SUDBURY, Ont. — The Canadian Press — Toxic gas that leaked from a Sudbury mining facility early Thursday has dissipated and no longer poses a risk to the community, the mining company said.
Residents near the Vale facility at Copper Cliff had been told to stay inside with the windows and doors closed due to a release of nitrogen dioxide.
Contractors building Gina Rinehart’s $10 billion Roy Hill project have been forced to send hundreds of workers to the Pilbara to try to avoid hefty penalty fees for delays finishing the project.
Head contractor Samsung C&T and its subcontractors have been racing to ensure they meet Roy Hill’s aggressive deadline to ship its first ore, which was slated for next month but now not expected until October.
If the first shipment does not sail by the end of October, Samsung faces penalty fees of almost $2 million for each day the project is late.
Sources said between 1000 and 1500 workers, unable to be accommodated at Roy Hill’s onsite accommodation, were being housed in various sites around the Pilbara town of Newman, about a three-hour round trip from Roy Hill.
A Roy Hill spokeswoman confirmed about 1100 workers were being housed in Newman “and have been for more than three months as part of Samsung’s efforts to meet schedule”.
EY figures are more confirmation of moribund merger and acquisition volume.
HALIFAX – You could almost recycle last year’s EY reports on mining mergers and acquisitions (M&A) to represent deal flow during the first half of 2015.
Which isn’t knocking EY. Just to say that mining M&A is still in the dumps.
As EY put it in their recent report on mining, “Overall activity in the 1st half of 2015 (H1 2015) remained subdued, following similar levels of malaise in 2014.” In fact, in some important ways, this year is worse off than last. EY was dead on describing IPO activity as flat-lining in the first half of 2015.
It looked dead last year. It’s deader now. Noting “persistently weak” IPOs in mining, E&Y data suggests the value of IPOs in the first half of 2015 is down 71% to $335 million from the first six months of 2014. The number of IPOs was also down to 6 from 8 and that says a lot.
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.
Until now, most experts have been reluctant to use the term “currency war” to describe this year’s global arms race in foreign exchange markets. But China certainly fired a big shot over the bow this week.
By formally cutting the government-managed value of the yuan, China raised the trend of increasingly competitive currency devaluations to a new level. In a world where struggling economies have been adopting policies that have driven their currencies lower in not particularly transparent attempts to stimulate export growth (30 central banks have cut interest rates this year), the world’s biggest exporter went to a new extreme to defend its turf.
Other export countries – including Canada, which has cut rates twice since January and is banking on an export recovery to revive its flagging economy – will surely feel the heat. So will the global financial markets, which look more fragile with every new volley in the currency battle.
There’s no reason to think all this will end well. About the best we can hope for is that it will all prove pointless.
BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany’s K+S AG SDFGn.DE said it would consider any improved offer from Canada’s Potash Corp of Saskatchewan POT.TO after its position was boosted by stronger than expected quarterly earnings.
The company affirmed its rejection of a 7.9 billion euro ($8.8 billion) takeover proposal by Potash, but left the door open on Thursday to an improved bid.
“K+S will deliver strong results as a stand-alone company,” finance chief Burkhard Lohr said during an earnings call. “K+S has a great future as an independent company.”
The Canadian firm’s takeover proposal of 41 euros per share does not even remotely reflect K+S’s underlying value, the CFO said, questioning again reassurances the Canadian firm has given on jobs and sites.
K+S’s management and supervisory boards “are extremely concerned that Potash appears to have no sustained interest in continuing the strategically, technically and financially linked fertilizer and salt activities in the current form,” it said.
It was a dramatic image: millions of cubic metres of waste cascading from the Mount Polley mine breach into the Quesnel watershed in B.C.’s Interior. Besides destroying a nine-kilometre creek and endangering salmon and the neighbouring community of Likely, the catastrophe damaged the mining industry’s reputation.
In the months following, fingers pointed, independent panels weighed in and committees were struck. One year later, the Mount Polley mine is operating again, this time with a conditional permit and no long-term plan to deal with excess tailings.
In British Columbia, after metals are extracted from large mines, the finely ground rock that remains is stored under water behind earth-and-rock dams, which can prevent acid mine drainage. (Acid mine drainage occurs when water flows through exposed acidic minerals and becomes contaminated.) But storing massive quantities of water in large open pits near towns and waterways is risky.
First Nations, scientists and the independent review panel investigating the breach point to dry stacking as a safer, proven alternative to century-old wet tailings technology.
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.
Moody’s Investors Service downgraded Barrick Gold Corp.’s credit to the lowest investment grade rating, a blow to the company that is on track to reduce its debt by $3-billion (U.S.) this year.
Barrick is rapidly selling mines to reduce its $13-billion debt load. But Moody’s said Barrick’s debt is still too high given the weak gold price.
“Material organic debt reduction is unlikely and production will start declining in the next several years,” Darren Kirk, Moody’s senior credit officer, said in a statement announcing the downgrade.
Moody’s changed the miner’s outlook to “stable” from “negative” and downgraded Barrick’s debt to one notch above junk status, a risky rating that would increase the company’s borrowing costs.
Relations between South Africa’s government and the mining industry are unraveling as a commodity-price rout derails plans by President Jacob Zuma’s administration to create millions of jobs and pare a 25 percent jobless rate.
Mining companies in South Africa, the world’s largest platinum and manganese producer, plan to fire as many as 10,000 workers at a time when the economy is struggling to rebound from the slowest expansion since a 2009 recession.
A public slanging match has ensued between senior politicians opposed to the layoffs and executives who say their stance, together with prolonged uncertainty over mining laws and an unreliable power supply, threatens their companies’ survival. Gwede Mantashe, secretary general of the ruling African National Congress, last month branded companies as “lazy” for firing staff rather than considering alternatives.
“I don’t think the government understands the gravity of the challenges in the industry,” Mzukisi Qobo, a politics lecturer at the University of Pretoria, said by phone on Wednesday.
Joel R. Reynolds is Western director and senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The definition of a mine, said Mark Twain, is a hole in the ground owned by liars. And this month the industry’s biggest lie — that it can be trusted with our water — is once again on display as another mining disaster has spilled millions of gallons of toxic mining waste and chemicals into our streams, rivers and lakes.
On Aug. 5, at the abandoned Gold King mine in southwest Colorado, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cleanup team inadvertently unleashed into a tributary of the Animas River a 3-million-gallon soup of toxic mining wastewater. The accident has closed the Animas indefinitely and threatens drinking water supplies, the economy and wildlife in the region, into New Mexico and potentially all the way to Lake Powell.
This latest tragedy followed by one year almost to the day a pair of mine containment failures in Canada and Mexico. On Aug. 4, 2014, at the Mount Polley copper and gold mine in central British Columbia, an earthen dam built 17 years ago to hold mining waste laced with mercury, lead, copper and other heavy metals — called tailings — failed, inundating the Fraser River watershed.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/news
Essar Steel interested in bidding for both Hamilton and Nanticoke plants, according to a report
A foreign steel maker that has previously purchased a Sault Ste. Marie steel plant is interested in U.S. Steel’s Canadian operations, according to a report in the Hamilton Spectator.
Essar Steel Holdings, an India-based steel company, purchased Algoma Steel in 2007 for $1.85 billion. The company’s name curiously appeared in bankruptcy court documents a month earlier as a party to be notified about the progress and proceedings.
But the news should be met with “cautious optimism” as a formal bid has yet to be announced, said Ward 4 Coun. and steel sub-committee member, Sam Merulla.
“That would be a dream come true for our city,” Merulla added. “At this point it’s speculative.”
