Twitter

Canada’s Wheaton Precious Metals plans London listing amid surge in gold prices – by Kumutha Ramanathan (Yahoo Finance UK – September 21, 2020)

https://sports.yahoo.com/

Canada’s Wheaton Precious Metals (WPM) has announced plans to list on the London Stock Exchange (LSE.L) as demand for precious metals from investors has been surging amid turbulence in equity markets of late.

Wheaton, one of the world’s largest companies involved in buying gold and silver, has a market capitalisation of about $23bn (£17.6bn), and is listed in Toronto and New York. On those indices, its shares have risen more than 70% this year.

Gold prices have risen this year by roughly 28% and hit a record high of above $2,000 an ounce in August. Silver has also been gaining, up 50% to $27 an ounce.

Read more

Monday mining massacre as gold, copper, iron ore prices tank – by Frik Els (Mining.com – September 21, 2020)

https://www.mining.com/

The gold price fell to its lowest in nearly two months on Monday as the US dollar strengthened and a drop on global stock markets failed to translate into safe-haven demand for the precious metal.

US gold futures fell by as much as $77.50 an ounce, or 3.9% from Friday’s settlement, hitting a low of $1,885.40 on the Comex market in New York before recovering some of those losses to trade above $1,900 by early afternoon. Trade was heavy with nearly 36m ounces exchanging hands by 2 pm.

Copper prices dropped by more than 3% from fresh 2-year highs reached on Friday but managed to stay above the pivotal $3.00 a pound level.

Read more

An Alaska Mine Project Might Be Bigger Than Acknowledged – by Henry Fountain (New York Times – September 21, 2020)

https://www.nytimes.com/

Executives overseeing the development of a long-disputed copper and gold mine in Alaska were recorded saying they expected the project to become much bigger, and operate for much longer, than outlined in the proposal that is awaiting final approval by the Army Corps of Engineers.

The executives, who were recorded in remote meetings by members of an environmental advocacy group posing as potential investors, said the project, Pebble Mine, could potentially operate for 160 years or more beyond the current proposal of 20 years. And it could quickly double its output after the initial two decades, they said.

“Once you have something like this in production why would you want to stop?” Ronald W. Thiessen, chief executive of Northern Dynasty Minerals, the parent company of Pebble Limited Partnership, said in one of the recordings.

Read more

Tesla “battery day” a possible blow to cobalt miners – by Cecilia Jamasmie (Mining.com – September 21, 2020)

https://www.mining.com/

Elon Musk’s electric car company Tesla hosts its annual shareholder meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 22, followed by the highly anticipated “battery technology day”, a worldwide live-streamed event during which the firm is expected to unveil its own new type of battery cell.

Speculation points to a cobalt-free battery that uses more of less costly metals such as nickel and manganese.

Tesla currently uses the nickel rich nickel-cobalt-aluminum cathode chemistry, which has a low cobalt content of about 5%, for their cars produced outside China.

Read more

Northern Ont. mining company uses new device to keep COVID-19 off the mine property – by Len Gillis (Sudbury.com – September 19, 2020)

https://www.sudbury.com/

A Northern Ontario mining company has stepped up with a new process to fight the pandemic. New Gold Inc. mine employees near Rainy River are being tested for COVID-19 and are getting their results within a couple of hours of their test thanks to the use of a Precision Biomonitoring testing system.

Details of the system were outlined Thursday during a webinar hosted by the Sudbury branch of CIM (Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum). For New Gold, a company with a remote open pit mining operation north of Rainy River.

It has meant the company can continue working with confidence that their employees and contractors are working in a safe COVID-free environment.

Read more

Sourcing EV battery metals from deep sea claims 90% carbon footprint reduction (Financial Express – September 21, 2020)

https://www.financialexpress.com/

As the world rushes to replace internal combustion engines with electric vehicle batteries, a study suggests that polymetallic rocks found on the deep-ocean floor can be a source for hundreds of millions of tonnes of EV battery metals with dramatically lower climate impact than mining ores on land.

The study published in the Journal of Cleaner Production does a comparative life cycle assessment of battery sources, quantifying the direct and indirect emissions, disruptions to carbon sequestration services realised in the mining, processing, and refining of battery metals.

The carbon intensity of producing metals like nickel led to mounting interest in finding low-carbon metal sources, along with a plea by Tesla’s Elon Musk that promised “a giant contract” for nickel mined “efficiently and in an environmentally sensitive way.”

Read more

Barrick accepts Chilean court ruling on Pascua-Lama project closure (Mining Technology – September 21, 2020)

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

Barrick Gold has announced that it would not appeal a Chilean court’s ruling to uphold the closure order on the Chilean part of its Pascua-Lama mining project, which was imposed by the country’s environmental regulator Superintendence for the Environment (SMA).

The Pascua-Lama mine is a suspended open-pit mining project located in the Andes Mountains, on the Chilean-Argentine border.

In October 2013, Barrick Gold temporarily suspended construction activities at the Pascua-Lama citing environmental issues, political opposition, labour unrest and development costs.

Read more

COMMUNITY VOICES: Mommy, where did my little Tesla come from? – by Jeff Vaughan (Bakersfield – September 20, 2020)

https://www.bakersfield.com/

Jeff Vaughan is an independent petroleum geologist who was born and worked in Bakersfield his entire career.

This is a take on the age old question that older siblings have been pondering forever. Surely the wise and elegant stork that delivered me home is not the same demented or inebriated one that delivered my defective younger brother?

So let’s take a look at electric vehicles and where they come from in comparing them to their internally combusted siblings.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. The following is a partial list of items in an electric vehicle that come from hydrocarbons (oil and gas). Hint – plastic is made from hydrocarbons, but it is not the only petroleum product used on electric vehicles.

Read more

OPINION: Chrystia Freeland should heed debt warnings before it’s too late – by Konrad Yakabuski (Globe and Mail – September 19, 2020)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland faces growing concerns among some of the country’s leading economic thinkers that she is not taking her job seriously enough.

The nonchalance with which Ottawa is taking on hundreds of billions of dollars in new debt is starting to make business leaders antsy. Opening the floodgates was the right approach in April. Keeping them open indefinitely looks reckless.

Yet, Ms. Freeland and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have spent the past few weeks promising just that. In the run-up to next week’s Speech from the Throne, they have given little indication that they intend to heed calls to produce an exit strategy from unprecedented spending levels.

Read more

Special report: Pebble Mine, the people’s story spanning more than two decades – by Sandy Szwarc (Must Read Alaska – September 19, 2020)

Home

Pebble Mine is just weeks away from clearing the last hurdle to a federal permit − after nearly two decades of scientific, engineering and environmental studies, and wading through the permitting process.

It reached this point despite well-organized and massively-funded opposition from Outside special interests that have done everything in their power to block the permit. Across the country, many believe that those behind the opposition are grassroots environmentalists, unbiased experts, local fishermen, and Native American Indians.

But virtually none of them are who they appear to be. Attempting to mislead the public with huge media campaigns repeating the same scary sounding claims and misinformation, and efforts to stop the mine permit with an army of lawyers, their goals have nothing to do with the mine itself or saving the environment.

Read more

Mining petition to be aired, should government stand – by Michael Swan (The Catholic Register – September 20, 2020)

https://www.catholicregister.org/

If the Liberal government stands past the Sept. 23 throne speech, Martin Blanchet’s seven-year battle to get somebody with authority to look into how Canadian mining companies and others treat workers, communities and the environment in poor countries will finally get an airing in the House of Commons.

More than 6,000 people have signed a petition Blanchet launched over the summer through the Parliamentary online petition system. The petition calls for stronger investigatory powers for the Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise and Blanchet’s MP, Edmonton-Strathcona MP and NDP deputy house leader Heather McPherson, is anxious to present it in the House of Commons.

In addition to the petition, McPherson is preparing her own private members’ bill to strengthen the new system for monitoring overseas operations of Canadian companies.

Read more

With Gold Rallying, Mining CEOs Say ESG Scrutiny Is Intensifying – by Steven Frank, Yvonne Yue Li and Felix Njini (Bloomberg News – September 20, 2020)

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/

(Bloomberg) — Skyrocketing gold is providing a welcome windfall to the mining industry, but it’s also attracting a broader base of investors who are demanding greater attention to environmental, social and governance topics.

Interest in ESG issues has moved to the forefront in conversations with stakeholders in the past year, top executives said in the run-up to the Denver Gold Group’s Americas conference, a key annual event in the precious-metals world. Such talks come as investors snap up billions of dollars in stock offerings from once-shunned gold miners.

Generalists are looking at bullion because of the high prices and “the strong argument that the gold price can go higher,” according to Sean Boyd, chief executive officer of Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd., a top-10 gold producer.

Read more

Russian Indigenous communities are begging Tesla not to get its nickel from this major polluter – by Maddie Stone (Grist.org – September 21, 2020)

https://grist.org/

Every year in August and September, the people of Ust’-Avam, a remote indigenous community located in the Taimyr region of the Russian Arctic, toss nets into the Avam River to catch tugunok fish, an important traditional food.

This year, the community stopped fishing early, around the start of the month. There were no tugunok to be found. Nor could locals find the fish at other common sites along the river basin fed by Lake Pyasino, which lies just a few miles north of the industrial city of Norilsk.

Gennady Shchukin, a member of the Dolgan ethnic group, has little doubt about the culprit: In late May, a reserve fuel tank at a power plant near Norilsk burst open, flooding local waterways with an estimated 23,000 tons of diesel oil.

Read more

Argonaut takes a shine to high-grade gold at Dubreuilville: Open-pit developer looks to expand gold resource base – by Staff (Northern Ontario Business – September 18, 2020)

https://www.northernontariobusiness.com/

Argonaut Gold continues to find high-grade gold beside and below where it wants to carve out an open-pit mine near Dubreuilville.

The Toronto mine developer released results on Sept.16 from an exploration drill program specifically targeting high-grade mineralization near the planned pit in northeastern Ontario.

Since July 2019, the company has discovered a number of high-grade gold bearing structures trending westward from Alamos Gold’s Island Gold Mine, their neighbour to the east.

Read more

Ford reveals plan for $700M plant, jobs at Rouge plus all-electric Ford F-150 secrets – by Phoebe Wall Howard (Detroit Free Press – September 17, 2020)

https://www.freep.com/

Ford Motor Co. revealed Thursday an audacious plan to build a $700 million plant at the Rouge complex that would create the first all-electric F-150, the nation’s bestselling vehicle.

“This plant mirrors the story of America and American manufacturing,” said Bill Ford Jr., executive chairman, during an event at the manufacturing site livestreamed on YouTube and Facebook.

“This is where the industrial revolution took hold, where the arsenal of democracy was forged, where parents and grandparents and great grandparents built not only cars and trucks but their own American dreams.

Read more