December 16, 2012 – Republic of Mining

More than just costs are a concern at Barrick Gold’s $8.5B Pascua-Lama megamine – by Catherine Solyom (National Post – December 16, 2012)

December 16, 2012

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Pascua-Lama, on the border of Chile and Argentina — Standing on a precipice 5,200 metres above sea level, the air is thin and the vistas are long.

Just breathing is difficult at this altitude, with a howling wind disturbing the utter, majestic silence of the snow-capped Andes mountains, threatening to blow you over the edge. You’d think you were alone at the top of the world.

But what happens up here in Pascua-Lama, where Canadian mining giant Barrick Gold is developing the first open-pit gold mine to straddle two countries, will have a huge impact on the people living in the valleys below on both sides of the border — for better or for worse.

After more than a decade of intense debate — often played out in front of the Canadian embassies in Santiago and Buenos Aires — the mine is set to open in 2014, and to produce 850,000 ounces of gold a year, as well as vast amounts of copper and silver.

Up to 10,000 people, many of them from the villages closest to the mine, will be employed during the construction phase and another 1,650 will operate the mine for at least the next 25 years.

[Ontario] Grits extend energy rebate – by Sebastien Perth (Sudbury Star – December 15, 2012)

December 16, 2012

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

A provincial program that saves millions in energy costs for large industries in Northern Ontario has been extended for three years.

Northern Development and Mines Minister and Sudbury MPP Rick Bartolucci made the announcement Friday at Xstrata Nickel’s operations in Falconbridge.

The Northern Industrial Electricity Rate program can provide a company with a rebate of two-cents per kilowatt hour up to a maximum of $20 million a year. The program was set to expire in March, but will now be in effect until 2016.

To access Northern Industrial Electricity Rate funding, companies must provide a plan showing how they will reduce their energy consumption.

“They have to develop a plan that has to be in discussion with the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines and the ministry of Environment then they have to make sure that the plan is implemented and we follow to make sure that energy conservation is taking place,” Bartolucci said. “You see the success of the program and the importance of the program and if I am still where I am now (in the future), I’d be advocating for the program because it’s so good.”

2012 is Northern Ontario’s 100th birthday – by Gordon Dowsley (Toronto Star – December 16, 2012)

December 16, 2012

The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Gordon Dowsley, a consultant in international development with specialization in the financial sector, teaches courses at the seniors center in Oshawa on history, geography and art.

Before the year slips away, we should celebrate the centennial of Northern Ontario. Not of its existence of course, for its Canadian Shield rock has been here for a billion years. However, its political boundaries were only established in 1912.

After Confederation, Ontario did not extend much beyond the Great Lakes. But in 1870 the new Canada bought all the land draining into Hudson Bay for £300,000. That launched a battle over which provincial government ruled what.

In 1884, the eastern border of Northern Ontario and Quebec was set, a straight line bisecting Lake Timiskaming. This set off a series of events led by one Charles Farr. He had surveyed land around Hailebury, named after his school in England, and New Liskeard.

This is not shield country but the Great Clay Belt. Cloaked in all the biases of his era, he lobbied Queen’s Park to settle the clay belt and set up a wall of English Protestants in the face of the French Catholics across the lake.

The oil deal that paved China’s path to Nexen – and beyond – by Jacquie McNish and Carrie Tait (Globe and Mail – December 16, 2012)

December 16, 2012

Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

TORONTO and CALGARY – The foreign investment rush that prompted Ottawa to cordon off Alberta’s oil sands can be traced to a furious pre-dawn game of Pictionary in the Chinese city of Panjin nearly three years ago.

Four Calgary oil executives had travelled to the city, three hours north of Beijing, to promote a vast Alberta oil sands deposit local geologists had never seen and a planned thermal drilling technology they didn’t understand. Growing frustrated, the Canadians grabbed markers and decorated a nearby easel, sketching fat rocks, granules of sand, buried oil reservoirs and complex math formulas. At first, even an attending Chinese translator was bewildered.

Although the game took time, there was magic in those markers. In the middle of the night, shortly before 3 a.m., officials of China’s Great Wall Drilling Co. began nodding their heads. Soon the nondescript office in a squat, stone building shook with laughter as relieved English and Chinese officials bowed and congratulated each other.

“It was a breakthrough,” says Hilary Foulkes, a former executive vice-president of Penn West Petroleum Ltd., who led the presentation for what she believed was a long-shot bid to attract scarce capital to the company’s Peace River oil sands property in Northern Alberta. “We made a connection and there was a camaraderie and trust that was developed.”

Calls for New Caledonia’s nickel profits to be shared – Radio Australia (October 18, 2012)

December 16, 2012

http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/radio

But the benefits aren’t reaching many New Caledonians; in particular, young indigenous Kanaks, among whom unemployment is 38 per cent.

Presenter: Geraldine Coutts
Speaker: Professor Catherine Ris, University of New Caledonia

RIS: New Caledonia is a quite rich country, especially compared to other countries in the Pacific Islands, but it’s a very unequal country. Income distribution, experience, [there are] big, huge disparities. Even people, even different ethnic groups and also between areas even, if you are living in the south of New Caledonia you are not living in the same conditions than if you are living in the north, or in the islands province.

And one of the reasons for that is the school achievement already defers according to ethnicity. School achievement, if we split the population between Kanaks – that’s the indigenous people of New Caledonia – and non-Kanak people, we see for example that only three per cent of Kanak people graduate from higher education, compared to 23 per cent from non-Kanak people. And this disparity in school achievement also implies of course disparities in access to employment, labour market outcomes and to income distribution.