Freeport-McMoRan (NYSE:FCX) is selling a 13 percent ownership interest in its Morenci Mine to Sumitomo Metal Mining Co., Ltd. (SMM) for $1.0 billion in cash.Morenci is an open-pit, copper mine located in Arizona.The Morenci unincorporated joint venture is currently owned 85 percent by FCX and 15 percent by Sumitomo Metal Mining Arizona Inc. (SMMAz is owned 80 percent by SMM and 20 percent by Sumi...Read More
Taseko Mines Ltd. (TSX: TKO) is suing the federal government in B.C. Supreme Court and seeking unspecified compensation for a 2014 decision that blocked development of a proposed $1.5 billion gold and copper deposit.The Vancouver-based company claims that the government and its agents - including the environment minister at the time - failed to meet their legal duties to Taseko when they blocked t...Read More
Rio Tinto Group should focus on buying floundering rivals to secure copper mines instead of building new ones, according to Sanford C. Bernstein Ltd."The decision should be a no-brainer," Paul Gait, an analyst at Bernstein in London, said in a note Friday. "Building a new ton of supply costs significantly more than buying an existing one."Rio said Thursday it plans to cut its dividend by as much a...Read More
Miners struggling to cut costs amid plunging metal prices just got some help from Argentine President Mauricio Macri, as he announced the government has revoked a 5% tax imposed by the previous administration on mining and energy companies.Macri, who took office in December on a platform of repealing government intervention that scared investors away, unveiled the measure during a visit to the min...Read More
Teck Resources Ltd. and Freeport-McMoRan Inc. led a mining stock rally on Friday as surging oil prices provided relief for their foray into energy before prices tumbled.Shares in Freeport surged 13 percent to $5.52 at 1:34 p.m. in New York, while Teck, Canada's biggest diversified miner, jumped 20 percent to C$6.19 in Toronto. They were the best performers in the Bloomberg Americas Mining Index.Fr...Read More
Teck Resources (TSX:TCK.B, TCK.A)(NYSE:TCK), Canada's largest diversified miner, logged Thursday a loss of $459 million in its fourth quarter, hurt by an ongoing rout in commodity prices and an asset impairment charge of $384 million (Cdn$536 million).The Vancouver-based company, North America's largest producer of steel-making coal, was hit extremely hard by a plunge in that and other commodities...Read More
Mining giant Rio Tinto (LON, ASX, NYSE:RIO) reported Thursday a loss for 2015 after metal prices, particularly iron ore and copper plummeted last year and are still trading at historical lows.The world's second biggest mining company, which posted a loss of $866 million, has also abandoned its promise to maintain or steadily increase its dividend annually each year. Rio said it could no longer jus...Read More
A 3 million-gallon spill from the abandoned Gold King Mine in Colorado last year is likely to have deposited more than 880,000 pounds of metals into the Animas River, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said.According to the agency's preliminary report, some of the metals reached the San Juan River, which the Animas joins in New Mexico, but most settled into the Animas riverbed before t...Read More
The Democratic Republic of Congo has decided not to change its mining code as the move could have driven away investors at a time of historically low commodity prices and energy shortages that are driving down output in the country.Copper production in DRC, Africa's biggest producer of the red metal, fell by 3% to 995,805 metric tons in 2015, the first drop in six years, the Chamber of Mines said...Read More
The B.C. government is throwing the mining industry an emergency lifeline in the form of deferred electricity bill payments that could be worth more than $300 million.Several metallurgical coal mines have closed in B.C. in the last couple of years, due to a prolonged commodity price plunge, and B.C.'s biggest mining company, Teck Resources (TSX:TCK.B) has taken to rotating shutdowns at those that...Read More
A lifeline being tossed to B.C. mines may not be enough to prevent the closure of the Huckleberry open-pit copper mine near Houston, B.C.Imperial Metals (TSX:III) has put employees at its Huckleberry mine on notice that the mine will shut down in August.The announcement follows on an earlier announcement in January that the open-pit mine would reduce its 260-person workforce by 100.Imperial said t...Read More
Courtesy of: Visual CapitalistIt's no secret that the world has been a little down on China.The world's most populous country has been the primary engine of economic growth for decades, but recently investor optimism around China has diminished significantly. With a sliding manufacturing sector and lower GDP growth, most mainstream pundits have shifted focus to whether the country will have a "sof...Read More
Grinding at Anglo American's (LON:AAL) Los Bronces copper mine in Chile has been halted after the firm detected a leak in a pipe carrying ground ore mixed with water on Sunday evening.According to local newspaper La Tercera (in Spanish), the discharge was noticed on farmland outside the capital Santiago during a routine inspection of the pipe, which connects Anglo's flagship mine with the Las Tort...Read More
Mining financier and entrepreneur Ross Beaty told an audience at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference in late January that it's a "phenomenal" time to buy resource stocks."The tide is way out and it's a buyer's market everywhere across the board from oil, mining, currencies, and real estate," Beaty said. "Every so often cycles get to the point where they're at today and it's just hard to l...Read More
The B.C. government is throwing the mining industry an emergency lifeline in the form of deferred electricity bill payments that could be worth more than $300 million.Several metallurgical coal mines have closed in B.C. in the last couple of years, due to a prolonged commodity price plunge, and B.C.'s biggest mining company, Teck Resources (TSX:TCK.B) has taken to rotating shutdowns at those that...Read More
On 1 February a European consortium launched a new Horizon 2020 project: Blue Nodules. This project addresses the challenge of creating a viable and sustainable value chain to retrieve polymetallic nodules from the ocean floor. It will develop and test new highly-automated and sustainable technologies for deep-sea mining with minimal environmental pressures.The technical side of the...Read More
LONDON/NEW YORK/ASIA, 5 February, 2016 - Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP's Global Project Finance group has been recognized by Project Finance International (PFI) for five separate transactions at the PFI Awards Dinner held in London on Feb. 3. The awards dinner gathered the most senior and successful market professionals to celebrate industry excellence.The firm acted as counsel in the fo...Read More
Energy, mining, and utilities workers across the world are the least happy in their jobs, a new study published this week shows.TinyPulse, an HR service that attempts to prevent employees burnout, looked at over 500,000 survey responses from over 60,000 employees in 13 different industries worldwide.According to the results, the top three happiest industries last year were Consumer Products & Serv...Read More
English researchers at the University of Exeter have developed a new, inexpensive method to uncover copper deposits.Dr Ben Williamson, of the university's Camborne School of Mines, and Dr Richard Herrington from the London Natural History Museum, worked together to develop the new technique, which they say could become a very cost-effective way of discovering porphyry-type copper deposits.These ki...Read More
Mining stocks were soaring Thursday following a disappointing report on US services sector growth released Wednesday and comments from a top Federal Reserve official suggesting concern over rising economic risks.As the US dollar continued to sink, investors turned to assets considered more stable, such as gold and other metals, which boosted stocks across the mining sector.One of the biggest winne...Read More