Can the Sault plug into Ring of Fire potential? – by Dan Bellerose (The Sault Star – May 24, 2011)

The Sault Star is the daily newspaper in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario and is owned and operated by Osprey Media.

It has the potential to be one of the most significant mineral developments in Ontario in over a century.

Think of what the discovery of nickel meant to Sudbury, and gold to Red Lake and Timmins, that is the potential of the remote mineral-rich Ring of Fire in the James Bay Lowlands, about 500 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay.

It’s a vast deposit of more than 5,100 square kilometres of chromite, copper, zinc, gold and kimberlite and communities throughout Northern Ontario are scrambling to make themselves known to the development’s major players.

Cliffs Natural Resources, known in these parts as the primary iron-ore supplier of Essar Steel Algoma, wants to begin mining and processing a world-class chromite deposit within The Ring within five years, by 2015.

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In China’s Orbit – by Niall Ferguson (Wall Street Journal – November 18, 2010)

The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. Published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, the Journal has the largest newspaper circulation in the United States.

Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School. His next book, “Civilization: The West and the Rest,” will be published in March.

After 500 years of Western predominance, Niall Ferguson argues, the world is tilting back to the East.

“We are the masters now.” I wonder if President Barack Obama saw those words in the thought bubble over the head of his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, at the G20 summit in Seoul last week. If the president was hoping for change he could believe in—in China’s currency policy, that is—all he got was small change. Maybe Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner also heard “We are the masters now” as the Chinese shot down his proposal for capping imbalances in global current accounts. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke got the same treatment when he announced a new round of “quantitative easing” to try to jump start the U.S. economy, a move described by one leading Chinese commentator as “uncontrolled” and “irresponsible.”

“We are the masters now.” That was certainly the refrain that I kept hearing in my head when I was in China two weeks ago. It wasn’t so much the glitzy, Olympic-quality party I attended in the Tai Miao Temple, next to the Forbidden City, that made this impression. The displays of bell ringing, martial arts and all-girl drumming are the kind of thing that Western visitors expect. It was the understated but unmistakable self-confidence of the economists I met that told me something had changed in relations between China and the West.

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How Will Resources Constrain Asian Growth? – Jack Lifton (Resource Investor.com – December 9, 2011)

ResourceInvestor.com is a free service for the global community of individual and institutional investors, financial and mining professionals, and other stakeholders who can use the website for important research on natural resources investment strategy.

Jack Lifton is a leading authority on the sourcing and end use trends of rare and strategic metals. He is a founding principal of Technology Metals Research LLC and president of Jack Lifton LLC, consulting for institutional investors doing due diligence on metal-related opportunities.

Jack Lifton

The absolute importance of access to natural resources for a country’s future, can be well-illustrated by speculating on what could happen to China’s seemingly unstoppable growth, if the production rate of all metals does not grow in parallel to the world economy.

Figure 1 below, appeared last month in the Wall Street Journal, in an article by the distinguished British historian Niall Ferguson, titled “In China’s Orbit”. It projects GDP growth over the next 40 years for the world’s currently wealthiest (the USA) and the world’s two most populous nations (China and India). In his article, Professor Ferguson touches upon the extraordinary growth in China’s demand for metals over the last generation, but he doesn’t either examine the situation in depth nor draw any conclusions about this rate of growth as a limiting factor on the possibility of further such growth. Look at the chart, and I will then make a few remarks.

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Rare Earth Elements and Strategic Mineral Policy – by Jaakko Kooroshy, Rem Korteweg and Marjolein de Ridder (2010)

This report was produced at the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS) and TNO

Introduction

Newspapers report almost daily on international tensions around ‘strategic’ or ‘critical’ minerals such as rare earth elements. The temporary freeze of rare earth exports from China to Japan in retaliation of the capture of a Chinese sea captain near the disputed Senkaku islands in the East China sea is but one example of the strategic use of non-fuel minerals in international relations today.

Ensuring and safeguarding access to rare earth elements and other strategic mineral resources is quickly emerging as a strategic policy priority and a number of states are designing and implementing new policies aimed at increasing material security.

By analyzing the strategic mineral policies of three countries, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan, this report provides an insight into what drives policies on strategic non-fuel mineral resources.

Mineral policies do not develop in a vacuum.

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Pentagon in Race for Raw Materials – by Liam Pleven (Wall Street Journal – May 3, 2010)

The Wall Street Journal is an American English-language international daily newspaper. Published in New York City by Dow Jones & Company, the Journal has the largest newspaper circulation in the United States. Liam Pleven at liam.pleven@wsj.com

Stockpiling Minerals Takes on Greater Urgency as Global Supply Gets Squeezed

The U.S. military is gearing up to become a more active player in the global scramble for raw materials, as competition from China and other countries raises concerns about the cost and availability of resources deemed vital to national security.

The Defense Department holds in government warehouses a limited number of critical materials—such as cobalt, tin and zinc—worth about $1.6 billion as of late 2008. In the coming weeks, the Pentagon is likely to present a plan for Congress to overhaul its stockpiling program.

The new plan, dubbed the Strategic Materials Security Program by the Pentagon, would give the military greater power to decide what it stockpiles and how it goes about buying the materials. It would also speed up decision making at a time when military technology evolves rapidly, commodity markets swing widely and countries around the world fight to secure access to natural resources.

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Harold Morrow: ‘Mr. Potash’ knew where to look for Saskatchewan’s new buried treasure – by Nora Ryell (Globe and Mail – February 08, 2011)

 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.

Working for the government and as a consultant, he helped big players develop a new industry

Harold Morrow’s involvement in early mining exploration first led him to the gold mines of Northern Ontario, but it was in the Devonian layers of sedimentary rock found in Saskatchewan that he discovered a real find.

As he would later write to a colleague: “The Saskatchewan potash deposit is the most valuable single ore body ever found in Canada. … The Texas Gulf Kidd Creek ore body (in Timmins, Ont.), although a great one, will be gone and forgotten centuries before the demise of the Saskatchewan potash deposits.”

An area once entirely under ancient seas was uniquely rich in deposits of potassium chloride – or potash, as it is now commonly called, which is used almost exclusively in fertilizers. What started out as the “gold bug” quickly became the “potash bug,” and Morrow became a leading consultant in how to find it.

He was so successful at discovering deposits that in 1966 he was named “Mr. Potash” by the editor of the Northern Miner newspaper.

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Memorial for dead banned at Canadian [Barrick] gold mine in Africa – by Jocelyn Edwards (Toronto Star – May 24, 2011)

The Toronto Star, which has the largest circulation in Canada, has an enormous impact on Canada’s federal and provincial politics as well as shaping public opinion. This article was originally published May 24, 2011.

TARIME, TANZANIA—Families of the five men killed by security forces of a Canadian mine are furious after that were denied permission to hold a memorial service Tuesday at African Barrick’s gold mine in North Mara.

“When you have lost your loved ones and you are in a grieving period, for someone to do this to you, it is not right. It would be better if they would take you too,” said Magige Gati, whose 27-year-old son Emmanuel Magige was among the dead.

Five men were killed, and at least a dozen injured, when about 800 locals clashed with security on May 16 at a mine in the area owned by African Barrick, a subsidiary of Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corporation.

The clash is the latest episode in an ongoing conflict between residents of North Mara, who come to the mine to scavenge for gold and Barrick, which took over the mine in 2006.

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