March 17, 2015 – Republic of Mining

Mining and geopolitical risk: A global breakdown – by Cole Latimer (Australian Mining – March 17, 2015)

March 17, 2015

http://www.miningaustralia.com.au/home

Australia has always had an insular view of the mining industry.

It is often forgotten that many of the mining companies that operate here have a large suite of overseas operations, or are simply headquartered here but operate solely overseas.

There is more to the resources industry than what is happening on our island tucked away in the corner of the Pacific, and the vagaries of overseas machinations that affect it.

Yet, the mining sector has always viewed itself as a global industry, and one of the most important aspects of maintaining its ability to operate is remaining closely abreast of the constantly changing geopolitical landscape.

However as Deloitte points out: “As the pace of change accelerates it’s getting harder to predict the impact of these (shifting geopolitical) trends.” “It is becoming eminently clear that mining companies face rising regulatory, geopolitical, economic, and technological uncertainty.”

It goes on to state that despite best planning, much of the time miners will have to continue embracing uncertainty, essentially planning for the worst but hoping for the best.

Now is the time for Ring of Fire development: KWG official – by Matt Vis (tbnewswatch.com – March 17, 2015)

March 17, 2015

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

THUNDER BAY – A federal treasury board statement indicating that now may not be the time to move forward with Ring of Fire development has drawn sharp criticism from at least one major stakeholder.

Tony Clement was a guest speaker at a Timmins Chamber of Commerce luncheon Monday where he told the audience he does not anticipate the federal or provincial governments taking a larger role in the Ring of Fire until mineral prices rise.

Mo Lavigne, KWG Resources vice-president of exploration and development, was a panelist at a Ring of Fire discussion hosted by the Thunder Bay Chamber of Commerce Tuesday. He responded to Clement’s statement, telling reporters after the event that the idea of current commodity prices negatively affecting development is misguided.

“He’s really regurgitating a narrative that’s totally incorrect,” lavigne said. “For chromium and nickel this is exactly the right time to be developing the Ring of Fire. “I think it’s more misinformed commentary than anything else … People making uninformed comments is rampant these days. It’s so commonplace and unfortunately it’s not really helping us make good decisions.”

He added that the only markets suffering seriously is iron ore, which played a role in Cliffs Natural Resources backing out. But the markets remain stable for the chromite.

Miners Offer Bull Rings, Clinics as Protests Ice $25 Billion – by Firat Kayakiran and Andre Janse Van Vuuren (Bloomberg News – March 17, 2015)

March 17, 2015

http://www.bloomberg.com/

(Bloomberg) — Schools and clinics. Soccer fields and bull rings. Even plump guinea pigs — to eat. From South America to Africa, mining companies are throwing all that and more at communities to quiet growing opposition to controversial projects.

“There’s something like $25 billion worth of projects tied up or stopped,” Mark Cutifani, chief executive officer of Anglo American Plc, said in an interview. “We have to get all those relationships right.”

While opposition to mines is nothing new, the issue is a growing concern for miners like Anglo American and executives are increasingly speaking out. Billions of dollars are at stake, they say. Their opponents say the companies despoil the environment and often fail to benefit local economies, or at least not as much as they claim.

Push-back has been growing since the 1980s, when communities were rarely consulted about new mines. Now, local support is critical, according to Thras Moraitis, head of strategy at Xstrata Plc before its 2013 takeover by Glencore Plc.

“You can’t get a permit without involving full and prior consent of the local communities,” he said. Communities from Peru to South Africa are mobilizing to negotiate more successfully with the companies, according to two studies released late last year. Residents who are relocated to make way for mines are demanding more in return.

It’s taken a long time to get this far nowhere – by Mark Gentili (Sudbury Northern Life – March 16, 2015)

March 17, 2015

http://www.northernlife.ca/

Ontario created the Ring of Fire Secretariat in 2011 to develop, according to an Ontario Business Report document, “the chromite and other deposits in the Ring of Fire as quickly as possible and with due regard to environmental impacts and the needs of the Aboriginal communities within the region.”

That sounds great. Except if you ask anyone with a stake in the Ring of Fire, they’ll tell you they can’t figure out what the Secretariat has done the past four years….Then, less than a year ago, Ontario unveiled the Ring of Fire Development Corporation, ostensibly to do the same thing as the Secretariat. How many cooks does one meal need?

[Dalton] McGuinty sees mining the way his environmentally conscious (but terribly misinformed) southern urban supporters see it — dirty….Which begs the question, why would the Ontario Chamber tap his son to write the report card? Even if their intentions were pure, the optics of it are awful. I mean, there’s any number of educated policy wonks with information-gathering skills and no ties to the Liberals who could’ve written it.

Instead, the chamber is playing politics by defending the Ontario Liberals and trying to shame the feds into action, when they should be coming down on the side of development — that’s why they’re there. (Mark Gentili)

Mark Gentili is the managing editor of Northern Life and NorthernLife.ca.

The Ontario Chamber of Commerce’s “Where Are We Now?” report card on the Ring of Fire development in the Far North is a nice document. It’s full colour, has some good pictures and sports an attractive layout.

‘Zombie’ miners pulling down TSX Venture exchange – by Nelson Bennett (Business in Vancouver – March 16, 2015)

March 17, 2015

http://www.biv.com/

The plug should be pulled on these marginal junior miners, say investors

Of the 2,340 companies listed on the TSX Venture Exchange, about 1,400 are junior mining and exploration companies – many of which are headquartered in Vancouver.

But to hear retail brokers like Rick Rule describe them, more than 500 of them might as well be classed as pulp and paper companies, because that’s about all they produce: paper filings to meet exchange listing requirements, at the expense of exploration.

The chairman of Sprott Global Resource Investments Ltd. is among the growing number of resource-sector investors who say the TSX Venture Exchange has become weighed down by companies that should be considered clinically dead.

Bill Sheriff, CEO of the reinsurance company Till Capital, agrees: “A bunch of these should be delisted. We’re majority owners of a couple of companies that, quite frankly, one of them should be delisted. It’s only two cents.”

Tony Simon, a founder of the Venture Capital Markets Association, recently calculated that there are 598 companies on the TSX Venture Exchange with a collective negative working capital of $2 billion. That means they can’t possibly be meeting their listing requirements, according to Simon. But only about a dozen were delisted last year, according to the exchange.

South32 looks better bet than parent BHP Billiton by Clyde Russell (Reuters U.S. – March 17, 2015)

March 17, 2015

http://www.reuters.com/

LAUNCESTON, Australia – (Reuters) – BHP Billiton has done a great job in making its spin-off South32 look attractive, perhaps to the point where it may be a better bet than its parent.

The world’s largest miner released documents on Tuesday outlining details for the new company, which will take over BHP’s aluminum, manganese, nickel, silver and some coal assets.

These assets are often described in the media as “unloved,” but the outlook for many of them is better than the core of iron ore, petroleum, copper and metallurgical coal that will remain with BHP. South32, so named for the line of latitude that links its main operating centers of South Africa and Australia, will get a head start from its parent.

The new company will assume only $674 million in net debt, about half the level analysts had expected, providing a boost to the management should they decide to pursue mergers and acquisitions. Analysts expect the new company, which will list in Australia, the United Kingdom and South Africa, will be worth up to $13 billion.

The South32 assets contributed net profit after tax of $738 million to BHP for the half year to December 2014, again an upside surprise that bodes well for the new company’s reception.

India’s Conflict Minerals – by Anthony Loyd (National Geographic – April 2015)

March 17, 2015

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/

The gunman at the jungle’s edge lived and died by different names. Some knew him as Prashant, others as Paramjeet. Occasionally he called himself Gopalji, trading the alias with another insurgent leader to further confuse the Indian authorities trying to hunt him down.

When I met him, he was fresh from killing, and called himself by yet another name. “Comrade Manas,” he said as he stepped from the shadows beneath a huge walnut tree, machine gun in hand, a slight figure, his frame and features burned out and cadaverous with the depredations of malaria and typhoid, war and jungle.

The day was already old and the sun low. The silhouettes of a dozen or so other gunmen lurked in the deepening green of the nearby paddy fields, watchful and waiting. Manas and his men were on the move and had little time to talk.

In India they are known by a single word, Naxalites: Maoist insurgents at the heart of the nation’s longest running and most deeply entrenched internal conflict. Their decades-long war, which costs India more lives today than the embers of the conflict in Kashmir, has been described by former premier Manmohan Singh as India’s “greatest internal security threat.”

In the spate of violence 24 hours before our rendezvous, Manas, just 27 years old, and his men had killed six policemen and wounded eight more in an ambush across the range of low hills at whose base we now met.

UPDATE 2-Protests, lawsuit at Chile mine cloud Antofagasta outlook – by Silvia Antonioli (Reuters India – March 17, 2015)

March 17, 2015

http://in.reuters.com/

LONDON, March 17 (Reuters) – Environmental protests and a court ruling affecting Antofagasta’s Los Pelambras mine in Chile have clouded the outlook for its copper production this year and driven the company to slash its dividend.

Antofagasta, majority owned by Chile’s Luksic family, is grappling with weaker copper prices and falling metal grades, as well as the protests and lawsuit affecting Los Pelambres, which produces more than half the miner’s copper.

A court in Chile ruled last week that the firm must demolish a mine tailings dam at Los Pelambres, which protesters say is affecting water availability. Antofagasta is appealing the ruling but said it casts doubt over the outlook for the mine.

“Local protests have reduced expected copper production at Los Pelambres by some 8,000 tonnes of copper,” the company said in a statement on Tuesday announcing 2014 results.

“These protests, along with the adverse ruling from the Civil Court of Los Vilos, mean that there is some inherent uncertainty as to the potential impact on Los Pelambres 2015 production levels,” the London-listed company said.

2015 Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) Award Winners Videos [ALL VIDEOS IN THIS SINGLE POSTING]

March 25, 2018March 17, 2015

2015 PDAC Bill Dennis Award: David Palmer, president and CEO of Probe Mines

http://www.pendaproductions.com/ This video was produced by PENDA Productions, a full service production company specializing in Corporate Communications with a focus on Corporate Responsibility.

This award, named for a former president of the association, honours an individual or team of explorationists who have accomplished one or both of the following: made a significant mineral discovery; made an important contribution to the prospecting and/or exploration industry.

David Palmer, president and CEO of Probe Mines, is the recipient of this year’s Bill Dennis Award for a Canadian mineral discovery or prospecting success. Palmer is being recognized for the Borden gold project, a discovery located near Chapleau, Ont.

NEWS RELEASE: MAC strikes an independent task force to review its tailings management program

March 17, 2015

BC independent panel report on Mount Polley will inform task force’s review

OTTAWA, March 17, 2015 /CNW/ – The Mining Association of Canada (MAC) has commissioned an independent, multi-stakeholder expert task force to review its tailings management requirements and guidance documents under its Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) initiative, a mandatory program for all MAC members, to ensure they are as effective as they can be at preventing tailings dam failures and optimizing the design, construction and ongoing management of tailings storage facilities. MAC plans to publish the task force’s final report by the end of 2015.

The formation of the independent task force is part of MAC’s ongoing review of its tailings management program, which it proactively initiated immediately following the August 4th 2014 tailings breach at the Mount Polley mine, located in south-central British Columbia. The task force will review TSM’s tailings management requirements and MAC’s three tailings management guides, and will advise on how these can be enhanced and strengthened. The findings and recommendations of the BC independent expert engineering investigation and review panel’s report, released in late January, will be assessed by the task force as part of its review.

One of the BC panel’s key recommendations pertaining to corporate governance was that any mining operation proposing to operate a tailings storage facility in BC should either be required to be a member of MAC—ensuring adherence to TSM—or be obliged to commit to an equivalent program that would also include an audit function. Notwithstanding this endorsement, the MAC Board of Directors believes that a review to consider further enhancements to and strengthening of the tailings component of TSM is warranted.

People share their vision for Greater Sudbury – by Mary Katherine Keown (Sudbury Star – March 16, 2015)

March 17, 2015

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

Noting that while Sudbury has the third largest mining cluster in the country —
behind Vancouver and Toronto — the province still does not recognize the expertise
that exists within its borders.

“All the political people in this city need to start hammering the province to recognize
Sudbury as the mining supply and technology centre for Ontario,” Robinson said. “We’ve got
a university, we’ve got mines — everything we need. What we don’t have is the province
saying they’re going to close down mining engineering in Toronto and move it up to Sudbury.
The province would be much better off doing this — it would save money and promote jobs.
So then it’s a political question.” (Professor David Robinson)

Picture Greater Sudbury in 2025: more residents living within the downtown core ” … bike lanes and paths criss-crossing and connecting all points of this sprawling city ” … robust industrial parks that capitalize on local expertise and drive socio-economic development ” … and a school of performing arts at Laurentian University.

These were just a few of the ideas participants brought to the table at last evening’s public input session, part of the Greater Sudbury Development Corporation’s economic visioning process.

Timing not right for Ring of Fire project: Tony Clement – by Len Gillis (Kingston Whig-Standard – March 17, 2015)

March 17, 2015

http://www.thewhig.com/

TIMMINS, Ont. — The federal and provincial governments are not likely to make any significant moves on the Ring of Fire mining project until there is a vast improvement in mineral markets, says federal Treasury Board president Tony Clement.

The guest speaker at a Timmins Chamber of Commerce luncheon Monday, Clement responded to a question about the Ontario Chamber of Commerce’s Ring of Fire report card, which gave failing grades to both levels of governments for not being proactive enough to get mining projects up and running.

The report card blamed red tape in the mine permitting process, as well as a failure to provide infrastructure, such as better road or rail links. “There has been little progress developing this extraordinary economic opportunity,” it read.

The Ring of Fire project is a mining development about 600 kilometres northwest of Timmins, in the remote McFaulds Lake area. The prospect is identified mainly as a chromite project, valued in the tens of billions of dollars.

There are huge deposits of other metals there, too, but so far none of the three significant mining companies involved has moved forward with any sort of mining operation.