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Day: March 12, 2015

NEWS RELEASE: Wataynikaneyap Power ownership grows to 20 First Nation communities and project receives key approval

http://wataypower.ca/

Click here for an updated preliminary business plan: http://wataypower.ca/sites/default/files/Wataynikaneyap%20Preliminary%20Business%20Plan%20-%20November%2028%202014.pdf

To view the map associated with this release, please visit the following link: http://media3.marketwire.com/docs/MapWatay.pdf

March 12, 2015 – Thunder Bay: Wataynikaneyap Power today held a press conference announcing that Sandy Lake First Nation and Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation will join the Wataynikaneyap Power Transmission Project, bringing the number of communities participating in the First Nation-led company to twenty. Each community is an equal owner in the project to bring grid-connection to remote First Nation communities, currently serviced by diesel generation.

“Having 20 communities come together to own a major infrastructure project at any one time is truly unprecedented,” says Margaret Kenequanash, Chair of Wataynikaneyap Power. “Our communities see the value of controlling infrastructure development in our traditional homelands to ensure responsible development while maximizing benefits to our communities. I would like to welcome both Sandy Lake First Nation and Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation as partners and shareholders in this unique and exciting project.”

“It is an honour to join the other First Nations on this very important and much needed infrastructure project,” says Sandy Lake Chief, Bart Meekis. “Grid connection will bring many benefits to our community including the opportunity to develop renewable energy projects.”

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AUDIO: Chambers’ Ring of Fire report card ‘not applicable’ to the north (CBC News Sudbury – March 12, 2015)

http://www.cbc.ca/news

A professor at Laurentian University calls a new report card on the Ring of Fire unfair. The report released this week by the Greater Sudbury and Ontario Chambers of Commerce gives the project a failing grade for development.

The report cites the absence of an agreement with First Nations, problems with permits and a lack of federal funding as the most significant barriers to development.

But David Pearson said the expectations for the project are too great and it’s unreasonable to think that all First Nation communities in the far north can speak to the project with one voice.

“I think the standards that you’ve used to put your F’s on and your C’s and your D’s and so forth are not standards that are applicable to the far north,” he said. Some industry experts have defended the findings, saying the point of the report is to draw a sense of urgency to the project.

A panel discussion on the subject was held in Sudbury Wednesday night at Dynamic Earth. The Ontario Chamber of Commerce’s Josh Hjartarson said he wants to talk about the project, but government officials aren’t returning his phone calls.

He’s said he’s trying to pressure the government to take action. “What I’m trying to say is that we’re spending some political capital,” he continued.

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Ring of Fire producing mostly press releases, says federal NDP advisor – by Jamie Smith (tbnewswatch.com – March 12, 2015)

http://www.tbnewswatch.com/default.aspx

THUNDER BAY — Nothing has happened in the Ring of Fire in nearly a decade and nothing will until the federal and provincial governments manage and make decisions with First Nations. That’s according Howard Hampton, former Ontario NDP leader and current paid adviser on the Ring of Fire for the federal New Democratic Party.

Hampton, during an interview with tbnewswatch.com Thursday, said both levels of government have completely missed what First Nations have been saying all along, that all three need to co-manage the development and make decisions together.

“We’ve had about eight year about press releases about the Ring of Fire,” Hampton said in Thunder Bay Thursday after returning from a trip to several Matawa communities.

“But if you look at the situation not much has happened.” Announcements like the development corporation and Cliffs’ one-time plan to put a processor near Sudbury were done unilaterally, without any consultation with First Nations Hampton said.

The $1 billion for infrastructure was nothing more than a nice pre-election promise while a recent plan to get Matawa a feasibility study for an all-weather road is actually a re-announcement from 1999 when the federal government outlined a plan to build all-weather routes to several Northern communities. Both levels of government to this point have handled the Ring of Fire badly.

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Saudis, frackers big stakeholders in oil price war – by Gwynne Dyer (Elliot Lake Standard – March 11, 2015)

http://www.elliotlakestandard.ca/

I’m in Alberta, the province that produces most of Canada’s oil, and there’s only one question on everybody’s lips: How long will the oil price stay down?

It has fallen by more than half in the past nine months — West Texas Intermediate closed at $48.29 US a barrel Wednesday — and further falls are predicted for the coming weeks.

This hits jobs and government revenues hard in big oil-producing centres like Alberta, Texas and the British North Sea, but its effects reach farther than that. “Clean” energy producers are seeing demand for their solar panels and windmills drop as oil gets more competitive.

Electric cars, which were expected to make a major market breakthrough this year, are losing out to traditional gas-guzzlers that are cheap to run again. Countries that have become too dependent on oil revenues are in deep trouble, such as Russia (where the rouble has lost half its value in six months) and Venezuela.

Countries like India, which imports most of its oil, are getting a big economic boost from the lower oil price. So how long this goes on matters to a great many people. The answer may lie in two key numbers. Saudi Arabia has $900 billion in cash reserves, so it can afford to keep the oil price low for at least a couple of years.

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Poor grades for Ring of Fire don’t surprise key players – by Jonathan Migneault (Sudbury Northern Life – March 11, 2015)

http://www.northernlife.ca/

Panelists say little progress made after years of work

Key industry players in the Ring of Fire mineral deposit said they were not surprised by an Ontario Chamber of Commerce report card that criticized the glacial pace of progress in the region.

During a panel discussion the chamber organized in Sudbury Wednesday, Paul Semple, the chief operating officer with Noront Resources, a junior miner that owns stakes in the Ring of Fire, said the failing “F” grade for the development of the Ring of Fire was warranted.

“We’ve done some good things, there has been a framework agreement with the province for $1 billion, but you don’t win a hockey game with a couple of good shifts,” Semple said. “We haven’t really done anything with that billion dollars, we haven’t done anything with the development corporation, and the framework hasn’t honestly given any benefits to the First Nations.”

George Darling, the mine technical services director with engineering firm SNC-Lavalin, who also sat on the panel, said he was disappointed by the speed at which the project has progressed.

Darling said a “huge smelter” his company is building in Madagascar – a project worth $2.5 billion – took only two years to get going. “What I’m very nervous about is the amount of time it takes in North America to develop project, compared to countries like Madagascar that are really developing right now,” he said.

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All is not well on the metals commodities front – by Lawrence Williams (Mineweb.com – March 10, 2015)

http://www.mineweb.com/

In US dollar terms, metals commodities have seen drastic falls over the past 4-5 years which will just perpetuate the mining boom-bust cycle.

The world of metalliferous mining – for the most part at least – is suffering, and suffering badly. No more China-driven supercycle (at least for the short to medium term). More of a China-driven downcycle seems to be in place as Asia’s biggest economy ceases to grow at its recent pace, and there are suggestions too that the Chinese, who look at these things with a rather longer-term viewpoint than most Western governments and businessmen, may even be actively driving down some commodity prices through destocking and reducing imports.

No matter that this impacts on the country’s own mining operations – there has been something of an ongoing programme anyway to rein in some of that nation’s more inefficient and most-polluting mining operations. Air quality in most Chinese cities remains below the standards acceptable in much of the West, but this is all changing, slowly, as the nation restructures. This could be a painful process.

While precious metals prices seem to engender most media coverage, there is little real evidence that China is actively driving these prices downwards – indeed this may be one of the few areas where Chinese demand is supporting prices, albeit obviously not very effectively. But take iron ore, where prices are currently close to one-third of their peak to see the real impacts of declining Chinese demand. With the big low cost producers raising production to protect revenues, smaller, higher cost operations (some of which are large) are being driven out of business.

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Vale CEO Ferreira Said to Be in Talks to Head Petrobras Board – by Anna Edgerton and Sabrina Valle (Bloomberg News – March 10, 2015)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

(Bloomberg) — Vale SA Chief Executive Officer Murilo Ferreira is being sounded out to take over as chairman of the board of Brazil’s beleaguered oil producer Petroleo Brasileiro SA, people with knowledge of the discussions said.

Government representatives have spoken with Ferreira, 61, about replacing former Finance Minister Guido Mantega as chairman, according to three people who asked not to be named because the talks aren’t public. The next Petrobras board meeting in which a new leader could be confirmed will be on March 23.

Ferreira would be the first executive since at least 2003 to head the state-controlled oil producer’s board, replacing a political appointee who was known for his obedience to President Dilma Rousseff. After last month choosing Aldemir Bendine, a state banker backed by Rousseff’s party, to replace Maria das Gracas Foster as chief executive officer, the government recognizes the importance of choosing a market-friendly name to lead the board, one of the people said.

“He’s a great Brazilian executive, competent, with credibility, a good name for Petrobras,” consultant David Zylbersztajn, a former oil regulator who worked with Ferreira in the early 2000s, said in a phone interview from Rio. “Knowing Murilo, I can say he can stand his own.”

Vale and Petrobras press offices declined to comment on the possibility of Ferreira joining the oil company’s board.

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Sudbury’s Environmental Revival – by Boghos Ghougassian (Arab Forum for Environment & Development – December 1, 2012)

http://www.afedonline.org/en/

The Greater Sudbury area in Ontario Province, Canada, 400 km north of Toronto city, was one of the earliest regions of the world to feel the harmful impact of unsustainable industrial development. It was also one of the first to recognize the mistakes and determined to correct them.

For nearly a century, mining and logging activities had converted the Greater Sudbury area into an inhospitable land. It had been dubbed as moonscape, its blackened scar visible from outer space. Even the Apollo 16 astronauts have done their exercises in here in 1971, before landing on the moon surface.
Greater Sudbury encompasses one of the largest known nickel ore bodies on Earth, with an area of more than 60 km2. This has earned Sudbury international recognition as “the Nickel Capital of the World”.

Sudbury was found in 1883 as a railway station town. So dominant were the trees, the Jesuits called their parish “Ste. Anne of the pines”. The trees also caught the attention of wood logging companies who clear cut the area leading to loss of biologic diversity, erosion of soils and other environmental impacts. Records indicate that Sudbury’s forests have been swarmed with some 11,000 loggers during the late 1880s.

With the discovery of nickel, early mining and smelting processes in 1886 to 1929 delivered another devastating blow to the environment. The metal rich rock was ignited in open “roast beds” cloaking the area in dense clouds of sulfur dioxide’s acidic smoke, which devastated the remaining green vegetation and acidified the freshwater of many lakes of the region, killing fishes and many other aquatic species.

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Iron ore strategy the road to ‘self-destruction’, warns Cliffs chief – by Paul Garvey (The Australian – March 12, 2015)

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business

AUSTRALIA’S big iron ore ­miners are on a path towards “self-destruction” and could leave the country with a case to answer before the World Trade Organ­isation, the head of North America’s largest iron ore miner has warned.

Lourenco Goncalves, chief executive of US iron ore miner Cliffs Natural Resources, yesterday told the Global Iron Ore and Steel Forecast conference in Perth the surge in iron ore supply from producers such as BHP Billi­ton, Rio Tinto and Fortescue Metals could send the price of Australia’s most important export to permanently lower levels.

Iron ore prices have more than halved in the past year as surging production swamped cooling demand, although the key iron ore index rebounded slightly yesterday to end a six-day losing streak.

Mr Goncalves said the price of seaborne iron ore shipped by Australian miners could halve again from about $US60 a tonne to as low as $US30 as a result of the major miners’ expansion strategy. “You call that strategy? I call it self-destruction,” Mr Goncalves said.

On Tuesday, Rio Tinto iron ore chief Andrew Harding and his BHP counterpart, Jimmy Wilson, defended their companies’ roles in the creation of the supply glut, arguing that each tonne of supply they did not deliver would have been filled with lesser-quality ore from elsewhere.

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Ring of Fire: Turning an ‘F’ into an ‘A’ – by Carol Mulligan (Sudbury Star – March 12, 2015)

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

The Canadian government has a history of investing in “transformational projects” such as the Alberta oil sands and the Churchill Falls hydroelectric project, says an Ontario Chamber of Commerce spokesman.

It should now provide a “hard commitment” to develop Ontario’s Ring of Fire chromite deposits, says Josh Hjartarson, vice-president of policy and government relations for the Ontario chamber. “Northern Ontario is just in demanding a similar level of investment,” Hjartarson told 150 people at the Ring of Fire Report Card launch Wednesday at Dynamic Earth.

The report card, “Where Are We Now?” graded the federal and provincial governments on the action they have taken — or not taken — since the Ontario Chamber of Commerce’s first report last year on the economic benefit of developing the Ring of Fire.

The federal government received an F for not making the Ring of Fire a national priority, and that has generated headlines this week, said Hjartarson. The report was presented to business leaders in Toronto on Tuesday.

While the intent of the report was not to blame the federal government, the chamber is acting in its capacity as an advocacy group to ensure there are “political costs” to ignoring the issue, he said.

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Northwestern Ontario’s Resourceful Economy [Ring of Fire Episode] (The Agenda with Steve Paikin – March 10, 2015)

http://theagenda.tvo.org/ Northwestern Ontario’s resource economy seemed poised for a game-changing resurgence with the “Ring of Fire” multi-billion dollar mining find. But after a few key delays and departures, the rapid expansion in other mining deposits, including gold, may hold the most immediate promise. The Agenda with Steve Paikin stops into Thunder Bay to survey the …

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