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It’s not just mining. Refining holds U.S. back on minerals – by James Marshall (E&E News – Greenwire – July 14, 2021)

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Republicans are sensing a vulnerability in the White House’s avowed allegiance to renewable energy, questioning whether the Biden administration will embrace mining projects to ramp up the United States’ access to the minerals vital to building electric vehicles, wind turbines and solar panels.

They have taken aim at a Biden administration decision to delay a land swap that would facilitate copper mining on sacred Apache land and another to postpone orders to open Alaskan land to mineral development (E&E Daily, April 29).

But experts say mining expansion isn’t a silver bullet in the United States’ quest to become competitive with China on critical minerals during the energy transition. Instead, they argue that the key problem the Biden administration must swiftly address is farther up the supply chain: the dearth of U.S. mineral processing plants and refineries.

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U.K. Fraud Unit Finds Bribe Network Behind World’s Cobalt Hub – by Michael J. Kavanagh (Bloomberg News – July 14, 2021)

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/

(Bloomberg) — U.K. prosecutors have told Swiss authorities they have proof of an alleged money-laundering ring spanning from Africa to Europe that paid almost $380 million in cash bribes to authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Companies repeatedly bribed officials to further their business interests in the mineral-rich nation, according to the Swiss court judgment that cited information from U.K. prosecutors. Congo is Africa’s biggest producer of copper and supplies about 70% of the world’s cobalt, a critical input for the batteries that power electric vehicles.

The $379 million that was allegedly siphoned off in bribes over a five-year period is more than Congo’s total spending on health care last year.

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Copper mining is Opec on crack, so why is the price falling? – by Frik Els (Mining.com – July 13, 2021)

https://www.mining.com/

Much like the reference in this piece’s headline, it’s a cliché to call a country the Saudia Arabia of something.

The top search suggestion at the moment is the Saudi Arabia of wind. That’s Boris Johnson’s dream for the UK and from a leader with an affinity for hot air, perhaps not unexpected.

The Saudi Arabia of lithium query takes you to a story about Chile, which is wrong. Neither is it Afghanistan as this article in the NYT would have it. It’s Nevada; Elon Musk confirmed it last year.

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Can Reddit’s silver ‘apes’ beat the market? – by Peter Hobson (Globe and Mail – July 14, 2021)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Kerry Kraker, 56, has worked in kitchens all his life. Since March he’s spent around US$100 a week – half his spare cash – on silver coins. He’s part of a growing social-media movement who say they are buying bars and coins for protection from a coming age of inflation.

Thanks to a community of like-minded silver “stackers” gathering on social-media platform Reddit Inc., Seattle-based Mr. Kraker says he also feels empowered.

“They are so encouraging and so convinced in the changes they can cause,” Mr. Kraker, who lost his home in the financial crisis, told Reuters.

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The Long Saga of Arrested Development in Northern Ontario – by Livio Di Matteo (Northern Economist Blog – July 14, 2021)

https://northerneconomist.blogspot.com/

Ontario has suffered from slowing economic growth over the course of the 20th century but nowhere in the province has the problem been as severe as in northern Ontario.

From 1990 to 2005, total employment in Ontario grew 23 percent and real per capita GDP grew by 17 percent. However, even omitting the pandemic year, going from 2005 to 2019, Ontario’s total employment grew only 15 percent while real per capita GDP grew by 8 percent.

There is a similar trend of slowing employment growth after 2005 on a regional basis but some regions – especially the north – have fared worse than others. The most alarming picture comes from a glance at the overall employment growth picture from 1990 to 2019 (we need to omit 2020 because it is the pandemic year and makes things look even worse).

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Doubting the commodity supercycle? It’s now a cheaper bet – by David Berman (Globe and Mail – July 14, 2021)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Commodity prices have been struggling in recent weeks, pausing this year’s remarkable run on materials stocks and raising the question of whether the opportunity for investors has ended.

But some observers remain convinced that a commodities “supercycle” – an extended period of strong demand for raw materials – is continuing, offering a buying opportunity for anyone who missed the first stage of the rally.

“Although most of the world continues to battle the COVID-19 pandemic, rapidly increasing vaccination rates combined with revved-up economic stimulus has significantly improved the outlook (and sentiment) for commodities,” Orest Wowkodaw, an analyst at Bank of Nova Scotia, said in a report this week.

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Europe Plans Aggressive New Laws to Phase Out Fossil Fuels – by Somini Sengupta (New York Times – July 13, 2021)

https://www.nytimes.com/

European officials are preparing to introduce ambitious legislation designed to wean one of the world’s biggest and most polluting economies off fossil fuels far more quickly than other nations have pledged to do. The proposals could include phasing out coal as an electricity source as well as imposing tariffs on polluting imports — an idea with the potential to set off global trade disputes.

The European Commission’s package of around a dozen legislative proposals, expected on Wednesday, is designed to swiftly reduce the emissions of planet-warming gases and meet an ambitious climate goal, already enshrined in law: The 27-nation bloc has said it will cut its emissions of greenhouse gases by 55 percent by 2030, compared to 1990 levels.

The legislation is expected to be in sharp contrast to vague aspirations by various other countries to neutralize their emissions by midcentury. “It’s not just a big promise,” said Jennifer Tollmann, a Berlin-based analyst for E3G, a research and advocacy group that works on climate policy.

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Could rare earths peak in Tanzania? – by Scarlett Evans (Mining Technology – July 14, 2021)

https://www.mining-technology.com/

A fast-growing staple of the green energy revolution, rare earth elements are used to produce electric magnets found in everything from electric vehicles (EVs) to direct drive wind turbines.

With tightening global emissions restrictions driving up demand for EVs, cashing in on deposits of rare earth materials is a savvy way to secure a seat at the table of the blossoming green economy, and finding alternative sources to China has become a priority amidst continued trade tensions.

Peak Resources’ Ngualla project is based on one of the largest and highest-grade undeveloped neodymium praseodymium (NdPr) deposits in the world, located in southern Tanzania. Rare earths remain a newly-emerging product and while deposits in Tanzania are high-grade, Peak Resources’ project marks the first rare earths mine in the country.

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‘A race against time’: First Nations, towns in northwestern Ontario prepare to evacuate as wildfires approach – by Logan Turner (CBC News Thunder Bay – July 14, 2021)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/

First Nations and towns in northwestern Ontario are monitoring the weather forecast and making urgent plans for evacuations as firefighting crews race to bring wildfires across the region under control.

“Our community is in a race against time,” said Pikangikum First Nation Chief Dean Owen in a written statement. “With so many communities being evacuated due to the fires, we are all competing for limited resources and space.”

The First Nation, which is about 100 kilometres northwest of Red Lake, Ont., and has an on-reserve population of more than 3,000, declared a state of emergency on Monday night, and requested that about 500 to 800 “vulnerable people” be evacuated from Pikangikum. It marks the third time in three years community members have been forced to flee due to forest fire and smoke threats.

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Black lung, a scourge of the past, still plagues Illinois mines – by Kari Lydersen (Energy News Network – July 14, 2021)

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When Robert Cohen learned about black lung disease as a medical student, he assumed it was a relic of the past. “I thought it was something that happened in the times of Émile Zola” — whose 1885 book “Germinal” chronicled the horrors of France’s coal industry. “I didn’t think I’d see it in my practice.”

Almost four decades later, he still treats miners from downstate Illinois, their lungs scarred from breathing coal dust. They trek up to Chicago, sometimes looking out of place in the sleek hospital waiting room on Chicago’s ritzy Gold Coast, where Cohen sees patients.

“The nurses love them, they are so down to earth,” said Cohen, who also founded a black lung clinic at Chicago’s public county hospital, serving miners from around the region, including many who had migrated to Chicago from Appalachia after mines there closed.

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Who should pay when projects fail after Indigenous rights claims? – by Shiri Pasternak (Globe and Mail – July 14, 2021)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Shiri Pasternak is a professor of criminology at Toronto’s X University. She has changed this affiliation in solidarity with Indigenous faculty because of the legacy of the institution’s namesake in the residential school system.

In early July, Foxgate Developments Inc. announced that it was shutting down construction at the 1492 Land Back Lane camp on reclaimed Six Nations land in Ontario. The site of the proposed housing subdivision called McKenzie Meadows had been permanently occupied by community members since last summer.

But unfinished business remains. Foxgate wants someone to pay for their losses – specifically, $200-million in damages from the Ontario and federal governments, the Ontario Provincial Police, and others for neglecting to remove the occupation.

They also want governments to affirm that title to the lands is legally held by Foxgate and not subject to a land claim by the Six Nations.

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Can Environmentalists Handle the Truth about Mining? – by Jack Lifton (Investor Intel – July 13, 2021)

https://investorintel.com/

Solar panels and wind turbines cannot even begin to supply the concentrated
power needed for smelters, steel furnaces, copper refining, aluminum
production, and myriads of other energy intensive necessary processes.

The recovery of the amount of non-fuel natural resources necessary for the world, or even just the USA, or the EU, or China, to go “green” would simultaneously entail the construction of a massively enlarged minerals processing industry the likes of which the world has not seen since the creation and growth of the steel industry, which is and will remain the structural backbone of our civilization.

Much of the sourcing and processing infrastructure that is needed for its own domestic consumption of natural resources has already been accomplished by China.

But for the rest of the world, such resource recovery and processing onto useful forms at that “greening” scale would require the diversion of a significant percentage of national GDPs for decades.

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Top-10 Canadian base metal and uranium explorers and developers (Mining.com – July 13, 2021)

https://www.mining.com/

Demand for greener energy has put companies with uranium and base metal projects under the spotlight. Here’s a list of the top ten Canadian-headquartered base metal and uranium juniors with no production. The ranking is based on the companies’ market capitalization as of June 3, and compiled by MiningIntelligence.

NexGen Energy – Market capitalization: C$2.7 billion ($2.3 billion)

NexGen Energy’s (TSX: NXE; NYSE: NXE) market cap has increased fivefold from last year, pushing it from third to first place in this year’s top ten ranking.

The exploration and development company’s valuation has been boosted as the spot price for uranium edged higher in May to pass $32 per lb., and comes after several years in which uranium was trading in the $25-30 per lb. price range.

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The Untapped Potential of Nevada’s Cortez Trend (Investing News Network – July 13, 2021)

https://investingnews.com/

The Cortez trend is the lesser-known relative of the famous Carlin trend — the Nevada site home to the most productive accumulation of gold deposits in North America.

In the last quarter of a century, the Cortez trend has been a prolific and profitable site, but experts believe that the Cortez fault corridor could be older, larger and far more valuable than Carlin over the longer term.

And with Nevada continuing to be one of the best regions for gold mining, it’s no surprise why companies operating in this region present a desirable investment opportunity. In Q2 2020 alone, Barrick Gold’s (TSX:ABX,NYSE:GOLD) Carlin project was the largest global mining operation, producing 382 koz — a 105 percent increase over Q2 2019.

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Ontario government has made COVID economic pain even worse – by Livio Di Matteo (Fraser Institute Blog – July 13, 2021)

https://www.fraserinstitute.org/

With much of the economic attention in Ontario focused on reopening in the pandemic’s wake, it’s easy to lose sight of the long-term picture. While the pandemic was an unforeseen shock to provincial employment and income, it remains that Ontario has seen weak employment and income growth for much of the 21st century with the decline in growth rates settling in after 2005.

Consider this. From 1990 to 2005, total employment in Ontario grew 23 per cent and real per capita GDP grew by 17 per cent. However, even omitting the COVID year, going from 2005 to 2019, Ontario’s total employment grew only 15 per cent while real per capita GDP grew by 8 per cent.

In the case of employment, this pattern of slowing growth repeats itself across Ontario’s economic regions with a range that is alarming. Indeed, all Ontario economic regions saw lower employment growth from 2005 to 2019.

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