Новости за 03.05.2019

TSX-listed Hudbay Minerals announced on Friday announced that it had reached an agreement with shareholder Waterton Global Resource Management and that the two parties would put forward a slate of 11 board members for election at the upcoming shareholders meeting. The slate include chairperson Alan Hibben and CEO Alan Hair, as well as Carol Banducci, Igor Gonzales, Richard Howes, Sarah Kavanagh, Carin Knickel, Peter Kukielski, Colin Osborne, David Smith and Daniel Quintanilla.

Wesfarmers's bid for Australia's Kidman Resources undervalues the lithium miner, analysts said on Friday, reflecting the financing difficulties the sector faces even as electric car makers warn of raw material shortages. Wesfarmers offered a 47% premium for Kidman, which is developing the Mount Holland project in Western Australia through a joint venture with battery chemicals maker Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile S.A. (SQM).

TSX-V-listed Orefinders Resources has acquired 11.8-milllion shares, or 31%, of Mistango River Resources from Osisko Gold Royalties. In exchange, Orefinders issued five-million of its shares to Osisko.

Companies in the Democratic Republic of Congo will have to ensure subcontractors they hire are domestically owned under rules being implemented by the government. The requirement adds to the raft of new measures mining companies have had to contend with over the past year, after the state in March 2018 raised taxes and other costs. Investors including Glencore, Randgold Resources, China Molybdenum and Ivanhoe Mines operate in Congo, the world’s largest source of cobalt and a major producer of copper and other metals.

Ivanhoe Mines this week announced that the strike length of the shallow, thick, massive copper sulphide mineralisation at Kamoa North that was discovered earlier this year in drill hole DD1450 on the Kamoa-Kakula mining licence, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), has been significantly extended by assays received from ongoing drilling. Recent drilling has confirmed that the discovery zone of bonanza-grade copper mineralisation at Kamoa North – the Kamoa North Bonanza Zone – is continuous... Читать дальше...

Aim-listed Rambler Metals and Mining achieved record throughput for 2018, by processing 364 176 t of ore from the Ming mine, in Canada, through the Nugget Pong copper and gold milling facility. This is the second consecutive year that the company has set a throughput record.

JSE- and NYSE-listed Sibanye-Stillwater has resumed underground operations at its Thembelani shaft, in Rustenburg, following an incident that resulted in 1 800 workers being held underground on Tuesday. The shaft has now been certified safe for normal hoisting operations.

Diversified miner Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) has appointed Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) as its external auditor from 2020. The decision follows after the miner announced in its 2018 Integrated Report that Deloitte & Touche’s services as the external auditors of Amplats would terminate by rotation in 2020.

Aim- and TSX-V-listed Altus Strategies has granted ASX-listed Indiana Resources an extension to the exclusivity period for completing due diligence on the Lakanfla and Tabakorole gold projects, in Mali, to June 14. Indiana requested the extension owing to the time required to process substantial amounts of historical data on the projects.

Nickel miner Australian Mines hopes to lock in funds for a planned A$1.3-billion ($935 million) battery materials plant by end-June, its chief executive said, despite volatile prices that have crimped lending to the new energy sector. The company is talking with South Korean battery maker SK Innovation to finalise an offtake agreement after reaching a preliminary deal in March 2018. At the same time, it is chasing lenders for its Sconi nickel-cobalt chemicals project in northern Australia.

Indian major Adani is facing yet another hurdle in the development of its $16.5-billion Carmichael coal project, in Queensland, after the state government rejected a management plan for the endangered black-throated finch. Adani Mining CEO Lucas Dow on Friday said that the company had received advice from the Queensland Environment Department late on Thursday of a number of new commitments that would need to be met.

Booming demand for electric vehicles and insufficient investment in mines could result in a global shortage of minerals needed to manufacture rechargeable batteries in a few years’ time, a Tesla representative told US officials and mining executives in a meeting in Washington. Prices for some of the minerals, which include graphite, cobalt, lithium and nickel, could increase as a result of the high demand and the limited supply, Tesla global supply manager of battery metals Sarah Maryssael said... Читать дальше...

Kyrgyzstan's Parliament voted on Thursday to ban uranium exploration and mining in the Central Asian nation despite previously issuing licenses to foreign companies such as Canada's Azarga Uranium. The move, which may expose the Bishkek government to compensation claims from foreign investors, followed a series of public protests against plans to develop the Kyzyl Ompul project in which Azarga has a stake.

Junior miners, struggling to fund exploration as institutions seek lower risk and better returns from larger rivals and newer industries, sought to sell potential investors on projects on Thursday, with mixed success. The proliferation of index funds, sluggish gold price growth and a shift into cannabis and cryptocurrencies by risk investors has left junior miners short of funding.

Amid cost balancing; global economy fluxes; revolving regulatory changes; geopolitical, civil and social pressures; and the effects of climate change, water management is emerging as the pre-eminent sustainability issue in the global energy and mining resource industries, says pumps manufacturer Verder Pumps MD Darryl Macdougall. He reiterates that water has always been a fundamentally important resource across all mining and quarrying developments and industrial operations.

The mining industry - which has become a major user of geosynthetic materials - recognises the value of using geosynthetic products for environmental protection, says geosynthetic products manufacturer and supplier Fibertex South Africa (SA) geotechnical engineer Johnny Oriokot. Therefore, geosynthetics experts at Fibertex SA work closely with mine engineers throughout Africa to provide critical solutions for mine water projects that reduce  environmental threats and enhance safety on mines.

The increasing challenges of dewatering with rising acid levels in mines are being met head on by associated companies Integrated Pump Technology and Integrated Pump Rental. Cognisance of the need for pumping solutions capable of operating in such highly corrosive environments informs the companies’ product offering of fit-for-purpose pumps and accessories for this application. Integrated Pump Technology MD Colin Adams tells Mining Weekly that the newly-launched 90 kW Grindex Mega submersible stainless... Читать дальше...

At the start of the design process, the design problem and solution have to be conceptualised to allow for the design objectives for a tailings facility to be formulated. A range of techniques can then be used and applied to undertake the design, including appropriate analyses, to ensure water saving at mines,” says consulting engineers and scientists SRK Consulting South Africa principal civil geotechnical engineer Adriaan Meintjes. Meintjes adds that, in the past decade and following a series of significant... Читать дальше...

The Mining Association of Canada (MAC) has introduced a new standard, the Water Stewardship Protocol, as part of its Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) initiative. This protocol will play an important role in the continuous improvement taking place in the mining industry regarding sustainable practices. A significant component of TSM, a MAC-led programme committed to sustainability in the mining sector, is ensuring that mining operations take environmental impacts into consideration.

Treating mine water has become more common as the mines try to minimise their impacts.  This has allowed for different types of water treatment options to enter the market, as well as a growing understanding of the environmental and economic impact, and where the water can be used to support other growth industries in the area, says consulting engineers and scientists SRK Consulting partner and principal hydrologist Peter Shepherd.

While grabbing cranes are usually large machines with wide spans and high lifting heights, the Condra grabbing crane installed in February at the railhead serving Sishen Iron Ore Mine, near Kuruman, was designed to manoeuvre through relatively tight space, Condra Cranes announced in a statement last week. Completed in December and delivered by road in January, the crane is the final link in Sishen’s ore spillage recovery chain, using its 0.5 m3 clamshell grab to transfer dumps of ore spilled by the conveyor system, into railway cars.

An innovative new mobile water station has been developed to provide safe drinking water for remote workforces in the mining sector – improving water quality and worker satisfaction, cutting costs and spurring improved environmental performance by slashing the need for costly single-use plastic bottles. “Unique hydration stations from Bluewater offer tangible benefits to mining operators where providing drinking water can be logistically challenging and costly,” says water purification company Bluewater Africa operations director James Steere.

The South African mining education and training sector is in a dire state, with not enough focus on adult basic education and the proper upskilling of mineworkers, states socioeconomic development facilitator Economic Development Solutions (EDS) MD Janine Espin. “General large-scale intervention programmes are constantly implemented, but these programmes does not make any difference to the occupational level of people who need education and training. We want to see proper upskilling . . . where there... Читать дальше...

Mineworkers and communities are negatively affected – through frequent and large-scale retrenchments – by the twenty-first-century trend of mine modernisation, which shows that the mismatch between twenty-first-century jobs and twentieth-century skills sets needs to urgently be addressed by digital technologies, says University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) Mining Institute director Professor Fred Cawood. “Digital technologies are well suited to help address this need,” he asserts.

Workforce development provider Immersive Technologies will launch the Operator Performance Analytics (OPA) service to compare and improve operator skills and behaviour in South Africa later this year, following consistent growth in mine-related training and the use of mining simulation-based training products and services. The OPA is a business improvement service designed specifically for site managers to accurately identify operator performance variability and training needs.