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OPINION: BHP approach to Anglo CEO signals end of Mackenzie era is nearing – by Stephen Bartholomeusz (Sydney Morning Herald – September 26, 2019)

https://www.smh.com.au/

Reports that miner BHP has approached Anglo American’s chief executive to sound him out as Andrew Mackenzie’s successor signals that the end of the BHP chief’s six-year tenure is now close.

Bloomberg has reported that BHP has contacted Anglo American CEO Mark Cutifani twice this year but so far has been rejected. Cutifani, an Australian, has been the chief executive of Anglo since 2013 and is credited with a massive turnaround of a group that was in crisis when he was appointed.

BHP doesn’t comment on its succession planning but it has become increasingly apparent that the process – which is a long-term and continuous one – has been intensifying this year.

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REFILE-Papua New Guinea to review resource extraction laws next year (Reuters U.S. – September 25, 2019)

https://www.reuters.com/

TOKYO, Sept 26 (Reuters) – Papua New Guinea plans to begin working with foreign investors next year to review natural resource extraction laws that are more than 40 years old, the country’s petroleum minister said on Thursday at an industry confernce in Japan.

Most of the country’s resource extraction laws stem from before it won independence in 1975, and the government, which came to power in May, is looking to ensure the country benefits more from its huge petroleum and mineral resources.

Papua New Guinea is already in the process of revising its Mining Act, and next year will look to update its petroleum legislation to match regulations in other nations that produce liquefied natural gas (LNG).

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Basic Facts About the Ring of Fire Including FNs Traditional Territories – by Stan Sudol

This post was originally published last year. A lot has happened in the Ring of Fire since then so I thought I would repost with some updates and interesting links. Some of the most significant developments have been the cancellation of the March 26, 2014 Regional “Framework Agreement” and the election of a new Chief for Eabametoong. On June 17th of this year, Harvey Yesno, former Grand Chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation was elected replacing former Chief Elizabeth Atlookan.

Eabametoong is the largest populated community among the five isolated FNs in the Ring of Fire and is also one of the original signatories to Treaty 9 in 1905 along with Marten Falls. I will elaborate on the importance of Treaty 9 in a future update.

Chief Yesno seems to be a very pragmatic, pro-business individual who sees economic development on Eabametoong’s tradiational territories as a way of improving the standard of living in his community. This link https://bit.ly/2wZDqi5 brings you to a previous keynote speech he gave in 2014 while this link is a recent profile in Northern Ontario Business https://bit.ly/2nbGm9v .

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BHP Approached Anglo American Chief Mark Cutifani for CEO Role – by Thomas Biesheuvel and David Stringer (Bloomberg News – September 25, 2019)

https://finance.yahoo.com/

(Bloomberg) — BHP Group has talked to Anglo American Plc Chief Executive Officer Mark Cutifani about running for the top job at the company, according to people familiar with the matter.

BHP made the approaches earlier this year and again more recently, said the people, who asked not to be identified as the process is confidential. Cutifani rebuffed the company’s advances so far, they said. BHP favors an internal hire, but also wants to speak with external candidates, the people said. Spokesmen for Anglo and BHP declined to comment.

Cutifani has said in previous interviews he planned to stay until Anglo finished its $5 billion Peruvian copper project Quellaveco, which may start production in 2022, by which time he will be in his mid-60s.

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From innocents to anxious activists — what are we doing to our kids? – by Terence Corcoran (National Post – September 24, 2019)

https://nationalpost.com/

At a time when the world is safer than any in history, children are being taught that they live on the brink of a variety of existential threats

Fifty years ago, American TV personality Art Linkletter hosted Kids Says the Darndest Things segments on his House Party show, a CBS radio and television feature that ran for 25 years between 1945 and 1969. During the segments, Linkletter interviewed precocious children under the age of 12, mostly about their family lives and the foibles of their parents.

There were no child climate experts to interview, no nine-year-old boys in drag to document as they participated in pageants wearing heavy eye makeup and lipstick, no F-word spewing and dildo-waving pre-teens in movies like Good Boys to muse about.

Even as late as 1998, when comedian Bill Cosby briefly revived Kids Say the Darndest Things, the result was another stream of often hilarious malapropisms, neologisms, downright silly childish observations along with cloying and sometimes boring repartee on how the world works in the minds of seemingly articulate children.

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Hitting Reset on the Ring of Fire – (TV Ontario’s The Agenda With Steve Paikin – September 24, 2019)

 

https://www.tvo.org/theagenda

The Agenda’s Steve Paikin interviews Marten Fall’s Chief Bruce Achneepineskum, Noront Resources President and CEO Alan Coutts and former Supreme Court of Canada Justice, the Honourable Frank Iacobucci who is now Senior Councel at Torys Law Firm in Toronto.

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Vale to restart Onça Puma nickel complex – by Cecilia Jamasmie (Mining.com – September 24, 2019)

https://www.mining.com/

Brazil’s Vale (NYSE: VALE) has begun working on resuming operations at its $3 billion Onça Puma nickel mining complex, as the country’s Supreme Court suspended injunctions against the miner earlier this month.

Nickel mining at Onça Puma, in Brazil’s northern Pará state, has been halted since September 2017 as the company failed to undergo a requested environmental impact on local indigenous communities affected by pollution caused by the mine.

The complex, which also had to suspend nickel processing in June this year, produced a record 7,100 tonnes of nickel in the third quarter of 2017, up 29% compared with the prior three-month period and up 7.6% from the third quarter of 2016, Vale said at the time.

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Indian rare earth miner V.V. Mineral targets African assets after local ban – by Sudarshan Varadhan (Reuters Africa – September 24, 2019)

https://af.reuters.com/

NEW DELHI, Sept 24 (Reuters) – India’s V.V. Mineral, a beach sand miner hit by a domestic law which effectively banned private companies from extracting rare earth deposits, has applied for licenses to start operations in Kenya and Tanzania, the company’s chairman said on Tuesday.

V.V. Mineral was India’s largest exporter of rare earth minerals such as garnet, ilumenite and rutile over the last decade, but it started facing regulatory and legal trouble in 2013, which culminated in a blanket ban this year on beach sand mining by private companies.

“We have applied for two licenses to extract beach sand minerals in an area covering 300 square kilometers in Kenya, and a 15 square kilometre area in Tanzania,” S. Vaikundarajan, chairman and founder of V.V. Mineral told Reuters.

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Brazil to Push Forward Mining on Indigenous Land Amid Opposition – by Sabrina Valle and Luiza Ferraz (Bloomberg News – September 24, 2019)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

The Brazilian government is pushing ahead with a controversial bill that allows mining activity on indigenous lands, and it won’t give local communities any veto power, a cabinet member said.

The private sector will naturally refrain from exploring in areas if indigenous groups are against it, Alexandre Vidigal, the mining secretary at the Energy Ministry, said Tuesday in an interview.

“It is obvious that if an indigenous community opposes a certain mining activity, there won’t be a entrepreneur interested in developing it,” he said on the sidelines of an event in Rio de Janeiro. He expects the government will conclude the text of the bill by the end of the month.

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Miners push for U.S. Congress to vote on electric vehicle supply chain bills – by Ernest Scheyder (Reuters U.S. – September 23, 2019)

https://www.reuters.com/

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Mining executives eager to speed U.S. production of lithium and other metals for the burgeoning electric vehicle industry are frustrated that the U.S. Congress has yet to pass legislation designed to streamline mine permitting and fund geological studies, among other steps.

Earlier this year, Washington’s trade war with Beijing threatened to curb Chinese shipments to the United States of rare earth minerals used in defense equipment. China is also the world’s largest electric vehicle battery producer, processor of lithium and consumer of copper.

“We don’t have great clarity on what the legislative timelines are,” said Keith Phillips, chief executive of Piedmont Lithium Ltd (PLL.AX), which is developing a lithium mine in North Carolina. “This pending legislation would be a big positive” to help secure investment.

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Indian government measures disappointed mining industry – by Ajoy K Das (MiningWeekly.com – September 24, 2019)

https://www.miningweekly.com/

KOLKATA (miningweekly.com) – The Indian mining industry is unimpressed by the government’s recent cuts in corporate tax rate and lofty pronouncement of increasing mineral output by 200% over the next seven years.

The Federation of Indian Mineral Industries (FIMI) said that despite the reduction in corporate tax rate, the Indian mining industry continued to remain burdened with the highest tax rate in the world, with effective rate of 58% in case of existing mines and 54% in case of mines allocated through the auction route.

“The mining sector has a pivotal role to play in the ‘Make in India’ policy of the government. The government aims to increase mineral production by 200% in value terms over the next seven years.

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After Dumping Vale, Church of England Says Miner Has ‘Way to Go’ – by Isis Almeida and Sabrina Valle (Bloomberg News – September 24, 2019)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

The Church of England has dumped Vale SA, and it doesn’t look like the Brazilian miner will make it back into the good books any time soon.

The church sold its shares in Vale after a tailings dam collapse in January killed at least 249 people in the Brazilian town of Brumadinho. It has also blocked investments in the miner through an ethical exclusion process, according to Adam Matthews, director of ethics and engagement at the church’s pension board.

There’s a “long way to go” before the church is ready to backtrack, he said by phone before the Financial Times Commodities Americas Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where he is scheduled to speak.

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COLUMNS: We users of mineral resources should also be responsible enough to develop them – by Karl Everett (Duluth News Tribune – September 24, 2019)

https://www.duluthnewstribune.com/

Karl Everett of Duluth is a professional engineer, geologist, environmental health and safety consultant, and vice president of the Mesabi Range Geological Society.

We don’t need to buy Greenland for mineral resources; we have plenty of mineral resources to develop right here in northern Minnesota. Minnesota is the largest producer in the United States of the ferrous minerals in iron ore and taconite, which provides jobs and revenue in northern Minnesota and accounts for almost a third of the Gross Regional Product.

In addition to iron ore, northern Minnesota has one of the world’s largest copper deposits and the world’s third-largest nickel deposit. These deposits include platinum, palladium, gold, and cobalt. There are also manganese and titanium deposits located in northern Minnesota.

All these mineral resources are adjacent to existing Iron Range mines that have the existing transportation and infrastructure for the development of these sources, including power, rail systems, and port facilities for shipping. The region also has the workforce for mining.

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First Quantum weighing sale of minority stake in Zambian copper assets – by Niall McGee (Globe and Mail – September 24, 2019)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Shares in First Quantum Minerals Ltd. nosedived on Monday after it batted away speculation it could be acquired any time soon, instead saying it has held talks about selling a minority stake in some of its Zambian assets.

Last Thursday, Bloomberg reported that the Toronto-based senior copper miner had attracted takeover interest in light of its floundering share price. The Globe and Mail later reported that Chinese state-owned firm Jiangxi Copper Co. Ltd. had approached First Quantum but hadn’t yet made a formal takeover offer. First Quantum’s share price jumped a total of 20 per cent in the last two trading sessions of last week.

In a statement on Monday, First Quantum said it “has not engaged in any discussions regarding a takeover bid or other change of control transaction and has no knowledge of potential take-over bids, change of control transactions or proposals.”

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Osisko Gold grabs Barkerville, creates North Spirit Discovery – by Cecilia Jamasmie (Mining.com – September 23, 2019)

https://www.mining.com/

Canada’s Osisko Gold Royalties (TSX, NYSE: OR) is buying all the shares it doesn’t already own in fellow miner Barkerville Gold Mines, in a deal valued at C$338 million (about $255m).

The Montreal-based miner said each Barkerville shareholder would receive 0.0357 common share of Osisko for each share of Barkerville held, implying a value of C$0.58/share, based on Osisko’s Sept. 20 closing price on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

The deal gives it access to Barkerville’s touted Cariboo gold project in British Columbia, which Osisko sees as a “potentially world-class asset” with significant infrastructure in place. The company said the asset has similar attributes to Canadian Malartic mine, when it identified the opportunity.

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