Letters: Government dismisses clean energy potential in Saskatchewan

Phil Tank, Saskatoon StarPhoenix - 

© Provided by Star PhoenixCrown Investments (CIC) Minister and Minister Responsible for SaskPower Don Morgan, Minister of Energy in Ontario, Todd Smith and Minister of Energy, Alberta, Sonya Savage speak at a news conference to launch the Small Modular Reactor (SMR) Strategic Plan on Monday, March 28, 2022 in Regina. KAYLE NEIS / Regina Leader-Post

Renewables support a fantasy in Sask.

Recently, the Saskatchewan government announced that it plans to generate 60 per cent of the province’s power from solar, wind and geothermal by 2034. To this end, the Moe government has agreed to provide generous incentives to individuals and companies wishing to sell renewable power to the grid.

Also, the Moe government has decided to support the federal plan to build a cross-country energy grid. When transmission lines to Manitoba are completed in 2034, Saskatchewan will purchase enough green hydroelectric power that coal and natural gas will no longer be needed.

These initiatives will not only position Saskatchewan as a leader in the transition from fossil fuels, but will create thousands of good-paying jobs.

But, of course, the above is a fantasy. The current Saskatchewan government does not appear to be interested in renewable energy.

Instead of investing in cost-effective renewables and green energy from Manitoba, this government has decided to spend some $20 billion on four yet-to-be-developed and untried small nuclear reactors.

Meanwhile, in the U.K. the government is moving swiftly to invest in renewables and to use storage batteries to guarantee a base load when needed. Germany has been encouraging the development of renewables for several decades.

Saskatchewan, along with Alberta, has the greatest potential in Canada to generate renewable power and certainly very much greater than the U.K. or Germany. In Alberta, private companies are moving ahead to capture this potential because it makes economic sense.

Here, SaskPower, tied to the Moe government’s agenda, appears unwilling to take renewables seriously.

Paul Wilkinson

Saskatoon

SCHMOE

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe doubles down after carbon comments criticized

Connor O’Donovan - Yesterday 
© Adrian Raaber / Global News

At the legislature Monday, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe defended comments made last week regarding data showing Saskatchewan has the highest per capita carbon emissions in Canada.

"I'll stand with the 'I don't care' right now when it comes to the metric of per capita emissions," Moe told reporters following question period.

"Could I have chosen something a little less controversial? Potentially. But I think this is a time for our province to be bold."

Moe made the comments, which were first reported by the Prince Albert Daily Herald, while fielding questions at a Prince Albert Chamber of Commerce event Friday.

In response to an audience question about Saskatchewan's work on the environment and climate change, Moe said "I don't care" in reference to occasions where people remind him that data shows Saskatchewan has the highest per capita emissions in Canada.

Moe implied in his response that those emissions levels are directly tied to demand for Saskatchewan products, and that he thinks of the province as a world leader in delivering sustainable exports.


After criticism of the comments built online over the weekend, Saskatchewan NDP Environment, Energy and Resources Critic Erika Ritchie brought them up in question period Monday, calling them "irresponsible" and suggesting the government needs to do more to lower emissions and address climate change.



"We need serious leadership, and an all-government and economy-wide response to this problem and those remarks are not the kinds of things that give assurance to investors," she later told reporters in the rotunda.

"We are facing a global crisis. All governments need to be taking this seriously and putting all their efforts towards reducing emissions."

But later Monday, Moe again defended his dismissal of per capita measurements by pointing out that most of the products produced in Saskatchewan are exported beyond its borders.

He said Saskatchewan products are produced with less-damaging methods than are used in other jurisdictions, though he did not provide proof Monday to back up that statement.

"We have some of the highest-quality products in the world but they're competitively priced, And they're the most sustainable products that you can access in the world," he said.

Saskatchewan has outlined emissions targets in its Prairie Resilience climate change strategy, which was put into effect in 2018 to help the province "cope with, adapt to, and recover from stress and change."

SaskPower has since pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 50 per cent over 2005 levels by 2030, and has announced intentions for net-zero GHG emissions by 2050.

Premier Moe defends 'I don't care' comments on per capita carbon emissions in Sask.

Premier Scott Moe is standing by comments he recently made dealing with criticism the Saskatchewan government has been facing over its environmental record.

© Michael Bell/The Canadian Press

Premier Scott Moe is defending recent comments he made about Saskatchewan's environmental performance in Prince Albert.

David Shield - CBC -Yesterday 

On Monday, the opposition New Democratic Party raised concerns about a speech Moe made at a Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce event in Prince Albert.

In the speech, Moe said he wasn't bothered by criticism that Saskatchewan has the highest per capita carbon emissions in the country.

"A lot of folks will come to me and say, 'Hey, you guys have the highest carbon emissions per capita.'I don't care,'" said Moe during the speech.

"We have the highest exports per capita in Canada as well. We make the cleanest products and then we send it to over 150 countries around the world."

Speaking to reporters after Question Period, Moe clarified that he was speaking about the province being judged by per capita emissions, and that the province should instead be judged by the emissions used to create its products.

"When you look at Saskatchewan's products, we have the cleanest products in the world," said Moe.

"We have the lowest carbon content potash in the world. So, you should buy Saskatchewan potash when you're looking to buy some, maybe not that product from Russia or Belarus," said Moe.

Saskatchewan has long been criticized by environmental groups for its performance.

According to the 2021 National Inventory Report published by Environment and Climate Change Canada, the province's greenhouse gas emissions currently leads the country in emissions per capita.

The study found Saskatchewan's emissions decreased by one megatonne from 2018 to 2019 and remained at relatively stable levels from 2014 to 2019.

Opposition Environment Critic Erika Ritchie said Moe's comments are evidence the premier does not take climate change seriously.

"The kind of response we heard from the premier indicates a very flippant response to a serious crisis here," she told reporters.

"We need serious leadership and action taken by our government. We need an all-government response and an economy-wide response to this problem."

However, Moe countered and said that using per capita measures to compare Saskatchewan to other provinces is wrongheaded.

"I would put forward that anyone that is talking about per capita emissions really doesn't care about climate change in any way," he said.

"What they are trying to do is score cheap political points. We have the cleanest products in the world per tonne of potash, per tonne of agri-food products, per per unit of uranium that is produced here."

Saskatchewan has long been at odds with the federal government's climate change plan. Last year, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled 6-3 that the federal government's carbon pricing program was constitutional, despite a court challenge led by the provincial government.

In 2017, the Government of Saskatchewan released its own 'made-in-Saskatchewan' climate change strategy called Prairie Resilience, with more than 40 commitments to address climate change.

However, the plan does not set provincial goals to reduce emissions by 2030. The federal government has set a target to cut emissions by 40 to 45 per cent below 2005 levels by that time.

Fact check: Purported Barack Obama tweet about Russia and Donald Trump's birth certificate is satire

Ana Faguy, USA TODAY 

The claim: Barack Obama tweeted, "Has anyone checked to make sure Donald Trump doesn't have a Russian birth certificate?"

Long before he was a presidential candidate, Donald Trump gained headlines as a leading voice in the "birther" movement, amplifying the false claim that then-President Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.

A recent social media post purports to flip that accusation on its head.

A March 20 Facebook post presents what appears to be a screenshot of a March 16 tweet from former President Barack Obama.

Posts on Facebook can be seen ( here ) ( here ).

"I think most Americans would agree that I'm a level-headed individual, not a man who's prone to indulging in conspiracy theories," reads the purported Obama tweet. "I've certainly had a fair number directed at me. But has anyone checked to make sure Donald Trump doesn't have a Russian birth certificate?"

The post accrued more than 500 shares in less than three weeks, and comments showed many social media users believed it was authentic.

But the tweet is not real, Obama never made the comment on social media.

USA TODAY reached out to the user who shared the claim for comment.
The post originates from a satire site

The screenshot of Obama's supposed tweet was posted by the satire page Stop The Donald. According to their website, Stop The Donald uses "humor as a political weapon against Strongmen and Dictators."

The altered tweet is poking fun at Trump’s previous questioning of Obama’s birth certificate, which Trump began in 2011. Trump continued to question Obama's citizenship during the 2016 election.

The tweet also alludes to Trump's Russian connections and favorable comments toward Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The screenshot lists the tweet as being sent on March 16, but there is no evidence of any such tweet on Obama's account.

Fact check: Fictional Tucker Carlson quote about Ukraine spreads on social media

On March 16 Obama tweeted twice. The first was a three-part thread on the Ukrainian refugee crisis, and the other was a tweet about March Madness.

Our rating: Satire

Based on our research, we rate SATIRE the claim that Obama tweeted, "Has anyone checked to make sure Donald Trump doesn't have a Russian birth certificate?" There is no evidence that this tweet exists, and the screenshot originates from a satire site.

Our fact-check sources:

Stop The Donald, accessed April 8, Mission
Los Angeles Times, Sept. 16, 2016, What Donald Trump has said through the years about where President Obama was born
CNN, Nov. 29, 2017, Report: Trump continues to question Obama’s birth certificate
Politico, March/April 2017, All of Trump’s Russia Ties, in 7 Charts
NPR, Feb. 22, Trump praises Putin as 'savvy' amid new escalations on Russia-Ukraine border
PolitiFact, April 5, No, Obama didn’t tweet that Trump might have Russian birth certificate
Reuters, April 5, Fact Check-Fabricated Obama tweet about Trump and birth certificate was created as satire
USA TODAY, Oct. 13, 2021, Fact check: Image claiming to show Barack Obama's birth certificate is fake

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or electronic newspaper replica here.

Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook.

WAR IS RAPE

Bolsonaro faces stiff questioning over Brazilian army’s Viagra purchase

Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro - 8h ago
The Guardian


Opponents of the Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, are demanding answers after the revelation that the country’s armed forces had splashed out on tens of thousands of impotence pills.

“We must understand why the Bolsonaro administration is spending public money on buying such large quantities of Viagra,” the lawmaker Elias Vaz declared after Brazilian media reported the seemingly unorthodox acquisitions on Monday.

The navy and air force – which between them had reportedly bought more than 30,000 pills – offered an innocent explanation: the drug was supposedly being used to treat pulmonary hypertension.

However, many were unconvinced. A report in the O Globo newspaper suggested the dosages that had been bought were generally used to treat penises, not blood pressure.

“How do you feel knowing that we’re even paying for Viagra for the armed forces?” the Brazilian singer Zélia Duncan asked her hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. “I feel impotent,” one replied.

Rio congressman Marcelo Freixo said he would ask the public prosecutor to investigate the erectile “outrage”. “The Bolsonaro administration dallied over buying Covid vaccines but approved the overpriced purchase of 35,000 Viagra pills for the armed forces,” Freixo complained on Twitter.

The president of the Worker’s party (PT), Gleisi Hoffman, slammed the “criminal spending spree” and accused Bolsonaro of destroying the military’s credibility.

Ciro Gomes, a centre-left politician who hopes to challenge Bolsonaro in October’s presidential election, said that while the armed forces deserved respect, their acquisition departments seemed bent on demoralizing the military.

“Unless they’re able to prove they’re developing some kind of secret weapon – capable of revolutionizing the international arms industry – it’ll be tough to justify the purchase of 35,000 units of a erectile dysfunction drug,” Gomes opined.

He added: “It’s no coincidence that these absurdities are taking place during the government of a president … who acts systematically to dishonor the troop.”

Bolsonaro, 67, is a former army captain and paratrooper who has packed his cabinet with military men and repeatedly hinted that he would be prepared to lead a military “intervention” against Brazil’s democratic institutions. Last year Bolsonaro ordered what critics called a “banana republic-style” military parade outside his presidential palace in an apparent attempt to project strength and intimidate foes.

Political observers called the military’s “Viagra binge” an embarrassment to a populist president who frequently boasts about his supposed virility, referring to himself as “imbrochável”. The word roughly translates into English as “unfloppable” or “flaccid-proof”.

Stripe teams up with major tech companies to commit $925 million toward carbon capture

Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify and McKinsey are trying to spur the market for carbon capture.

They're launching Frontier, which plans to purchase $925 million worth of permanent carbon removal from companies that are developing the technology over the next nine years.

The Frontier initiative suggests momentum is starting to build in carbon capture.


© Provided by CNBC

Pods, operated by Carbfix, containing technology for storing carbon dioxide underground, in Hellisheidi, Iceland, on Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2021. Startups Climeworks AG and Carbfix are working together to store carbon dioxide removed from the air deep underground to reverse some of the damage CO2 emissions are doing to the planet. Photographer: Arnaldur Halldorsson/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Catherine Clifford - CNBC

Online payments-technology provider Stripe is teaming up with several other companies, including Google parent Alphabet and Facebook parent Meta, to commit nearly $1 billion in spurring the carbon-capture market.

On Tuesday the companies announced the creation of Frontier, which plans to purchase $925 million worth of permanent carbon removal from companies that are developing the technology over the next nine years.

Frontier will be a wholly owned subsidiary of Stripe. Alphabet, Meta, e-commerce platform Shopify and consulting giant McKinsey are chipping in — and committing to purchase some of the carbon-capture solutions.

Stripe will also provide customers to Frontier through its Stripe Climate program, which allows online sellers using the company's platform to devote a portion of sales to carbon removal.

The goal of the investment is to turbocharge the nascent industry.

The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that to limit global warning to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, an average of 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide will have to be removed each year from the atmosphere by 2050. Fewer than 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide have been captured to date.

The Frontier initiative suggests momentum is starting to build in the space.

"Sentiment is changing about both carbon capture and carbon dioxide removal," said Julio Friedmann, chief scientist at Carbon Direct, which invests in and advises companies on cFarbon-removal solutions.

"This is changing in part because we are not succeeding on climate at the speed and scale required," Friedmann said. "In short: We're failing and we need a bigger boat — one that includes all serious options for mitigation."

The IPCC's Sixth Assessment report, released April 4, specifically mentioned the importance of carbon capture, saying it is "necessary to achieve net zero CO2 and GHG emissions both globally and nationally, counterbalancing 'hard-to-abate' residual emissions," the report said.

The Frontier development is among other company and government initiatives that are sinking billions into the technology.

For example, the Swiss carbon sequestration company Climeworks raised a $650 million equity round of funding on April 5. And in the U.S., the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill included $3.5 billion in direct investment by the federal government in carbon-capture technologies, while both the U.K. and European Union have committed to capture 5 million tons per year of carbon dioxide.
Funding to get the flywheel turning

The advanced market commitment funding model was used to develop pneumococcal vaccines for low-income countries in 2009. A group of funders collaborated with Gavi, UNICEF and the World Bank to devote $1.5 billion in purchases to spur the development of the vaccines. That AMC helped vaccinate millions of children.

But this is the first time the model has been used to fund carbon-removal technologies at scale.

Frontier's job will be to collect financial commitments from companies and governments that want to purchase carbon-capture solutions to make good on their net-zero pledges, vet the suppliers of those solutions and then pay the suppliers once the solutions are delivered.

The group plans to announce more details about where it will spend the money later this year. Companies will be selected if their technologies can store carbon for more than 1,000 years, have a path to being affordable at scale — defined as less than $100 per ton by 2040 — and have a path to remove more than half a gigaton of carbon by 2040, among other factors.

The Frontier news was cheered by Facebook's former chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, who recently announced he will devote his time to fighting climate change.

"This is huge and I'm super proud Meta is a launch partner," Schroepfer said on Twitter. "Even the most conservative climate models say we need to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to avert the worst of the climate crisis. Many cool technologies exist but they don't have a market for their product."

Not everyone, however, sees the focus on carbon-removal technologies as a good thing.

"Honestly, I really wish these same companies were investing the same amount of money in clean energy solutions," Michael E. Mann, a professor of atmospheric science at Penn State, told CNBC. "As I discuss in 'The New Climate War,' there is no evidence that carbon removal can be implemented at the scale necessary to make a dent in global carbon emissions on the time frame necessary," said Mann, who is also the director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center (ESSC).

Globally, carbon emissions need to be reduced by 50% this decade, Mann said.

Carbon capture "could play a role later down the road, but for the time being what is needed is a rapid and dramatic transition away from fossil fuel burning toward renewable energy," he said.

"The current Russian invasion of Ukraine, enabled by reliance of Europe on their gas and oil, is a reminder of the continued dangers of our dependence on fossil fuels," Mann told CNBC. "What we need is to solve this problem at its source, not apply Band-Aids at the edges."

THE REALITY IS THAT CCS IS NOT GREEN NOR CLEAN IT IS GOING TO BE USED TO FRACK OLD DRY WELLS SUCH AS IN THE BAKAN SHIELD IN SASKATCHEWAN
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-myth-of-carbon-capture-and-storage.html

ALSO SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=CCS

Opinion: US uses Cold War powers to secure battery metals supply

Reuters | April 11, 2022 | 

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

(The opinions expressed here are those of the author, Andy Home, a columnist for Reuters.)


US President Joe Biden has invoked the Defense Production Act (DPA) to accelerate the build-out of a domestic battery materials supply chain.

A measure first used by President Truman to boost US steel production in the Korean War will now be tailored to future energy transition metals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel.

The White House’s March 31 announcement was light on details, specifically the amount of government funding available, and the initial impact is likely to be incremental rather than revolutionary.

Investment in greenfield capacity will be dependent on a planned overhaul of the country’s gold rush-era mining laws, the underlying cause of much of the environmental resistance to new mines.

But it’s still a clear statement of intent and one that reinforces industrial metals’ growing strategic importance in a fast-changing world.
Back to the future

“Our national security and our chances for peace depend on our defense production, (and) our defense production depends on steel,” President Truman told the American people in a radio address in 1952 at the height of the Korean War.

Metals such as steel and aluminum were critical to the war effort, and the Defense Production Act was passed in 1950 to allow the government to stimulate production.

The rise of the oil economy in the second half of the century shifted the strategic focus to energy security, but as energy transitions from fossil fuels to renewables, enabling metals are now back on governments’ priority lists.

“To promote the national defense, the United States must secure a reliable and sustainable supply of such strategic and critical materials,” said President Biden, citing specifically lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese and graphite.

All are used in batteries, and the United States relies on imports for all of them, often from what Biden termed “unreliable foreign sources”.

Demand for these minerals is set to increase exponentially in the coming years as automakers increase electric vehicle production and build out the required battery capacity.

“Unreliable foreign sources” is usually diplomatic code for China when it comes to strategic metals.

There is obvious concern about China’s dominant position in lithium processing and in the supply of graphite. The United States is totally import dependent for the latter, with around one third of annual imports coming from China.
New urgency

However, Russian metals supply has taken on a new urgency since the invasion of Ukraine.

The United States has limited direct exposure to the potential loss of Russian lithium, manganese or cobalt.


Nickel, however, is much more problematic. Battery production requires high-grade – so-called “Class I” – nickel, and Russia’s Norilsk Nickel accounts for around 17% of global supply, according to Fitch Ratings.

Neither Norilsk nor its oligarch owner Vladimir Potanin have yet been sanctioned, but self-sanctioning is making it ever harder to finance, insure and ship metal from the company’s Arctic base.

Russian metal has suddenly become high-risk supply after the country’s self-styled “special military operation” in Ukraine, tightening an already stretched market. It’s one of the reasons the nickel price turned so wild in March the London Metal Exchange had to suspend its contract.

Western critical metal supply chains were already starting to change in response to the strategic need to loosen dependence on Chinese supply.

Ukraine both opens up new potential mineral hostilities and underlines the need for greater self-sufficiency.

Federal accelerator

The Defense Production Act is intended as a federal government accelerator for a domestic battery metals supply chain that is still in its infancy.

Without presidential action, the United States “cannot reasonably be expected to provide the capability for these needed industrial resources, materials, or critical technology items in a timely manner,” Biden warned.

The initial focus will be on enhancing and expanding existing capacity through funding feasibility studies for by-product and co-product production, mine waste reclamation and value-added modernisation.

New projects will be given a helping hand, both in terms of capital expenditure and winning public acceptance.

Green environmental push-back against green transition metals remains a road-block on the path to a clean energy future, and the Biden Administration is keen to underline that domestic supply must come from “environmentally responsible domestic mining and processing”.

Key to this balancing act will be the planned rewrite of the 1872 General Mining Law, a legal framework that is wholly unfit for 21st century purpose, generating protracted court action and seemingly random outcomes for proposed new mines.

That particular battle lies ahead, which is why it makes sense to channel initial DPA funding into maximising what has already been built. Or, in the case of historic tailings, what has already been built and abandoned.

Critical metals

The real significance of invoking the DPA, however, is that it elevates battery metals to the top of the US critical materials supply list.

Until now the Biden Administration has only used the Act to secure vaccines and enhance testing in its battle to control the covid-19 pandemic.

Securing domestic or “friendly” supplies of lithium and nickel is now in the same top-priority category.

The Administration has already committed up to $3 billion to increase battery metals production thanks to last year’s infrastructure bill.

That was passed with bi-partisan support, and minerals security is one of the few areas of political agreement between Democrats and Republicans, which may open the door on further money being allocated to the sector.

Expect domestic investment to go hand in hand with mineral alliances, particularly with the European Union, Australia and Canada, which itself is preparing a major C$2 billion ($1.6 billion) investment drive into the battery supply chain.

Industrial metals moved out of the geopolitical limelight after the 1970s, when successive oil shocks rocked the global economy.

President Biden’s lithium echo of Truman’s steel warning tells you they’re rapidly returning to centre stage.

(Editing by Jan Harvey)

Glencore investors urged by Glass Lewis to reject climate plan

Bloomberg News | April 12, 2022 

Newlands coal mine, Queensland, Australia. (Image courtesy of Glencore.)

Glencore Plc shareholders have been urged to vote down the commodity trader’s climate progress report at an investor meeting later this month by an influential proxy advisory firm.


Glass Lewis & Co. said that the lack of board oversight for the company’s climate program and insufficient clarity on how Glencore may interpret support for its strategy-setting process meant investors should vote against the motion, the shareholder adviser said in a report seen by Bloomberg News.

As investors become ever more focused on climate, Glencore has laid a different strategy to many of its rivals. While its major peers have looked to quit mining thermal coal, the most polluting fuel, Glencore has instead sought to position itself as a responsible custodian to run its mines to closure by 2050, becoming carbon neutral in the process.

Glencore’s position received overwhelming shareholder support at last year’s investor meeting, with 94% voting in favor.

In a letter responding to Glass Lewis, seen by Bloomberg News, Glencore said it was at the forefront of climate shareholder engagement and reporting in the mining sector and asked the advisory firm to revisit its assessment.

“The board maintains the ultimate oversight of the strategy, as clearly expressed in our AGM Notice,” the company said in the letter. “Our reporting reflects the central importance of climate to our board. The directors receive reports, discuss and make decisions on climate matters at each set of our board and committee meetings.”

Glass Lewis didn’t respond to a call seeking comment.

Still, Glass Lewis said it was unclear how much board oversight there was for Glencore’s climate reporting.

“We believe that effective governance and board-level oversight of climate are arguably the most critical aspects of a company’s management of climate-related issues,” Glass Lewis said. “Given that there is no disclosure to this effect, we do not believe that support for this resolution is warranted.”

Glass Lewis follows the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility in saying Glencore’s climate progress report should be voted down.

Last month the ACCR said it opposed the resolution for reasons including continued coal expansion in Australia and Glencore’s coal emission targets not being consistent with the reduction needed to avert the worst impact of climate change.

(By Thomas Biesheuvel)

South African unions start wage talks with platinum miners

Bloomberg News | April 12, 2022 |

Dishaba platinum mine in Limpopo province, South Africa. (Image courtesy of Anglo American Platinum.)

South African labor unions have started wage negotiations with the country’s largest platinum miners as workers press for a share of the record profits generated by rallying metal prices.


Negotiations started with Anglo American Platinum Ltd. last week and more talks are planned tomorrow, William Mabapa, general-secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, said by phone. Amplats, a unit of Anglo American Plc, has extended its offer beyond the usual three-year period to five years, with annual increases in basic pay of 7%, according to Mabapa.


Amplats also offered to backdate the new wages from April 1, if the unions agree to sign the deal this month, he said. Mabapa declined to disclose what the union is asking for. Amplats didn’t immediately respond to emailed questions.

The NUM is holding the talks jointly with the rival Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, after presenting their wage demands to Amplats, Sibanye Stillwater Ltd. and Impala Platinum Holdings Ltd. While the South African miners announced record dividends after a rally in the price of palladium and rhodium, they have warned that wage settlements with about 163,000 workers must not risk the long-term viability of a key export industry.

The offer from Amplats, including other benefits, could result in the lowest-paid employee earning about 30,000 rand a month ($2,066) in the fifth year compared with the current 20,875 rand.

Sibanye spokesperson James Wellsted said the miner had received notice of wage demands from AMCU and said talks will start toward the middle of the year. Implats will also be engaging with the unions, said spokesman Johan Theron.

A strike that’s been underway for more than a month at Sibanye’s gold mines could be escalated to the company’s platinum operations, the unions said Tuesday.

(By Felix Njini)

Airbus defends Russian titanium use, urges against sanctions

Bloomberg News | April 12, 2022 | 

Credit: Pixabay

Airbus SE defended its decision to keep importing Russian titanium, contending sanctions would hurt aerospace manufacturers who depend on the lightweight metal and wouldn’t deter Vladimir Putin after his invasion of Ukraine.


The European planemaker has been stockpiling titanium for many years, Chief Executive Officer Guillaume Faury said at the company’s annual general meeting Tuesday. That’s given Airbus some breathing room in the short and medium term, even if an embargo does take effect.


“We don’t think sanctions on imports will be appropriate,” Faury said. “This will be a small impact on Russia, and would have large consequences on the rest of the countries and the industry. So we think the no-sanction policy actually is the most meaningful one.”

Airbus, a major customer of Russia’s VSMPO-AVISMA Corp., has so far been able to keep importing the material, which hasn’t been directly targeted by a growing list of European Union sanctions aimed at punishing President Putin. U.S. rival Boeing Co. has halted Russian purchases.

Russia provides about half of Airbus’s titanium needs, directly or through key suppliers. The company has been stockpiling the metal since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, Chief Financial Officer Dominik Asam said.

The Toulouse, France-based planemaker is working to bridge the gap in long-term supply by seeking out secondary sources, Faury said.

Titanium is prized in aerospace for its strength, low mass and corrosion resistance, making it ideal for components such as landing gear. It’s also used to attach the carbon-fiber outer shell of the A350 widebody because it doesn’t flex as much as other metals with temperature changes.

(By Charlotte Ryan)

South Africa sets $900 million annual mineral exploration target

Bloomberg News | April 12, 2022

Photo: Minerals Council South Africa

South Africa, home to the world’s biggest deposits of a number of minerals, has set an annual target of attracting $900 million of mining exploration expenditure annually by 2025.


The target, equivalent to 5% of the annual spend on exploration globally, is expected to kick start a mining industry, that while among the world’s biggest, has stagnated in recent years.

The exploration strategy made public Tuesday by the Department of Minerals and Energy, aims to take advantage of South Africa’s comparatively advanced infrastructure and mining expertise. It also plans to shrug off the country’s historical dependence on gold to focus instead on metals used in electric vehicles, battery storage and the production of hydrogen.

“With the declining gold resources, the appeal of the South African mining industry lies in the minerals of the future,” the department said in the document.

Gold dominance

While South Africa was the world’s biggest producer of gold for decades, production has slumped as its deposits get deeper and more expensive to access.

Still, the country has the world’s biggest deposits of platinum group metals, battery metal vanadium, chrome and manganese.

Challenges include poor policy implementation, poor geoscientific data, insufficient electricity generation, frequent strikes and community unrest, according to the document.

Among initiatives to boost exploration, the country aims to improve the data on its mineral deposits and give more technical support to small mining companies.

While the Department of Minerals and Energy didn’t say how much exploration is currently carried out in the country, News24, a South African news site, said it accounted for less than 1% of the annual expenditure on searching for minerals.

While the document was made public Tuesday, it’s dated August 2021.

Glencore Plc, Anglo American Plc and Rio Tinto Group operate in South Africa.

(By Antony Sguazzin)