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
Canadian miner Centerra Gold (TSX:CG) can finally proceed with plans for developing its 1.6-million ounce Gatsuurt gold deposit near its Boroo Mine, Mongolia's parliament ruled Thursday.The decision, which comes after five years of negotiations, grants Centerra a 66% ownership in the project, with the government of Mongolia holding the remaining 34% of equity.The approval also follows an agreeme...Read More
From its peak in 2011 to the beginning of 2016, the global mining sector has gone through a wrenching 90% reduction in global market capitalization, wiping out an estimated US$1.5 trillion. Following the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the International Monetary Fund estimated that financial institutions around the world ultimately lost US$1.5 trillion directly or indirectly from their holdings of subp...Read More
State-owned Indian firm KIOCL may invest an initial $59 million to build an iron ore pellet complex in Iran, with the objective of offering cheaper supplies of the processed material to Iranian steel mills.The company is also negotiating the sale of more than 2 million tonnes of seaborne to the Gulf country now free from trade sanctions, Reuters reports.Iran is said to have more than $10 billion...Read More
In its pre-budget submission to the Government of Canada, the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) outlines its priorities for Federal Budget 2016 to support Canada's mineral exploration and development sector. The PDAC recommends the Government take action to improve the flow of capital to the junior exploration sector, and address the infrastructure deficit in northern and remot...Read More
Caserones, a copper mine in northern Chile property of Japan's top smelter, JX Nippon Mining & Metals, will have to pay $10.8 million for breaching conservational rules, an environmental court has ruled (in Spanish).The fine, the second-highest the country's environmental authority -SMA- has ever imposed, was set in March last year, after the regulator found a number of infractions at the mine. T...Read More