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Day: July 15, 2015

Inuit org, Agnico Eagle Mines sign benefits deal for Nunavut’s Meliadine gold project – by Sarah Rogers (Nunatsiaq News – July 14, 2015)

http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/

“This is another step for a brighter future for Inuit”

It took more than three years of talks — which broke down at least once — but the Kivalliq Inuit Association and Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd. have finally completed and signed an Inuit Impact Benefit Agreement July 13 for the Meliadine gold project.

Officials from both the KIA and AEM signed the agreement in Rankin Inlet, just 24 kilometres away from what would be Nunavut’s third operating mine, and second gold mine, after Agnico Eagle’s Meadowbank gold mine outside of Baker Lake.

While complete details of the IIBA are yet to be made public, signatories, in a July 13 news release, said it addresses the protection of Inuit values, culture and language as well as the natural environment. Agnico Eagle told Nunatsiaq News the terms of the agreement will be made public once it translated into Inuktitut.

With the signing of the IIBA, Agnico Eagle says it’s made its first payment of $1.5 million to the KIA. The release also commits the company to working toward a minimum rate of 50 per cent Inuit employment at the mine.

“KIA has strived to balance the need to protect wildlife and the environment,” said president David Ningeongan in the same release. “This will lead to future sustainable development and benefits for Inuit in the Kivalliq region.

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ANALYSIS: South Africa: Scramble for Resources – the Mining Time Bomb – by Sylvia Vollenhoven (All Africa.com – July 15, 2015)

http://allafrica.com/

The riches that lie buried beneath the soil, the bounty of the oceans and our countless other resources are a blessing and a curse. Throughout history there have been powers eager to grab as much as they can while giving back as little as possible. In recent times the tensions in the mining industry exploded into the Marikana tragedy. Next week at the Durban Film Festival a documentary that is making waves internationally brings it down to a standoff between two cousins and the titanium of the pristine Wild Coast.

Two cousins, one proposed mining project on tribal land and a battle of epic proportions. That’s the story of The Shore Break, a landmark film by Producers Ryley Grunenwald and Odette Geldenhuys.

In the Amadiba area, on South Africa’s stunning Wild Coast, the Pondo people have tended their traditional way of life for centuries. Nonhle, a young local eco-tour guide, is a staunch supporter of her people and the endangered environment on which their livelihood and culture depend.

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Nickel’s fightback begins but obstacles loom – by Pratima Desai (Reuters U.S. – July 15, 2015)

http://www.reuters.com/

LONDON, July 15 (Reuters) – Prospects for tighter nickel supplies may have put a floor under prices but any real recovery will need Chinese stainless steel mills to step up their orders and global stockpiles to fall.

Benchmark nickel on the London Metal Exchange fell to six-year lows of $10,430 a tonne last week on worries about demand, particularly after a tumble in Chinese equities.

Prices have climbed back to around $11,500 yet remain at just half the $21,625 hit in May 2014 after Indonesia banned nickel ore exports.

The sell-off that followed that peak was triggered by suppliers in the Philippines who moved to supply ore to Chinese smelters, which produce nickel pig iron, a cheaper alternative to refined nickel that costs around $15,000 a tonne to make.

Chinese nickel pig-iron producers are losing money and have cut output. Analysts estimate China’s nickel pig-iron production fell about 25 percent year on year between January and May to below 170,000 tonnes.

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Indian iron-ore miners rush to steelmaking sector – by Ajoy K Das (MiningWeekly.com July 14, 2015)

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

KOLKATA (miningweekly.com) – India’s standalone miners have been galvanized to take a slice of the domestic steelmaking pie.

All large government-owned and managed miners with large iron-ore portfolios have been in touch with their respective controlling authorities seeking to spread their strategic investments into steel production, an official in the Ministry of Steel said.

Every iron-ore, manganese and chrome ore miner was scouting for opportunities to invest in large steel mills, based on the perception that the current downturn in global commodity prices could be prolonged, making it an opportune time for capital investments in downstream production and to hedge against margin erosion from just raw material production, he added.

NMDC Limited, the largest domestic iron-ore miner and under administrative control of the Steel Ministry, has sought government approval to participate in the planned special purpose vehicles (SPVs) for construction of mega steel plants across India’s mineral-rich provinces.

The Steel Ministry has already announced the creation of SPVs in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Karnataka to put up steel mills that each have a capacity of about 10-million tonnes a year with an investment of $7-billion to $8-billion riding on each.

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The marriage of mining and technology is inevitable – by Jeannette McGill (TEDxJohannesburg – December 6, 2014)

  Published on 6 Dec 2014 This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Jeannette McGill is one of the foremost thinkers in mining, having earned her stripes working many years underground and studying at the best universities in the world. She makes the point, in this TEDxJohannesburg …

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NEWS RELEASE: Pact Report Sheds New Light on Conflict-Free Mining in Africa’s Great Lakes

Download the report, Unconflicted, on Pact’s website.

For more information about Pact’s work in mining globally, visit http://www.pactworld.org/mining.

WASHINGTON, D.C., Jul. 14 /CSRwire/ – Today, Pact released a report detailing the state of conflict-free minerals in The Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. The report provides an in-depth look at traceability and due diligence, as well as on-the-ground progress and challenges.

Throughout Africa’s Great Lakes region, the international community has closely watched, and regulated, the extraction and sale of conflict minerals – tin, tungsten tantalum (3Ts) and gold – in the hopes of curtailing ongoing violence.

In 2010, Pact, an international development nonprofit, along with regional governments, companies and other partners, began implementing the joint industry traceability and due diligence system developed by ITRI (the nonprofit global tin industry association) known as iTSCi (ITRI Tin Supply Chain Initiative).

“In the five years since the partnership began, iTSCi has protected and improved the lives of tens of thousands of miners across hundreds of mines,” said Yves Bawa, regional director for Congo, Rwanda and Burundi and iTSCi program manager at Pact.

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Anglo American Seen Cutting Dividend as Commodity Prices Retreat – by Kevin Crowley and Jesse Riseborough (Bloomberg News – July 15, 2015)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Anglo American Plc could cut its dividend for the first time since 2009 as tumbling commodity prices reduce the cash available to pay investors.

Analysts at Barclays Plc, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Investec Ltd. have all said the company may make a cut when it reports first-half results next week, without specifying the scale of any reduction. Anglo, which spent $1 billion on dividends in 2014, hasn’t reduced the payout since it was halted during the global financial crisis.

The speculation underscores the challenge faced by Chief Executive Officer Mark Cutifani, who is seeking to almost double the company’s return on capital by improving mines and selling assets. He’s doing that at a time when prices for copper, iron ore, thermal coal and platinum, representing half of Anglo’s revenue last year, are trading in or close to bear markets.

Cutifani “has been dealt a very rough hand,” said Gavin Wood, the chief investment officer of Kagiso Asset Management in Cape Town, which manages $6 billion of assets, including Anglo shares. “They need to cut back on costs, on capital expenditure, preserve cash and weather it out.”

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Filmmaker goes home to document Red Lake mining life – by Ian Ross (Northern Ontario Business – June 30, 2015)

Established in 1980, Northern Ontario Business provides Canadians and international investors with relevant, current and insightful editorial content and business news information about Ontario’s vibrant and resource-rich North. Ian Ross is the editor of Northern Ontario Business ianross@nob.on.ca.

Abudding Toronto filmmaker has paid an artistic and captivating tribute to his hometown of Red Lake with the release of his first feature-length documentary.

Cliff Caines’ 78-minute film, “A Rock and a Hard Place,” is a nostalgic and critical portrait of a resource-dependent town built upon some of the world’s richest gold deposits.

Under the umbrella of his production company, Headframe Films, the documentary received an honourable mention at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver this past May.

The catalyst for the project was in 2010 when he got wind of rumours that Goldcorp was evaluating the possibility of digging up entire subdivisions of Balmertown, a small community within Red Lake where he grew up, to convert the land into a huge open pit.

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Miners’ M&A sinks in sea of dud deals – by James Thomson (Australian Financial Review – June 23, 2015)

http://www.afr.com/

Think long term. Show some vision. Be bold. Don’t mortgage your company’s future prospects by simply handing back capital to shareholders. Do something!

If like me you’ve had these thoughts about the current state of corporate psyches, then this might make you think again – big miners are apparently terrible at mergers and acquisitions.

According to research from Citi, the world’s biggest miners have now written off about 90 per cent of the value of the assets they have acquired via M&A since 2007.

Ninety per cent! This suggests the bulk of deals done by our big miners have been pretty much worthless for shareholders. A sea of dud deals. Billions in wasted capital.

According to Citi’s numbers, miners have written down the value of assets by $US85 billion in the past seven years, representing about 18 per cent of their assets base.

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Newmont’s C.U.R.E. commitment belies mining’s rapacious image – by Lawrie Williams (Lawrieongold.com – July 15, 2015)

http://lawrieongold.com/

Mining has a very poor media image, largely prompted by often untrue or exaggerated examples of supposed bad practice by axe-to-grind sometimes less scrupulous environmental NGOs and the invariable depiction of mining companies as the bad guys in many Hollywood movies – particularly Westerns.

The media has an inbuilt predilection for only publishing news of inevitable occasional (actually very rare) environmental breaches and to totally ignore the good that many, indeed most, mining companies do for the communities in which they operate as part of their social contract. It was not ever thus, but today’s miners are a very different breed, but still could be said to be suffering from the sins of the past in terms of perception.

Mining thus has a huge amount of ground to make up in perhaps better disseminating knowledge of the huge amount of positive work being undertaken in education, housing, health and safety and wellbeing in the often extremely remote areas of the world in which they operate.

Go to a presentation by virtually any modern-day mining company operating in the less developed parts of the world and it will highlight what is being done in this respect – building schools, hospitals, decent housing and implementing sustainability programmes to be in place when the deposit is worked out – and, of course, providing decently paid employment, in areas where frequently there was absolutely nothing but subsistence living.

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Mine Games: Clash of the Commodity Kingpins – by Jeremy Kahn (Bloomberg News – July 14 2015)

http://www.bloomberg.com/

Glencore boss Ivan Glasenberg takes on Rio Tinto’s Sam Walsh—and an entire industry.

Sam Walsh, the mild-mannered Australian CEO of London-based mining giant Rio Tinto Group, insists he remains on cordial terms with Ivan Glasenberg, the brash South African who leads the global mining and commodities trading firm Glencore. Sure, Glasenberg approached Walsh’s boss—Rio Tinto Chairman Jandu Plessis—in July 2014 and proposed a merger that would likely have cost Walsh his job.

Sure, Glasenberg doesn’t miss a chance to tell the world that Walsh and his fellow Big Mining executives don’t comprehend the basic economics of supply and demand. Still, Walsh told the Times of London in December, “We’re big boys, and this is business. It’s not personal.”

Except it kind of is. Glasenberg’s argument is that Walsh and his fellow global mining executives “screwed up”—the phrase the commodities tycoon used in 2013—by flooding the world with minerals. Take iron ore, which is responsible for almost half of Rio Tinto’s revenue and more than two-thirds of its pretax profit.

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