OTTAWA — Canadian exports of thermal coal increased another seven per cent last year, reaching the highest level in almost a decade. The boom in exports of the kind of coal burned to make electricity comes as Canada leads a charge to end the use of coal as a source of power worldwide, including at home.
The Liberals also promised three years ago that all thermal coal exports will stop from Canada by 2030, but exports have risen almost 20 per cent since that promise was made.
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Barrick Gold Corp. says its subsidiaries have settled a British court case with 10 Tanzanian villagers who alleged that police and security guards had caused deaths and injuries near the company’s North Mara gold mine.
The two subsidiaries in Tanzania did not admit any liability in the case at the High Court of Justice in London, Barrick said in a terse one-sentence statement on its website this week. It gave no other details.
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The senior executive team at Canadian copper miner First Quantum Minerals Ltd. got substantial compensation bumps and favourable performance reviews in a year the company was forced to shut down its biggest mine, and its stock lost more than half its value.
Late last year, Vancouver-based First Quantum shuttered the Cobre Panama mine after Panama’s Supreme Court declared its mining contract was unconstitutional. The giant copper mine in Panama accounted for about half of First Quantum’s revenue.
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A watchdog created by the federal government to probe corporate wrongdoing abroad says Vancouver-based Dynasty Gold Corp DYG-X has contributed to the use of forced labour at a mine in Xinjiang, China, and is asking Ottawa to cut off future trade support for the company.
Its investigative findings were released Tuesday in the first final report issued by the Canada Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE) since it opened its doors to receive complaints in March, 2021.
Ottawa’s corporate-ethics watchdog says a Vancouver-based mining company has allowed forced labour to occur at its gold mine in the Xinjiang region of China, even though the firm lost control of the project before the alleged slavery took place.
The company cited, Dynasty Gold Corp., says it’s being tarnished by baseless allegations on timelines that make no sense, but ombudsperson Sheri Meyerhoffer said companies are responsible for holdings they jointly control. The finding Tuesday is the first determination the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise has made since the office was created by the Liberals in 2018.
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Barrick Gold says it has found uranium in the drinking water of an open section of its Lumwana copper mine in Zambia, forcing it to halt the water supply and switch to other water sources for its workers in the section.
The Zambian mine has become increasingly important to Barrick’s future. The Toronto-based company has announced plans for a US$2-billion expansion at Lumwana to create one of the world’s biggest copper mines, with construction to begin late this year and production from the project expected by 2028.
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Shares in Global Atomic (TSX: GLO) have dropped nearly a third since the military rulers of Niger, where the company is developing its Dasa uranium project, vowed on the weekend to kick out United States troops that have been there more than a decade.
By Tuesday afternoon, stock in the Toronto-based company had fallen 29% since Friday to $2.21 apiece, valuing Global Atomic at $462.7 million. It was as low as $2.03 on Tuesday and has traded in a 52-week range of $1.28 to $3.91.
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Tumbling metal prices account for more than half all of impairment charges, declared when fixed assets fall below market values, the study of 105 TSX-listed mining companies found. They incurred $68 billion in charges from 2002 to 2015. Using unfamiliar technology and locating in developing countries also contributed, data show.
Metal price drops accounted for 143 of 268 cases and $25.2 billion in impairment charges, according to the study published last month in Resources Policy, an international journal on mineral rules and economics with editors in the United States, Australia and China. The research appears appropriate at a time when nickel and lithium prices have crashed from 2022 highs as gold has set new records.
The Trudeau government’s mandate that all new passenger vehicle sales must be electric or plug-in hybrid by 2035 could cause chaos because Canada’s electricity grid isn’t close to having the capacity needed to charge them, according to a new study by the Fraser Institute.
The fiscally conservative think tank estimates in a report released Thursday that to meet the higher demand for electricity will require increasing electricity generation nationally by up to 15.3% within 11 years.
March 18 (Reuters) – Northern Dynasty Minerals, the developer of the proposed Pebble copper and gold mine in southwest Alaska, has sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency seeking to overturn the agency’s veto of the project.
The developer on Friday filed a lawsuit in federal court in Anchorage challenging the EPA’s 2023 final determination prohibiting the discharge of mining waste in the state’s Bristol Bay over concerns the materials would degrade the watershed and harm important fishing ecosystems.
(Bloomberg) — The commodity trading industry reaped its second-best year ever in terms of profits, banking over $100 billion and building up a mountain of cash to spend on assets and breaking into new markets.
While earnings fell from 2022’s blockbuster records, profits across the sector still easily eclipsed prior highlights such as in 2008-2009, according to analysis from consultancy Oliver Wyman LLC.
Investors shave nearly $900 million off market cap in one of swiftest, largest single-day losses for a Canadian junior miner
Yukon-based Gabriel Resources Ltd. once harboured ambitions to build one of Europe’s largest gold and silver mines in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, which has been mined by humans for at least 2,000 years. But the proposed mining area is now on the UNESCO World Heritage list and Gabriel just lost an eight-year legal battle with Romania that has left the company’s future uncertain.
Gabriel’s experience is a cautionary tale that shows how shifting attitudes around resource extraction and an evolving global financial system have changed the business of mining.
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Federal Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson says legislative changes in response to the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling last year that curtailed Ottawa’s powers to regulate resource projects could come in next month’s budget.
Last October, the court ruled that the federal government doesn’t have nearly as much jurisdiction to regulate resource projects as it assumed it had under the Constitution. Currently, mines, oil and gas projects and pipelines are regulated based on a roughly 50/50 split between the federal government and the provinces through two separate and often overlapping processes.
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Few Canadian mining leaders have committed to full carbon emission reductions by 2050, according to a survey by KPMG. The survey conducted last month with 75 mining company decision-makers found that only 23% have made formal commitments to achieve all scope-related carbon emission reductions by 2050 or earlier,
About a quarter have not yet made formal commitments but are actively developing emission reduction plans. Moreover, 10% lack both ESG and carbon reduction strategies, while 7% either do not intend to implement such strategies or face challenges in reducing emissions at present.
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The Canadian and U.S. governments have agreed to put the issue of cross-border pollution from B.C. coal mines before the International Joint Commission, a body set up more than a century ago to resolve conflicts over shared waters.
The request, made through what is known as a joint reference under the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909, follows years of campaigning by Indigenous peoples and was developed with the Ktunaxa Nation, an Indigenous people whose traditional territory takes in parts of British Columbia, Montana and Idaho.
