https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/
The Onaping Depth project will be 2,500 metres below the existing Craig Mine
To extend its Sudbury, Ont., mining operations to 2040, Glencore plans to go very deep underground. The mining giant expects its $1.3-billion Onaping Depth project to be fully operational by 2025.
The new mine is being built around 2,500 metres below the former Craig Mine, which shut down in 2009.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Panama’s government says it has presented a final contract to Canadian miner First Quantum Minerals Ltd. as part of negotiations to resolve a tax dispute that threatens to shut down the Cobre Panama mine.
Panamanian President Laurentino Cortizo made the announcement Monday as part of a speech to the country’s national assembly, just a week after the government and company had returned to the negotiating table.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/
A revealing podcast has again brought to light the problem of slavery at Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-owned cobalt mines in the Congo and the hypocrisy of green energy advocates.
Siddharth Kara, author of Cobalt Red: How The Blood of The Congo Powers Our Lives and a visiting Harvard professor, told his host Joe Rogan about his research and findings after his visit to the mines in the Democratic Republic of The Congo (DRC). He explained to Rogan the brutal connection between lithium battery powered devices and their source of origin in the CCP-controlled cobalt mines.
The London Metal Exchange will enter 2023 with the smallest available warehouse stockpiles in at least 25 years, setting the stage for future squeezes and spikes if demand turns out stronger than expected.
Available inventories of the six main metals traded on the LME plunged by two-thirds in 2022, with aluminum’s 72% decline accounting for the bulk of the drop, while zinc shrank by 90%. Collectively, inventories not already marked for withdrawal hit the lowest level in data going back to 1997 on Thursday, and finished the year only fractionally higher.
Chinese companies that have made multimillion-dollar acquisitions in Zimbabwe will have to build lithium processing plants after the southern African nation banned the export of the metal in its raw form.
Companies must either set up local processing plants or provide proof of exceptional circumstances – and receive written permission from the government – before lithium can leave the country.
https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/
Junior mining companies drill near Batchawana Bay to unlock copper and gold potential
The Algoma district, north and east of Sault Ste. Marie, is an often overlooked area when it comes to mineral exploration. But that doesn’t mean its geology and potential isn’t any less prospective than other areas of Northern Ontario.
The district is checkered with mostly copper properties from past producing mines that operated from the turn of the last century straight into the 1960s and 1970s, their operators’ fortunes raising or falling with the commodity prices of the green metal. Other former mines produced small amounts of gold, silver, nickel, zinc and lead.
Planning to hire 600 people in 2023, with large portion of workforce drawn from local community
Seasons change, and so does the weather, but one thing remains constant in Saskatchewan: BHP Group Ltd. keeps pressing forward with Jansen, a $7.5-billion project 140 kilometres east of Saskatoon that will be the world’s largest potash mine once completed.
With billions of dollars spent in the past decade, the company has already built two mine shafts and is planning for first potash production in 2026.
Avoid bonds and be careful about stocks as governments in the developed world will start manipulating the credit system to inflate away their debt burdens, writes Russell Napier.
For the past two years, this column has focused on the key question that investors have to answer if they are to protect the purchasing power of their savings — what are the consequences of too much debt?
I have argued the consequence will be a rise in inflation that will not be matched by a rise in interest rates.
Electric Vehicle (EV) sales have seen considerable growth in recent years, reaching 9.4% of global passenger vehicle penetration in 2021, and expected to triple by 2026. S&P Global Commodities Insights estimate EV sales to grow by a compounded growth rate of over 28% over this period.
A consequence of this, battery materials have quickly become critical to the automotive supply chain with major companies establishing partnerships with both battery cell manufacturers and miners of the raw material.
LOGAR, Afghanistan — Somewhere in the Logar mountains, overlooking the highway to Kabul, Asadullah Massoud trudged up to a four-story-tall cleft. Before him was a monochromatic pattern of gray stone, save for a seam of dull, almost-black rocks. “Look there. See that black line?” he said. “That’s chromite.”
An explosion thumped in the distance. Massoud looked up, but appeared unconcerned. “That’s not fighting. We’re mining with the open-surface method, putting explosives and going from hill to hill,” he said.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/
This past summer, Power Metals Corp. chief executive officer Johnathan More fielded questions from the federal government about the roughly 5-per-cent equity position Chinese state-owned Sinomine Rare Metals Resources Co. held in his tiny exploration company. What struck him was how naive some of the queries were.
“They were coming at us saying, ‘Oh, they’re buying your company, they’re taking you over?’” he said. “I’m like, ‘no.’ This is how uneducated the government is.” Patiently, Mr. More explained that Sinomine owned a tiny, non-controlling stake, worth a mere $1.5-million.
Requiring notification on claims would have big impact on exploration: AME
The principal of free, prior and informed consent embedded in UNDRIP must apply to mineral claims in B.C., First Nations will argue in court – something that has the mining and exploration industry in B.C. worried.
First Nations, environmental groups and mining and exploration industry associations are in court today seeking intervenor status in a case that could have wide-ranging implications for mineral exploration in B.C., as well as the federal government’s critical minerals strategy, should the case succeed.
A shareholder rift over millions of dollars in executive pay at Snow Lake Resources (NASDAQ: LITM) is rattling the explorer’s plans to develop a lithium project in northwest Manitoba.
Management postponed a shareholder’s meeting today until January after an investors’ group that controls 42% of the company said it would try to vote out chief executive officer Philip Gross, chief operating officer Derek Knight and chief financial officer Mario Miranda.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Heather Exner-Pirot is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
Canada’s long-awaited critical minerals strategy, released last week by Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson, puts a plan behind the $3.8-billion the government previously announced to support critical minerals development and generally accelerate mining projects.
But while it’s encouraging to see Ottawa backing the natural resource sector in a big way, the question now is if the mining sector is interested in pursuing projects in Canada.
The global energy crisis caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine has pushed global demand for coal – the most polluting of all fossil fuels – to a record high in 2022, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Friday.
Demand for coal is set to grow 1.2% and top 8 billion metric tons for the first time ever this year, the IEA said in the latest edition of its annual coal report. This record comes only a year after countries agreed to phase down their use of coal at the United Nations’ climate conference in Glasgow.
