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United States Mining

TRUMP WANTS TO SAVE BIG COAL WITH $11 BILLION ANNUAL BAILOUT – by Nicole Goodkind (Newsweek Magazine – November 2, 2017)

http://www.newsweek.com/

The Trump administration wants to force electricity customers to pay for a $10.6 billion annual bailout of the failing coal and nuclear industries through surcharges on their monthly energy bills.

The quietly announced proposal would require ratepayers to fully underwrite a new mandate that coal and nuclear plants hold a minimum of 90 days’ worth of fuel on-site under the false premise of providing security from power outages.

But critics say the subsidy is just a massive government-mandated transfer of wealth from consumers to coal and nuclear companies. “This is like changing the energy system from capitalism to communism—and the U.S. government wants to do it within the next two weeks,” said Michael Krancer, a principal at energy policy company Silent Majority Strategies.

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Zinc mine in St. Lawrence County to reopen after being closed for decade – by Susan Mende (Watertown Daily Times – November 2, 2017)

http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/

FOWLER — After sitting idle for nearly a decade, the former St. Lawrence Zinc Co. mine is being refurbished and is expected to start extracting zinc early next year.

Titan Mining Corp., Toronto, recently secured the remaining $50 million needed to get the mine operating by selling 35.75 million stock shares at a price of $1.40 a share on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Keith A. Boyle, Titan’s chief operating officer, said the financing was the last major hurdle. The mine will be called Empire State Mines and will operate as a subsidiary of Titan. “That was the final piece,” Mr. Boyle said Wednesday. “We are off and running. There’s nothing left to do on the financial side.”

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Coal miners are so confident Trump will bring coal back that they’re rejecting alternate career retraining – by Zoë Schlanger (Quartz.com – November 2, 2017)

https://qz.com/

Throughout his campaign and into his first year as president, Donald Trump vowed to bring back US coal jobs and revitalize the dying industry.

He heralded the opening of the first new coal mine of his era this summer as a fulfillment of his campaign promises. The Acosta mine, owned by Corsa Coal, is set to employ fewer people than the average supermarket.

That new mine is in Southwestern Pennsylvania, where Reuters reports the dream of a second golden age of coal is alive and well, despite all indications that the industry’s future is bleak. In fact, hope is so strong it has Pennsylvania miners rejecting free, federally-funded retraining in new careers.

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US coal’s upturn favours open-pit mines in western states – by Ed Crooks (Financial Times – November 2, 2017)

https://www.ft.com/

The US coal industry has been making a comeback this year, hailed this week by President Donald Trump.

In the power generation sector, however, only one variety of the fuel is in demand — low-cost production from the large open-pit mines of western states such as Wyoming.

The trend has buoyed listed US mining groups Peabody Energy and Arch Coal, which have both emerged from bankruptcy after the wave of failures that swept the industry in 2015-16.

But it is a bad sign for the Appalachian region, including states such as West Virginia and Kentucky, which Mr Trump has pledged to help. Healthy demand for thermal coal, used for power generation, from the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana is helping support a US mining industry that is focusing on controlling debts and returning cash to shareholders.

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Looking for Clues to Fate of Fertilizer Rally Amid Surplus – by Jen Skerritt and Megan Durisin (Bloomberg News – October 25, 2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

As fertilizer producers in North America enjoy late-season improvement in prices, investors are looking for clues from the companies this week about how much longer the gains will last.

While crop nutrients including nitrogen and potash have rebounded from recent lows, questions remain about the lingering impact of a global surplus and prospects for a slowdown in demand. Producers will begin reporting third-quarter results in the next week, starting Thursday with Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan Inc.

Potash Corp.

A rally in potash prices probably helped to boost earnings for the Saskatoon, Saskatchewan-based company to 12 cents a share in the quarter, excluding some special items, compared to 9 cents a year earlier, according to 19 estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

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Zinc prices help NANA rebound from oil crash – by Elwood Brehmer (Alaska Journal of Commerce – October 25, 2017)

http://www.alaskajournal.com/

Strong returns from the Red Dog mine are helping NANA Regional Corp. overcome oil and gas industry losses. NANA CEO Wayne Westlake said in an interview that the Northwest Alaska zinc mine is outpacing production forecasts at a time when zinc prices are high.

The open-pit Red Dog mine sits about 90 miles north of Kotzebue, the largest community in the region. NANA, the Alaska Native regional corporation for the area, owns the mine that is operated by Vancouver-based Teck Resources Ltd.

Teck expects production from Red Dog to be between 525,000 and 550,000 metric tonnes this year, according to a September release from the company. Output in that range would be about 10 percent above prior production forecasts.

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[U.S. Mining] Strategic Minerals: The Embarrassment of Riches – by Ned Mamula (Capital Research – October 25, 2017)

 

Environmentalists put America’s vast mineral wealth off limits, ceding our future to China

Despite having a vast reserve of mineral resources, the U.S. is dependent for minerals on the goodwill and cooperation of other nations, including China and Russia.

Why are we in this situation? The answer is simple: Over the past five decades, our mining industry has been crippled by poor stewardship on the part of the federal government and by severe restrictions imposed at the behest of the environmentalist movement. It’s the major reason that scores of mining companies have gone under and tens of thousands of American jobs have been lost.

By contrast, in recent years, with horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking), the oil and gas industry has prospered. New technology has presented us with the prospect of abundant energy, even energy independence—a seeming impossibility just a generation ago. Unfortunately, the story of strategic minerals has taken a very different and indeed sinister turn.

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A renaissance to reverse US strategic minerals imports: Dig, Baby, Dig – by Ned Mamula and William Murray (The Hill – October 23, 2017)

http://thehill.com/

The “energy dominance” strategy pursed by the Trump administration has focused on keeping the national economy free from coercion by nations that use resources as economic weapons.

In a joint op-ed in June, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt alluded to this strategy, extolling the American energy renaissance and pledging that energy discussions would “no longer (be) about peak resources or being beholden to foreign powers.”

Given this heightened attention to energy security, it’s too bad leaders are not paying the same attention to a national security risk at least as large as oil-import dependency was a decade ago — the domestic supply of critical and strategic minerals.

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Special Report: Grasberg mine talks signal Indonesia’s strengthening resolve – by Alexander Macleod (Global Risk Insights – October 21, 2017)

Despite some issues concerning the Indonesian government’s divestment plans for the province of Papua’s Grasberg mine, there are growing signs that Indonesia will get its way. Nevertheless, Indonesia’s ruthless treatment of Freeport will alert future investors.

This year has been unforgiving to Freeport McMoRan Inc, an invaluable player in Indonesia’s mining sector. On August 29, after months of tense negotiations, Freeport agreed to relinquish a 51% share in Grasberg, the world’s second-largest gold and copper mine, to the Indonesian government.

Having acquired Grasberg early in the Suharto era, American corporation Freeport has since transformed it into a ‘super mine’. Grasberg produced 500,000 tonnes of copper and 1.1m ounces of gold in 2016 – over 25% of Freeport’s worldwide output.

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Hillary Clinton, Canadian company at heart of controversy Trump and his supporters want to resurrect – by Tom Blackwell (National Post – October 21, 2017)

http://nationalpost.com/

The 2010 sale of Uranium One to Russian interests — and allegations that Canadian donations to the Clinton Foundation eased its approval in U.S. — has new life

It’s the Russia controversy that President Donald Trump and his supporters would love the world to focus on, and it centres largely around a Toronto-based mining company.

The 2010 sale of Uranium One to Russian interests — and unproven allegations that Canadian donations to the Clinton Foundation eased its approval in the States — suddenly has new life.

Credit for the rebirth goes to the president, his media allies and a recent piece of investigative reporting on the seven-year-old issue. “That’s your real Russian story,” Trump told reporters Thursday, “not a story where they talk about collusion and there was none.”

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NEWS RELEASE: FORMATION CAPITAL CORPORATION U.S. ANNOUNCES POSITIVE ENGINEERING FEASIBILITY STUDY TO BUILD $187 MILLION MINING AND REFINING OPERATIONS IN EASTERN IDAHO

BLACKFOOT, ID – October 19, 2017 — Salmon, Idaho based salormation Capital Corporation, U.S., a wholly owned subsidiary of eCobalt Solutions Inc. (ECS.TSX / ECSIF.OTCQB) has received an economic Feasibility Study that outlines the development of a cobalt mining operation near Salmon, Idaho and hydrometallurgical refining facility on a railhead in neighboring Blackfoot, Idaho. The project is known as the Idaho Cobalt Project, and is owned by eCobalt’s wholly owned subsidiary, Formation Capital Corporation, U.S.

With pre-construction activities already underway, the vertically integrated Idaho Cobalt Project is designed to produce cobalt for the rechargeable batteries market.

The total initial capital cost is estimated at $187 million with additional sustaining, reclamation and closure costs of $101M totaling $288 million. Construction of the project is contingent upon the successful conclusion of mine financing.

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BMO: Miners may revisit dormant mega-projects – by Matthew Keevil (Northern Miner – Matthew Keevil)

Northern Miner

VANCOUVER — The last five years have seen large-cap miners shelve — and often write-down — ambitious, greenfield development projects that carry significant development price tags and heightened risk.

The majors instead focused on stronger operating margins and lighter balance sheets, which were typically characterized by improved free cash flow generation and lower debt.

The last 18 months have marked a shift in sentiment for metal producers, however, as metal prices have strengthened and risk capital markets entered the nascent stages of recovery.

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Workers to begin mining operations at the US nuclear waste dump in New Mexico following a radiation release that contaminated part of the repository (Daily Mail/Associated Press – October 17, 2017)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/

Workers are expected to begin mining operations at the US nuclear waste dump in New Mexico for the first time in three years following a radiation release that contaminated part of the underground repository, the Energy Department said Tuesday.

The work to carve out more disposal space from the ancient salt formation where the repository is located will begin later this fall and should be completed by 2020, the department said in a statement.

Workers will remove more than 112,000 tons of salt, making way for seven disposal rooms. Each will have space for more than 10,000 drums containing up to 55 gallons of waste.

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New uranium mines: no simple answers – by Emery Cowan (Arizona Daily Sun – October 15, 2017)

http://azdailysun.com/

A town on the edge of the Navajo Nation that unknowingly drank uranium-tainted water for at least 12 years. Navajo babies showing increasing uranium concentrations during their first year of life.

Children swimming in natural pools near Cameron they later learned had been filled with water from abandoned uranium mines. The stories about the impacts of Cold War-era uranium mining on the Navajo Nation became highly personal during a forum hosted at the Museum of Northern Arizona Wednesday night.

Four decades later, the subject has come to the fore again as a grandfathered uranium mine moves forward with operations south of Tusayan and a new president stokes fears about the reopening of 1 million acres of the Grand Canyon watershed outside the national park to new mining.

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Trump says he ended the ‘war’ on coal companies. But it’s too late to save them. – by Adam Federman (Washington Post – October 13, 2017)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/

It was depicted by energy executives and conservatives as a “witch hunt,” “a politically motivated sham” and a move that would “destroy mining in the West .”

In January 2016, President Barack Obama imposed a three-year moratorium on federal coal leasing, which halted new projects and delayed pending applications for companies to extract coal from federal land. During that time, the Interior Department was to carry out an overdue review of the program’s social and environmental costs.

A year later, all this was an easy target for President Trump, who had promised to save the coal industry from oppressive regulations and slumping sales. On March 29, his administration lifted the moratorium and deep-sixed the study.

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