The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous impact and influence on Canada’s political and business elite as well as the rest of the country’s print, radio and television media.

This quote was from the June 14, 2010 edition of the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business section.

Gordon Pitts – Globe and Mail Report on Business Reporter - During the rationalization of 2006-2007, did the Canadian mining industry get hollowed out?

Teck Resources Ltd. CEO Don Lindsay – “Yes, hollowing out did occur. Noranda, Falconbridge, Inco, and Alcan all went quickly. They were leading companies that employed a lot of people – and they required services, from finance to legal, accounting and engineering. There is no question that has diminished substantially, and it is a loss for Canada. We said so at the time and people didn’t accept those views and now, people realize how much Canada lost.

Having said that, the mining industry in Canada is as entrepreneurial as you will find. New companies get built up to take the place of the Norandas and Falconbridges. But there will be a gap for quite a few years.

I can assure you this would never happen in Australia; it would never happen in Chile. People build national champions in other countries. In the U.S. and Britain, they support and admire their champions. For some reason we didn’t take that approach.”

For the entire article, please go to the Globe and Mail website: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/managing/at-the-top/tecks-don-lindsay-weathers-the-storm/article1602615/

Last Saturday’s (June 12, 2010) Globe and Mail’s Report on Business article on Nickel Pig Iron and its hyped headlines that inferred serious trouble for Sudbury, Canada’s largest nickel producing region was bit overblown. While the subject of Nickel Pig Iron has made a major impact in the global nickel markets, reporter Andy Hoffman had overlooked a few key issues that significantly downplay the impact of Nickel Pig Iron on the Sudbury Basin, which remains the richest mining region in North America and among the top ten most significant globally.

Nickel Pig Iron has been around for at least half a decade or longer. It will probably put a cap on the price of nickel though one very knowledgable source feels the $8.50 level mentioned in the Globe and Mail article is at the low end. When you factor in rising labour costs in China, the cost of power and the environmental impacts in the Philippines and Indonesia, the cost per pound is really in the $12.00 range.

I might add the Nickel Pig Iron is in reality “Dirty Nickel.” The processing of the material in blast furnaces in China is an environmental nightmare. In addition, the small companies that supply the material to China are probably not restoring the strip-mined jungle that is the source of this low grade nickel ore. Those are the companies that NGOs should be going after, not environmentally responsible corporations like Vale, Barrick, BHP-Billiton or Teck.

The high-quality pure nickel produced in the Sudbury Basin is done under strict first-world enviromental, health and safety standards. The rich Sudbury Basin ore also contains copper, gold, silver, platinum, cobalt and a few other metals. Nickel Pig Iron only gets cash credits for the iron content.

In addition, Nickel Pig Iron can only be used for low-end stainless steel products. Jet engines and many high-end industrial applications must use pure nickel to produce the specialized stainless steel and nickel-based super alloys for their applications.

And one more point, digging up vast tracks of virgin jungle and shipping this “low-grade nickel mud” to China adds very little sustainable value to the countries allowing this to happen, except to well-connected landowners or a few junior mining companies. As the world begins to understand the unsustainable mining practices that the production of Nickel Pig Iron entails, there may be more opposition to its use. Read the rest of this entry »