversation. “There are fewer moose than before due to logging,” Jolly says as he scans the horizon.
This is Eeyou Istchee in northern Quebec, the traditional land of the James Bay Cree, with a surface area equivalent to two-thirds of France. The 65-year-old Cree hunter and trapper knows the land well and has agreed to take a visitor to see sites where lithium mines are under construction.
