Norway’s oil fund slashes coal investments after criticism – by Stine Jacobsen (Reuters U.S. – May 4, 2015)

http://www.reuters.com/

May 4 (Reuters) – Norway’s $900 billion sovereign wealth fund, the world’s biggest, has reduced the value of its coal mining portfolio by almost 40 percent in the first quarter, its head told parliament on Monday.

Environmental groups and some Norwegian politicians have accused the fund of having too large an exposure to coal and not making enough use of its influence to reduce carbon emissions.

As of March 31 the fund had coal mining assets worth 493 million crowns ($3.75 million), down from 805 million at the end of 2014.

The fund owns assets worth 31 billion crowns in general mining, 109 billion in power production and 228 billion in oil and gas production.

The fund, owning around 1.3 percent of all listed companies globally, is still exposed to firms using coal for steel production and those where coal is only one of several business areas, such as large mining conglomerates, the fund’s head Yngve Slyngstad told the parliament’s Standing Committee on Finance and Economic Affairs.

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[Montana Mining History] The Copper King’s Precipitous Fall – by Gilbert King (Smithsonian Magazine – September 20, 2015)

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/

Augustus Heinze dominated the copper fields of Montana, but his family’s scheming on Wall Street set off the Panic of 1907

Frederick Augustus Heinze was young, brash, charismatic and rich. He’d made millions off the copper mines of Butte, Montana, by the time he was 30, beating back every attempt by competitors to run him out of business. After turning down Standard Oil’s $15 million offer for his copper holdings, Heinze arrived in New York in 1907 with $25 million in cash, determined to join the likes of J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller as a major player in the world of finance. By the end of the year, however, the Copper King would be ruined, and his scheme to corner the stock of the United Copper Co. would lead to one of the worst financial crises in American history—the Panic of 1907.

He was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1869. His father, Otto Heinze, was a wealthy German immigrant, and young Augustus was educated in Germany before he returned to the United States to study at Columbia University’s School of Mines. An engineer by training, Heinze arrived in Montana after his father died, and with a $50,000 inheritance he developed a smelting process that enabled him to produce copper from very low-grade ore in native rock more than 1,500 feet below ground. He leased mines and worked for other mining companies until he was able, in 1895, to purchase the Rarus Mine in Butte, which proved to be one of Montana’s richest copper properties.

In a rapid ascent, Heinze established the Montana Ore Purchasing Co. and became one of the three “Copper Kings” of Butte, along with Gilded Age icons William Andrews Clark and Marcus Daly. Whip smart and devious, Heinze took advantage of the so-called apex law, a provision that allowed owners of a surface outcrop to mine it wherever it led, even if it went beneath land owned by someone else.

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Pebble mine backers aren’t ready to give up the gold – by Erica Martinson (Alaska Dispatch News – May 2, 2015)

http://www.adn.com/

WASHINGTON — Purveyors of the proposed Pebble mine aren’t done fighting federal, activist and state efforts to stop the massive gold and copper mine in its tracks.

This month, the Pebble Partnership will test its arguments that the Environmental Protection Agency jumped the gun in its efforts to stop the project and illegally colluded with the projects’ opponents before doing so. Meanwhile, the EPA’s independent inspector general is nearing completion of an investigation into the agency’s process.

Now it’s down to the lawyers, mining legal documents and unearthing years-old emails. Pebble CEO Tom Collier hopes a few legal wins will breathe new life into the project that many Alaskans consider down and out.

Since 2007, Pebble has spent several hundred million dollars in efforts to move forward on its mineral claims about 200 miles southwest of Anchorage, according to financial statements. Between 1988 and 2013, Pebble drilled 1,355 holes in the ground to test what lies beneath, and found gold, copper and molybdenum worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

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COLUMN-Iron ore reality check shows small, but significant change – by Clyde Russell (Reuters U.K. – May 4, 2015)

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/

LAUNCESTON, Australia, May 4 (Reuters) – It’s time for a reality check all round in the iron ore market.

In recent weeks there has been a strong rally in prices, tentative signs that the headlong expansion of capacity will be reined in, calls for a producer cartel of some sorts and a small miner scrappily hanging on in the face of seemingly overwhelming adversity.

All of this makes for great drama and news headlines, but also should lead to questions and analysis as to whether anything has actually changed in the iron ore market.

The first reality check is that despite the near 27 percent rally in the spot Asian iron ore price between April 6 and April 27, the price remains extremely weak.

Iron ore ended last week at $56.20 a tonne, having retreated from the $59.20 reached on April 27, leaving the steel-making ingredient down 21 percent so far this year. It’s also roughly half of what it was this time last year and not much better than a quarter of the record $191.90 a tonne in February 2011.

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‘Game changer’: Gas company offers $1-billion to First Nations band in B.C. – by Justine Hunter and Brent Jang (Globe and Mail – May 1, 2015)

The 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.

VICTORIA and VANCOUVER — The proponent of a liquefied natural gas plant on British Columbia’s north coast is offering more than $1-billion to obtain the consent of a First Nations community, a groundbreaking proposal that could establish the new price for natural resource development in traditional aboriginal territories.

In a province where resource projects have stalled and sometimes foundered over aboriginal opposition, the tentative deal between the Prince Rupert-based Lax Kw’alaams band and a joint venture led by Malaysia’s state-owned Petronas sets a new benchmark for sharing the wealth from energy extraction.

If approved by band members, the agreement will transfer roughly $1-billion in cash to the Lax Kw’alaams band over the span of the 40-year deal, while the B.C. government is putting more than $100-million worth of Crown lands on the table. For the 3,600 members of the Lax Kw’alaams community, the total package works out to a value of roughly $320,000 per person.

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INCO HISTORY: MOND: The Man, The Process, The Company – by Marty McAllister (Inco Triangle – September, 1989)

For Inco Triangle Archives, click here: http://www.sudburymuseums.ca/triangle/?home

This article came from the September 1989 issue of the Inco Triangle: http://www.sudburymuseums.ca/triangle/data/INCOTriangle-19890901.pdf

Just enough paint has peeled off an old tank in the Nairn powerhouse to partially reveal the hand-lettered words: Mond Nickel Company.

At least on this side of the Atlantic, there remain few such reminders of the proud organization that became part of Inco sixty years ago. As an independent company, “the Mond” barely lasted thirty years; its spirit, however, began much earlier with its founder, and its contribution is not yet complete. In a reverse version of the Canadian Copper story, Mond Nickel began as a process looking for raw materials.

Remember the Bunsen burners in high school? Well, Robert Wilhelm Bunsen was Ludwig Mond’s chemistry prof at the University of Heidelberg. The lessons stuck, and Mond went on to earn a sizable fortune in the chemical business in England.

His home, known as The Poplars, was an ornate mansion north of Regent’s Park, and he converted one of the stables into a research lab. It was in this lab in 1889 that Mond, then 50, set out with Carl Langer to develop a bleaching powder.

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Private company, public resource: The Inco Triangle archives are home to a rich collection of historically important documents – by R. Bergen (CIM Magazine – November 2009)

http://www.cim.org/en/

“I hope my comments won’t seem picayune, but Inco’s history is an integral and important part of our heritage in the Sudbury Basin. As with any locale, I suppose, some local legends have been embellished a little over time.” — Marty McAllister, in a 1989 letter advising a correction in the Inco Triangle

Twenty years after his first dispassionate contribution to the Ontario division of Inco’s now-defunct community news magazine, Marty McAllister no longer bothers to mince words. “If a magazine could be a legend, that one was,” he declares unabashedly, referring to the Inco Triangle from his Barrie, Ontario, home. His attention to the historic record earned him a regular heritage column. As a Greater Sudbury native, lifetime reader and career Inco employee, McAllister understands better than most the unique role of the publication in the hundreds of Sudbury area households that received the Triangle each month.

Of course, the operations were often featured in its pages and trumpeted for their forward thinking, but the Triangle was far more than a company mouthpiece. From the 1930s to the 1990s, the paternal influence of the Triangle helped tie together the communities that Inco had built to support its mines. Workers named Salfi, Kanga, Levesque and Rainville, whose birthplaces were scattered across Europe and North America, featured as a fraternity in the Triangle. Marriages, births, deaths, bonspiel winners and expert gardeners were fixtures in the magazine. Sports always featured prominently.

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Black interests opting out of once-mighty [South Africa] ferrochrome business – by Martin Creamer (MiningWeekly.com – May 4, 2015)

http://www.miningweekly.com/page/americas-home

JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Black South African interests are giving South Africa’s once-mighty ferrochrome business the cold shoulder.

The value-adding pursuit, which puts six times more value into chrome and generates three times more jobs than mere raw chrome exportation, was last week ditched by Royal Bafokeng Holdings, the investment arm of the 300-strong Bafokeng community, which has for long been associated with chrome, and earlier by Patrice Motsepe’s African Rainbow Minerals (ARM), which first opted out of ferrochrome in Machadodorp with its Assmang partner and then chose to close the Machadodorp ferroalloys operation altogether and relocate to a new ferroalloys project in Malaysia.

Both steps represent a serious indictment of the government’s beneficiation policy, which is failing when it comes to chrome beneficiation on the scarcity of competitively priced electricity and a lack of incentivisation.

Ironically, China is making use of South Africa’s raw chrome exports to advance to a leadership position in ferrochrome – and is likely to advance further in coming quarters as it lowers power tariffs to stimulate energy-intensive operations and as South Africa enters the more expensive winter tariff electricity period.

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Inquest: Policies must be acted upon: miner – by Carol Mulligan (Sudbury Star – May 4, 2015)

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

The last time Ryan St. George saw Jordan Fram was about a week before the young miner’s death. Both were stopped at an intersection, St. George on his motorcycle and Fram in his new truck.

Fram yelled over to St. George: “Hey, you’re driving a motorcycle with shorts and sandals,” chiding him for not riding safely.

“That was Jordan. He cared about people,” said St. George at the last day of the inquest into the deaths of Fram, 26, and his supervisor Jason Chenier, 35, at Vale’s Stobie Mine.

St. George is a member of United Steelworkers Local 6500, a former miner who represented his union at the coroner’s inquest.

He gave what was one of several powerful closing statements Friday to a three-woman, one-man jury. A fifth juror dropped out a week into the proceedings because of medical reasons. St. George said he believes, like Fram, “that people care about each other.

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Gold: This chart should scare you – by Magnus Heystek (Mineweb.com – May 4, 2015)

http://www.mineweb.com/

How the death of an industry is felt by everyone.

I started my career in financial journalism in January 1980. The gold price had just hit a record $850 an ounce, the rand was trading at $1.35 – no mistake – and Johannesburg was literally the City of Gold.

At the time, South Africa was the world’s largest producer of gold (over 1,000 tonnes per annum), platinum and other precious metals. We were truly the centre of the mining universe and our politicians of the time couldn’t stop reminding the outside world how important we were to them….

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) gold board had over 30 gold mining companies listed; and then there were the mining holding companies: the Anglos, Gencore, Rand Mines, JCI and many smaller ones.

The financial and investment community literally lived from gold-fix to gold-fix, still then relayed to the waiting world from London via telex messages, which came spattering out into the hands of the copy boys whose sole task was to tear a strip of paper with either good or bad news and run to whomever was paying his salary.

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Copper’s Win Streak Hits Seven Days (Wall Street Journal – May 3, 2015)

http://www.wsj.com/

The July contract for copper rose 1.5% on Friday

Copper prices have been running up their largest gains in years, with the market watching China for stimulus moves that might jump-start economic activity and renew demand for the industrial metal.

The most actively traded copper contract, for July delivery, ended higher for a seventh straight trading session Friday, its longest winning streak since December 2013, and has gained 9.9% over the stretch.

Copper is used in the manufacturing of everything from housing to personal electronics, and China’s rapid expansion and heavy investment in infrastructure has made it the world’s largest copper consumer, accounting for 40% of global demand. Copper is also viewed as a key barometer—and beneficiary—of economic growth, and any uptick in Chinese economic activity is viewed as a bullish driver for the market.

China has been aggressively maneuvering to keep its economy humming as it cools down from years of double-digit growth. That has lead to measures such as the one last month to cut the reserve-requirement ratio, allowing banks to lend more money and potentially spur growth.

On Friday, the April reading on China’s official purchasing managers index came in at 50.1, unchanged from March and slightly above market expectations of 50.0.

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Alaska turns up the heat on proposed B.C. mines – by Gordon Hoekstra (Vancouver Sun – May 3, 2015)

http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html

Lt. Gov. Mallott to meet with cabinet ministers, business and First Nations leaders

B.C.’s push to develop mines in its shared watersheds with Alaska is under increasing scrutiny from the American side of the border.

Concerns over multiple proposed metal mines near the southeast Alaska border has drawn Alaska’s Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott — and a coterie of commercial fishing, conservation and First Nation groups — to British Columbia this week.

In a visit that coincides with mining week in B.C., Mallott will meet with B.C. Energy and Mines Minister Bill Bennett, Environment Minister Mary Polak, industry representatives and First Nation leaders.

The Alaskan fishing, conservation and aboriginal representatives are in B.C. to build alliances in their push for more scrutiny of the potential effects on Alaska waters that support a multi-billion-dollar fishery.

They believe that B.C.’s review process is not adequate and want Alaska to have a seat at a table, potentially through an international joint commission, to examine potential cumulative effects on water and salmon. The groups are also concerned about compensation if there is a disaster.

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Giustra fights back after U.S. campaign smears – by Don Cayo (Vancouver Sun – May 1, 2015)

http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html

Vancouver mining magnate Frank Giustra finds himself caught up in the repeated mudslinging that surrounds Hillary Clinton’s campaign to become the next U.S. president. He doesn’t like it, and he’s fighting back.

His story has yielded big headlines in big-name media — The New York Times and The Washington Post, to name just two. And it has been playing out over the better part of a month as new angles are explored and old ones rehashed.

It’s a story made complex both by innuendo and by the muddying, glossing over or ignoring of timelines that might cast factual information in another light. And, of course, the Twitterverse and Internet are awash in vitriol from those who accept innuendo and suggestions as literal truth.

But the basic facts, neither damning nor exculpatory in themselves, are simple. They include:

• Billionaire Giustra and former U.S. President Bill Clinton, have become fast friends in the past decade. They travel the world together in Giustra’s jet to look in on philanthropic projects they jointly support. Giustra has given Clinton’s foundation many tens of millions of dollars, and he has raised many tens of millions more from rich acquaintances.

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U.S. to evaluate uranium mine cleanups on Navajo land -Justice Dept – by Sandra Maler (Reuters U.S. – May 1, 2015)

http://www.reuters.com/

WASHINGTON – (Reuters) – The U.S. government will put $13.2 million into an environmental trust to pay for evaluations of 16 abandoned uranium mines on land belonging to the Navajo Nation in Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, the Justice Department said on Friday.

The Justice Department said the agreement was part of its increased focus on environmental and health concerns in Indian country, “as well as the commitment of the Obama Administration to fairly resolve the historic grievances of American Indian tribes and build a healthier future for their people.”

The investigation of the sites is a necessary step before final cleanup decisions can be made, it said in a statement, adding the work would be subject to the approval of both the Navajo Nation and the Environmental Protection Agency.

“The site evaluations focus on the mines that pose the most significant hazards and will form a foundation for their final cleanup,” Assistant Attorney General John Cruden of the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division said in the statement.

The Navajo Nation encompasses more than 27,000 square miles (70,000 square km) within Utah, New Mexico and Arizona.

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Uranium Mines Dot Navajo Land, Neglected and Still Perilous – by Leslie MacMillan (New York Times – March 31, 2012)

http://www.nytimes.com/

CAMERON, Ariz. — In the summer of 2010, a Navajo cattle rancher named Larry Gordy stumbled upon an abandoned uranium mine in the middle of his grazing land and figured he had better call in the feds. Engineers from the Environmental Protection Agency arrived a few months later, Geiger counters in hand, and found radioactivity levels that buried the needles on their equipment.

The abandoned mine here, about 60 miles east of the Grand Canyon, joins the list of hundreds of such sites identified across the 27,000 square miles of Navajo territory in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico that are the legacy of shoddy mining practices and federal neglect. From the 1940s through the 1980s, the mines supplied critical materials to the nation’s nuclear weapons program.

For years, unsuspecting Navajos inhaled radioactive dust and drank contaminated well water. Many of them became sick with cancer and other diseases.

The radioactivity at the former mine is said to measure one million counts per minute, translating to a human dose that scientists say can lead directly to malignant tumors and other serious health damage, according to Lee Greer, a biologist at La Sierra University in Riverside, Calif.

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