Russia’s $75 trillion in resources is why sanctions are impossible (Preston Business Review – December 31, 2018)

https://prestonbusinessreview.com/

Russia’s $75 trillion in resources is why sanctions are impossible The country with the largest mineral reserves in the world, Russia, is the second top exporter of rare earth minerals. Its natural resources are estimated at tens of trillions of dollars.

It has abundant supplies of oil, natural gas, timber and valuable minerals, such as copper, diamonds, lead, zinc, bauxite, nickel, tin, mercury, gold and silver. Most of those resources are located in Siberia and the Far East.

Russia’s mining industry, which is the country‘s second largest after oil and gas, accounts for a significant share of its GDP and exports. The country is among the top three producers of mineral commodities such as platinum, gold and iron ore. It is also the world‘s largest producer of diamonds and palladium. The Ural Mountains have vast amounts of minerals while most deposits of coal, oil, gas and timber are located in Siberia.

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Grand Theft Cobalt: Rotterdam – by Kit Chellel and Mark Burton (Bloomberg News – December 27, 2018)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Thieves are pulling off audacious metal heists at Europe’s largest port. They’re even stealing from the Cobalt Jesus.

A group of bankers, brokers, and journalists was huddled outside a dingy warehouse along the Nieuwe Maas River in Rotterdam on a gray morning last January. All around was the industrial sprawl of Europe’s largest port, a landscape of cranes and colorful shipping containers stacked up like Lego bricks, reversing trucks and squalling gulls.

The building was run by Vollers Group GmbH, a logistics specialist based in Germany. One of its managers, Martijn Wijbrandi, led his visitors inside to get high-viz jackets and a safety briefing. We’ve never had a problem with theft, Wijbrandi said, but it pays to be careful.

He pointed out the alarm system, secured by a PIN code. On the warehouse floor, everyone filed past piles of magnesium bricks and bags of coffee to an area walled off by steel sheets that rose almost to the ceiling. A security camera was aimed at the padlocked sliding door.

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Inside the Coldest City in the World, Where It Snows 270 Days a Year – by Lucas Reilly (Mental Floss.com – December 26, 2018)

http://mentalfloss.com/

In much of the Northern Hemisphere right now, it’s getting colder and darker and the winter blues are setting in. But few places get it quite as bad as Norilsk, Russia, where residents won’t see a sunrise until mid-January. Worse yet, it’s arguably the coldest city in the world.

One of two Siberian cities built in the continuous permafrost zone, during the winter, the city of more than 175,000 people can see cold snaps as brutally low as -78°F. Overall, Norilsk boasts a yearlong average temperature of just 14°F. (Some will argue that the Siberian city of Yakutsk is colder, but that depends on how you want to slice it: Yakutsk is indisputably chillier in the winter—an average temperature of -42°F in January!—but it has much hotter summers and so, when measured by its yearly average, is warmer overall.)

Then there’s the snow. Norilsk “is covered with snow for about 270 days a year,” Vincze Miklós writes for io9, “and the inhabitants must deal with snowstorms one day out of every three.”

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London’s streets no longer paved with gold as miners struggle by Thomas Biesheuvel(Bloomberg News – December 23, 2018)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

[LONDON] Reports that AngloGold Ashanti is considering a London listing provide some festive cheer to a city that’s lost its way as a home for gold miners.

While Toronto, Johannesburg and Sydney have long hosted the biggest producers, London vies with New York as the world’s premier gold trading hub and its financiers have bankrolled the industry since the development of South Africa’s giant gold fields more than 130 years ago. When junior gold miners flocked to the city in the early 2000s, a renaissance seemed at hand.

That promise hasn’t been realised as companies from Petropavlovsk and Acacia Mining to Centamin struggled to reach their potential. Star performer Randgold Resources will exit next year after its acquisition by Barrick Gold, capping a slump in the market value of London-listed gold and silver miners. That’s left fund managers struggling to find liquid gold stocks as the bullion price languishes.

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Covering Climate Talks in the Heart of Poland’s Coal Country – by Brad Plumer (New York Times – December 19, 2018)

https://www.nytimes.com/

Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times.

The backdrop for this year’s big United Nations climate talks seemed, at first, a bizarre choice. Diplomats from across the globe converged on Katowice, a city in the heart of Poland’s southwestern coal-mining region, to discuss how the world’s nations could accelerate their efforts to shift away from fossil fuels.

But when I traveled to Poland last week to cover those climate talks, I discovered that the setting was fairly apt. Lately, climate policymakers around the world have been grappling with the fact that even the best-laid plans to tackle global warming will falter if they don’t take into account people who might lose out from a shift to cleaner energy. And Poland offered a sharp illustration of just how difficult that can be in practice.

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Biting the bullet, not the dust: Deripaska gives up his aluminium empire – by Polina Devitt, Anastasia Lyrchikova and Katya Golubkova (Reuters U.K. – December 20, 2018)

https://uk.reuters.com/

MOSCOW (Reuters) – The U.S. decision to lift sanctions on Russia’s Rusal (0486.HK), the world’s top aluminium producer outside China, is widely seen as a Christmas present for the company, global consumers of its metal, and the Russian stock market.

But its co-owner and founder Oleg Deripaska will have mixed feelings, as the deal means giving up control of his prized aluminium empire and then seeing it return to business as usual while he remains blacklisted alongside drug lords.

It’s a challenge for Deripaska, once Russia’s richest man, as he has never before sold a major asset. He started building his empire during the 1990s “aluminium wars” after the collapse of the Soviet Union, waging several battles with rivals.

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UPDATE 1-Portugal sees first lithium licensing tender in 2019, wants refinery – by Sergio Goncalves (Reuters U.S. – December 18, 2018)

https://www.reuters.com/

LISBON, Dec 18 (Reuters) – Portugal expects to launch a tender for lithium exploration licences next year, the new secretary of state for energy said on Tuesday, confirming the general outlines of a plan devised under his predecessor, although with a slight delay.

In September, Joao Galamba’s predecessor Jorge Seguro Sanches said he wanted to launch the tender before the end of 2018 as part of a plan to make Portugal Europe’s top supplier of the metal for electric car batteries and meet an expected surge in global demand for lithium.

Galamba, who took over less than two months ago after a wider government reshuffle, also told Reuters the government will look at commitments to invest in a local lithium processing unit as part of the tender process.

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Touting Coal But Negotiating Emissions Cuts – What Is Trump Up To In Poland? – by Dave Keating (Forbes Magazine – December 11, 2018)

https://www.forbes.com/

Yesterday, when the U.S. delegation at UN climate talks in Katowice, Poland organised an event promoting fossil fuels, the reaction was fierce – and predictable.

It was the second year in a row the U.S. has staged such an event at the annual climate gathering setting the rules of the Paris Climate Agreement, staying true to the headline message coming from the White House that climate change is a hoax and the agreement will hinder economic growth.

But behind the scenes, delegates from the U.S. government are sounding a different tone. Speaking at a “innovation in coal and natural gas” event on the sidelines of the summit, Preston Wells Griffith, the deputy assistant secretary for international affairs at the U.S. Department of Energy, told the audience that “alarmism should not silence realism.”

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Public Power saves Greek nickel producer Larco from immediate shutdown (Reuters U.S. – December 12, 2018)

https://www.reuters.com/

ATHENS (Reuters) – Greece’s Public Power Corp. (PPC) (DEHr.AT) will not cut the electricity supply to Larco before the start of the new year as the government works on a plan to avert a closure of Europe’s biggest nickel producer, the utility said late on Wednesday.

Larco, which is 55 percent owned by the Greek state, owes about 280 million euros ($319 million) in unpaid electricity bills to state-controlled power utility PPC, also a minority shareholder in the company.

PPC said on Wednesday it will continue to supply Larco with electricity until the end of the year after the Greek energy ministry intervened.

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Norilsk Nickel to invest $12bn in production over next five years – by Nastassia Astrasheuskaya (Financial Times – December 10, 2018)

https://www.ft.com/

Russia’s metals and mining major Norilsk Nickel plans to invest more than $12bn in production development over the next five years in order to boost production volumes, the company’s chief executive officer Vladimir Potanin said Monday.

The world’s largest producer of palladium, and one of the leading producers of nickel, platinum and copper, thus signalled a change of strategy from flat output to growth amid stronger global demand for its products.

“We are implementing a rather unprecedented investment programme: we are investing more than $12 billion in production development in the next five years,” Mr Potanin told Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in a meeting, according to the Kremlin transcript.

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Canada co-hosts ‘coal-free day’ at UN climate meeting in Poland – by Mia Rabson (The Canadian Press/Global News – December 8, 2018)

https://globalnews.ca/

OTTAWA — Canada and the United Kingdom are hosting a “coal-free day” at the United Nations climate talks in Katowice, Poland, a city built on coal mining.

Poland relies on coal for almost 80 per cent of its electricity, more than double the global average, and Katowice is the heart of its industry. The city of about 300,000 people grew up around workshops and mills fuelled by the coal deposits abundant in the ground.

At the International Congress Centre in Katowice, where thousands of environment leaders and representatives from almost every country in the world are meeting for at least two weeks, you can see the smoke stacks and plumes of coal exhaust from nearby power plants.

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Poland celebrates coal as talks start in mining capital – by Jean Chemnick (E&E News – December 6, 2018)

https://www.eenews.net/

The future of the Paris climate agreement is being charted now in a Polish city that proudly displays its coal-mining heritage. The U.N. climate talks that began Monday in Katowice, Poland, aim to finish the Paris “rulebook” — implementing guidelines for the 3-year-old pact.

Failure to strike a deal by the end of next week would undermine global trust in the climate deal in the wake of a U.N. report last year that showed only a swift decarbonization could avert disaster.

“Leaders of the world, you must lead,” British broadcaster and natural historian David Attenborough said at the conference’s opening Monday. “The continuation of our civilizations and the natural world upon which we depend is in your hands.” U.N. chief António Guterres echoed that message, urging representatives of nearly 200 nations to work together. “Only global answers,” he said, “can solve global problems.”

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Miners’ Day celebrated in climate talks city in Poland – by Monika Scislowska (Associated Press/Washington Post – December 4, 2018)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/ KATOWICE, Poland — Miners’ brass bands led celebrations Tuesday honoring the patron saint of miners in the southern Polish city that’s hosting this year’s U.N. climate talks. Musicians began Miner’s Day, dedicated to Catholic Saint Barbara, with a traditional sunrise concert in the streets of a historic district in Katowice. The performers, dressed in …

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Effective ban on new coal mining plans in Wales (BBC News – December 5, 2018)

https://www.bbc.com/

An effective ban on new coal mines in Wales getting planning permission is to come into effect. The measure is part of the Welsh Government’s new planning policy, published on Wednesday.

Applications for opencast and deep-mine coal mining will only be allowed under “exceptional circumstances”. Environment Secretary Lesley Griffiths said the policy will ensure “we have well-designed spaces which will benefit future generations”.

It comes after the assembly passed legally-binding carbon emissions targets on Tuesday. Planning Policy Wales governs what councils can allow through planning permission. In the new edition, the government says planning permission for opencast or deep-mine development “should not be permitted”.

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How Swedish Mining Automation Group is sparking digital disruption in the Canadian mining sector – by Laura Mullan (Gigabit Magazine – December 04, 2018)

https://www.gigabitmagazine.com/

Business Sweden Canada with partners from the Swedish mining industry has created SMAG to help the mining sector evolve into a more sustainable and innovative industry

Mining is often cited as one of the last remaining industries to be disrupted by technology, but that is changing quickly.

From driverless trucks to robotic drills, digitisation is quickly bringing a new measure of safety to mines. It’s also boosting the efficiency of how we obtain the precious minerals needed to make everything from modern cars to devices. In the coming years, mining automation is primed for explosive growth, and it seems that one Nordic country is set to be at the epicentre of it all.

Sweden may be a small mining nation but when it comes to mining technology, it’s considered to be in a league of its own. Looking to collaborate and foster innovation in the mining sector, six Swedish mining technology firms have joined forces with Business Sweden to create the Swedish Mining Automation Group (SMAG).

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