Rio Tinto trials renewable diesel at US operations

Reuters | January 13, 2023 |

Kennecott copper operations in Salt Lake City, Utah. Credit: Rio Tinto

Rio Tinto said on Friday it is conducting trials at its Kennecott copper operations in Salt Lake City, Utah, to determine the suitability of renewable diesel for open pit haulage.


The global miner said the trials come after it completed a renewable diesel trial at its Borax mine in California as it seeks to swap conventional diesel for renewable fuel in haul trucks at its operations in the United States.

(By Muhammed Husain; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)

Taseko gets $25 million loan to build processing plant at Florence Copper

Staff Writer | January 13, 2023

Credit: Taseko Mines

Taseko Mines (TSX, LSE: TKO) has received an additional commitment of $25 million from Bank of America Leasing & Capital LLC to fund the costs associated with the solvent extraction and electrowinning (SX/EW) plant for its Florence Copper commercial production facility in Arizona.


The latest funding follows an initial investment of $50 million made recently by Japan’s Mitsui for the construction of the copper project. As part of the financing arrangement with Mitsui, the parties entered into an offtake contract for 81% of the copper cathode produced at Florence during its early years.

“Following the recently announced strategic partnership with Mitsui & Co. (USA) Inc. for our Florence Copper project, this additional source of funds will further strengthen our balance sheet and provide financing flexibility as we prepare for construction of the project in 2023,” Taseko CEO Stuart McDonald said in a news release.

The $25 million funding will be available for drawdown upon Florence Copper receiving the final underground injection control permit from the EPA. In August 2022, the project was granted a draft permit despite concerns over its potential environmental impact.

The Bank of America loan will be secured by specific treatment and processing equipment in the SX/EW plant with an initial term of five years.

“In addition to Florence Copper’s strong economics, the project has many environmental attributes, including low carbon emissions and a low footprint operation, which are attractive to financial partners,” McDonald said.

“The financing commitment from Bank of America is a customized solution developed for Taseko, leveraging the equipment security of our SX/EW plant, since conventional mining equipment like shovels and haul trucks will not be used at Florence Copper,” he explained.

According to Taseko, Florence has one of the least capital-intensive copper production facilities in the world, and when fully ramped up, will produce 40,000 tonnes of high-quality cathode copper annually for the US domestic market.

The company said it expects the project to have the lowest energy and greenhouse gas intensity of any copper producer in North America.

LME data entry error showed copper price down 77% in latest glitch

Bloomberg News | January 13, 2023

Stock image.

London Metal Exchange trading data briefly showed a 77% drop in the global benchmark price for copper after its system transmitted incorrect pricing, in the latest technical setback at the embattled exchange.


The error came at the close of trading in the LME’s second open-outcry pricing session, which sets the global benchmark price for the physical metals industry. The mistake was a result of a data-entry error, according to a person familiar with the matter.


While the final price in the trading ring was set at $9,130 a ton, the LME’s external data feed showed a price of $2,130 a ton. In a subsequent notice, the LME asked data vendors to update their pricing feeds accordingly, and apologized for any inconvenience caused.

The glitch had no follow-on impact on prices or trading and was quickly resolved by the LME. Still, the episode marks the latest in a string of technical setbacks at the exchange, including several complications that arose when it resumed trading in the wake of the last year’s historic nickel squeeze. In the runup to the crisis last year, its clearinghouse also generated a “high number” of erroneous margin calls that for some brokers totaled hundreds of millions of dollars.

At the start of last year, the exchange also experienced a five-hour outage impacting its electronic trading platform, where roughly a third of trading takes place. The remainder takes place in a telephone-based interoffice market, in addition to a small volume of trades that take place in the Ring.

While Friday’s pricing issue was quickly addressed, the latest glitch comes at a time when the LME continues to deal with the fallout from the nickel crisis last March, which thrust the exchange into the global spotlight and raised questions about its future at the center of global metals markets.

Copper was trading at $9,183.50 a ton as of 3:14 p.m on the LME, little changed on the day.

(By Mark Burton, with assistance from Kenneth Hughes)

Brazil should work with other countries to curb illegal gold trade, says mining lobby

Reuters | January 13, 2023 | 

Illegal mining causes deforestation and river pollution in the Amazon rainforest. Credit: Adobe Stock

Brazil’s mining lobby group asked the country’s foreign ministry to work with other governments to improve tactics used to combat the illegal gold trade, it said on Friday.


“The trade of illegal gold feeds a criminal alliance in Brazil, which is responsible for part of the devastation we see in the Amazon rainforest, something the world is watching,” said Raul Jungmann, president of the Ibram trade association, in a statement.


Unregulated mining, which surged under right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro, has destroyed rainforest land and polluted rivers with deadly mercury, while illegal miners have clashed violently with indigenous groups protecting their land.

But even legal mining is at an industrial scale spurring deforestation as once-impenetrable forest is cleared for access roads and mines for gold, iron and coal.

Ibram represents mining giants such as Vale, Rio Tinto, BHP as well as gold miners such as South Africa’s AngloGold Ashanti and Canada’s Yamana Gold.

The lobby group called for the ministry to work with countries that buy illegally mined Brazilian gold, such as Switzerland, to “reduce the space” for illicit operators.

Ibram asked the ministry to help an August conference on “bioeconomy” in the Amazon, which is set to be a forum to formulate long-term plans for sustainable development.

“It would be a strategy to signal to Brazil and the world that concrete actions are being taken to recover this important biome and outline a future based on good sustainability practices”, said Jungmann.

The new administration of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has revoked some of Bolsonaro’s policies that eased off environmental protections. It has pledged to stop deforestation in the Amazon, a vital biome whose health is considered vital in the fight against climate change.

(By Marta Nogueira; Editing by David Gregorio)

Read more: Most Brazil gold mined near Amazon may be illegal, study shows

World to face ongoing potash price crunch as Brazil Potash propels Autazes toward production

Fertilizer in a farmer's hand. Credit: Brazil Potash.

POSTED BY: HENRY LAZENBY JANUARY 13, 2023

High potash prices will likely persist as the world scrambles to bring more production online amidst concerns over food security, privately held developer Brazil Potash says.

Protectionism from some countries has been a wakeup call to the global community, spurring it to work towards ensuring food security needs are met amid a tightening of fertilizer supplies, says CEO Matt Simpson in an interview with The Northern Miner.

Compounded by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, market trends have seen about 42% of the global potash market have been impacted.

“While potash from Russia is quietly making its way out to markets, only about 30% of prior volumes are making its way out of landlocked Belarus. When the war started, potash prices for delivery in Brazil – one of the world’s most important agricultural export markets – quadrupled to the US$1,200 per tonne level,” Simpson says.

While prices have come down to about US$500 per tonne today, Simpson says 2023 will not likely bring relief to a growing global food shortage, as many expect food inflation and rising prices to continue to put our food security at risk. He also notes that given the ongoing turmoil in Russia impacting neighbouring Belarus, more than 15 million tonnes of expected new production would probably not come online since those projects won’t likely secure funding because of the heightened risk.

“This sets up the market to remain tighter for longer,” the CEO says.

The future of global food security is uncertain, but potash producers will play an essential role in helping to ensure that everyone has access to nutritious food. With the Autazes potash project, Brazil Potash is paving the way to a more secure and sustainable agricultural future for Brazil, Simpson says.

Brazil Potash’s Autazes project is near Manaus, in the northern Amazonas State. The project is expected to produce potash using an environmentally friendly method of extracting the crop nutrient potassium chloride from the ground while doubling twice the current Brazilian production and changing the domestic potash market in Brazil.

That market will soon have to contend with the fact that the country’s only potash mine, Mosaic’s (Nasdaq: MOS) Taquari-Vassouras mine in eastern Sergipe State is at the end of its lifetime.

“Countries like Brazil are the perfect example of how boosting domestic potash production could lead to benefits across the entire agriculture sector and beyond,” Simpson says.

Brazil’s agricultural industry is one of the country’s largest employers, and the potash industry is a major contributor to the nation’s economy. However, right now, Brazil is a net importer, raising costs for the industry and creating risks to supply chains.

In 2022 there had been plenty of discussion about the importance of fertilizers to the country.

The administration also released the National Fertilizer Plan in 2022, highlighting the importance of potash in the country’s fertilizer mix. The plan broadly entails reducing Brazil’s reliance on importing about 85% of its fertilizer needs, of which potash accounts for 98% of imports.

The Brazilian government has given the project its support.

According to Simpson, the goal is to reduce this number to about 45% by 2050.

As it stands, the company is nearing a construction decision on the Autazes project. “We’ve obtained 76 of the 78 items required to get the installation licence that allows us to start construction. And we submitted the 77th item, which is our Indigenous consultation study. We expect a response in the coming months,” Simpson says.

Construction ready

Meanwhile, Brazil Potash recently completed an updated technical report on Autazes. The last comprehensive study was completed in 2016. As of the 2022 assessment, the company noted that an upward shift in potash sales prices and a favourable exchange rate mostly offset an escalation in costs for construction capital and general operating expenses.

The construction cost is about US$2.5 billion, with a four-year construction timeline.

The economic metrics also look good, with the NPV (at 10% discount) calculated at US$1.6 billion on an after-tax basis, and an IRR of about 17%. “In terms of those numbers, we think we can improve upon them quite a bit because, in parallel, we completed some work with the Saskatchewan Research Council on a revised flow sheet,” Simpson says.

He added the company is also evaluating incorporating hot leaching into the flotation flow sheet, which could translate to a higher-quality product, reduced capex of about US$400 million, and it drops the operating cost from about US$87 per tonne to US$65 per tonne. It helps push the IRR into the mid to high 20%.

Simpson notes that at a price level of about US$240 per tonne, most producers today are not making money, while the exact price would translate to making almost a 200% profit, Simpson says.

The executive notes management has started to focus on securing offtake agreements for Autazes, resulting in a take-or-pay contract with soybean producer Amaggi for production from Phase I of the Autazes mine. Under the offtake agreement, Brazil Potash will supply 2.4 million tonnes of potash annually over 15-17 years.

In addition, Amaggi’s logistics arm will also have the rights to market Brazil Potash’s remaining 1.9 million tonnes of annual production from the mine to other potential buyers as part of the marketing agreement. Under the barge transportation agreement, Brazil Potash will deliver the initial planned production of 2.4 million tonnes of potash a year to inland ports located near major farming regions within Brazil.

“The offtake agreement allows us to initiate talks with potential lenders as we prepare the finance package for the mine build,” says Simpson.

Congo picks Symbion to tap methane-filled lake

Bloomberg News | January 14, 2023 |

Lake Kivu. (Image by MONUSCO / Abel Kavanagh, Flickr.)

New York’s Symbion Power won a bid to produce electricity from methane trapped in a lake in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the country’s oil minister Didier Budimbu Ntubuanga told Bloomberg.


Symbion’s Chief Executive Officer Paul Hinks confirmed the company won the Makelele methane gas block on Lake Kivu with its partner Renewable Energy Developments. The company proposed a 60-megawatt gas-to-electricity project, in one of the world’s least-electrified nations.

“This is a large investment with a price tag of at least $300 million,” Hinks said by email. “We are also considering investing in our own private transmission network so we can wheel the power we produce across the region.”

Lake Kivu is shared by Congo and Rwanda and contains enough methane to produce an estimated 700 megawatts of electricity over more than 50 years. The methane, produced in part by microorganisms in the lake, is dissolved in its deep waters.

The development of electricity production from the lake is part of Congo’s plan to expand energy access from about 10% of the population to 32% by 2030.

Symbion has developed two projects on the Rwandan side of the lake, which it sold in 2019. The electricity from its Makelele concession will go to the trading hub of Goma and the North and South Kivu provinces, Hinks said.

A Canadian company and another US company won bids for two other gas blocks on the lake, Budimbu said, without naming them.

(Reporting by Michael J. Kavanagh).

ECOCIDE
The Metals Company calls video of mining waste dumped into the sea misinformation as stock sinks

Bruno Venditti | January 12, 2023 |

Image from The Metals Company

The Metals Company (NASDAQ: TMC), formerly Deep Green Metals, an explorer of lower-impact battery metals from seafloor polymetallic nodules, responded Thursday to videos of what appears to be mining waste dumped into the sea shared by environmental groups on Tuesday, saying they were taken out of context.


The videos, released by MiningWatch Canada, Greenpeace International, and the Deep Sea Mining Campaign, were captured in October by scientists aboard ships owned by the company as it trialed its deep-sea mining technology in the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ) in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, between Hawaii and Mexico. The zone has been ranked by Mining Intelligence as the biggest nickel project in world in both 2021 and 2022.



Mining international waters is in the spotlight as companies and countries are looking at minerals concentrated on the ocean floor that can be used in batteries for smart phones and electric vehicles. The resource is now estimated at four megatons (Mt) measured, 341Mt indicated and 11Mt inferred mineral resources.

The two videos released Monday show deep-sea sediment overflowing into the ocean from the deck of the company’s 228-meter-long former drill ship, Hidden Gem.

In a technology description on its website, the company said sediment is expected to be discharged back onto the seafloor within a few hundred meters.

The company described the incident as “a minor overflow,” and said some sediment and fragments of nodules poured out of the separator and over the deck of the ship intermittently during a seven-to eight-hour test run.

“Due to the dynamic behavior of the airlift riser when first switched on, there was a surge in the volume of water flow which briefly exceeded the buffer capacity of the cyclone separator at the top of the riser,” the Metals Company said in a statement. “As a result, the cyclone experienced a minor overflow of water containing a small amount of sediment and nodule fragments.”

This footage from the ship was provided by The Metals Company:

“When safe to do so the test run was stopped in a controlled manner,” the company said. It added that an assessment was carried out to see if the incident could harm the marine environment but found it “did not have the potential to cause harm and was, therefore, not a reportable incident.”

“Testing was conducted and the implemented modifications to the cyclone separator proved effective. There were no further overflows during subsequent test runs,” the company said.

Catherine Coumans, MiningWatch Canada’s Asia-Pacific Program Coordinator, disagreed.

“That’s not supposed to be happening,” Coumans said in a statement. “Clearly, something went wrong here.”

Coumans said the scientists who filmed the video aboard the ship and later leaked it to the three advocacy groups were paid by The Metals Company to monitor the company’s deep sea metal-harvesting technology’s environmental footprint.

On Twitter, Greenpeace Global Project Leader Louisa Casson called the incident the latest in a “long list of reasons why we need to stop deep sea mining before it starts in 2023.”

“Unfortunately, we are used to these attacks by activists who take things out of context and try to create a sense of armageddon,” The Metals Company’s head of communications and brand Dan Porras told MINING.COM.

Mining in the deep sea is still under study but metals are abundant on the seafloor. Reserves are estimated to be worth anywhere from $8 trillion to more than $16 trillion.

Most of the metals are found in potato-sized rock-like polymetallic nodules. Millions of years old, the nodules grow by absorbing metals from the seawater, expanding slowly around the core of a shell, bone, or rock.

It is estimated that 21 billion tonnes of polymetallic nodules are resting on the ocean floor in the CCZ. Almost 20 international mining companies have contracts to explore the region which spans over 5,000 kilometers and is considered the most prolific area for ocean mining.

The Metals Company’s stock sunk nearly 12% by 3pm EST Thursday on the Nasdaq, capitalizing it at $207 million.

  

Toughest material on earth now a reality
Staff Writer | January 13, 2023 | 

(Reference image from Raw Pixel.)

A group of scientists has measured the highest toughness ever recorded, of any material, while investigating a metallic alloy made of chromium, cobalt, and nickel (CrCoNi).


In a paper published in the journal Science, the researchers explain that not only is the metal extremely ductile and impressively strong, but its strength and ductility also improve as it gets colder. This runs counter to most other materials in existence.

CrCoNi is a subset of a class of metals called high entropy alloys (HEAs). All the alloys in use today contain a high proportion of one element with lower amounts of additional elements added, but HEAs are made of an equal mix of each constituent element. These balanced atomic recipes appear to bestow some of these materials with an extraordinarily high combination of strength and ductility when stressed, which together make up what is termed “toughness.”

HEAs have been a hot area of research since they were first developed about 20 years ago, but the technology required to push the materials to their limits in extreme tests was not available until recently.

“The toughness of this material near liquid helium temperatures (20 kelvin, -424 Fahrenheit) is as high as 500 megapascals square root meters. In the same units, the toughness of a piece of silicon is one, the aluminum airframe in passenger airplanes is about 35, and the toughness of some of the best steels is around 100. So, 500, it’s a staggering number,” research co-lead Robert Ritchie, a senior faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab, said in a media statement.

Microscopy-generated images showing the path of a fracture and accompanying crystal structure deformation in the CrCoNi alloy at nanometer scale during stress testing at -424 F. 

(Image by Robert Ritchie/Berkeley Lab).

Ritchie and his co-lead Easo George from ORNL began experimenting with CrCoNi and another alloy that also contains manganese and iron (CrMnFeCoNi) nearly a decade ago. They created samples of the alloys then lowered the materials to liquid nitrogen temperatures (around 77 kelvin, or -321 F) and discovered impressive strength and toughness.

Given those results, they immediately wanted to follow up their work with tests at liquid helium temperature ranges, but finding facilities that would enable stress testing samples in such a cold environment, and recruiting team members with the analytical tools and experience needed to analyze what happens in the material at an atomic level took the next 10 years.

The pair explained that many solid substances, including metals, exist in a crystalline form characterized by a repeating 3D atomic pattern, called a unit cell, that makes up a larger structure called a lattice. The material’s strength and toughness, or lack thereof, come from the physical properties of the lattice. No crystal is perfect, so the unit cells in a material will inevitably contain “defects,” a prominent example being dislocations – boundaries where undeformed lattice meets up with deformed lattice.

When force is applied to the material – think, for example, of bending a metal spoon – the shape change is accomplished by the movement of dislocations through the lattice. The easier it is for the dislocations to move, the softer the material is. But if the movement of the dislocations is blocked by obstacles in the form of lattice irregularities, then more force is required to move the atoms within the dislocation, and the material becomes stronger. On the flip side, obstacles usually make the material more brittle – prone to cracking.

Peeking inside CrCoNi

Using neutron diffraction, electron backscatter diffraction, and transmission electron microscopy, Ritchie, George, and their colleagues at Berkeley Lab, the University of Bristol, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and the University of New South Wales examined the lattice structures of CrCoNi samples that had been fractured at room temperature and 20 K.

The images and atomic maps generated from these techniques revealed that the alloy’s toughness is due to a trio of dislocation obstacles that come into effect in a particular order when force is applied to the material.

First, moving dislocations cause areas of the crystal to slide away from other areas that are on parallel planes. This movement displaces layers of unit cells so that their pattern no longer matches up in the direction perpendicular to the slipping movement, creating a type of obstacle.

Further force on the metal creates a phenomenon called nanotwinning, wherein areas of the lattice form a mirrored symmetry with a boundary in between. Finally, if forces continue to act on the metal, the energy being put into the system changes the arrangement of the unit cells themselves, with the CrCoNi atoms switching from a face-centred cubic crystal to another arrangement known as hexagonal close packing.

This sequence of atomic interactions ensures that the metal keeps flowing, but also keeps meeting new resistance from obstacles far past the point that most materials snap from the strain.

“So as you are pulling it, the first mechanism starts and then the second one starts, and then the third one starts, and then the fourth,” explained Ritchie. “Now, a lot of people will say, well, we’ve seen nanotwinning in regular materials, we’ve seen slip in regular materials. That’s true. There’s nothing new about that, but it’s the fact they all occur in this magical sequence that gives us these really tremendous properties.”

The team’s new findings, taken with other recent work on HEAs, may force the materials science community to reconsider long-held notions about how physical characteristics give rise to performance.

“It’s amusing because metallurgists say that the structure of a material defines its properties, but the structure of the NiCoCr is the simplest you can imagine – it’s just grains,” said Ritchie. “However, when you deform it, the structure becomes very complicated, and this shift helps explain its exceptional resistance to fracture,” co-author Andrew Minor said.

New products…but not just yet

George foresees the new material being used in situations where environmental extremes could destroy standard metallic alloys, such as in the frigid temperatures of deep space.

He and his team at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory are also investigating how alloys made of more abundant and less expensive elements could be coaxed into having similar properties.

Though the progress is exciting, Ritchie warns that real-world use could still be a ways off, for good reason.

“When you are flying on an airplane, would you like to know that what saves you from falling 40,000 feet is an airframe alloy that was only developed a few months ago? Or would you want the materials to be mature and well-understood? That’s why structural materials can take many years, even decades, to get into real use.”

LITHIUM

Biden backs Nevada lithium mine with $700 million loan offer

Bloomberg News | January 13, 2023 |

The Rhyolite Ridge lithium-boron project in Nevada. 

(Image courtesy of ioneer.)

A Nevada lithium mine that would be only the second in the US is getting backing from the Biden administration as it seeks to boost the domestic supply of the critical mineral needed to make electric vehicle batteries.


The Energy Department issued a conditional commitment for up to $700 million for Ioneer Ltd.’s Rhyolite Ridge Lithium-Boron Project, a prospective supplier to Ford Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. that could produce enough lithium for 370,000 electric vehicles a year. Project partners include mining and metals processing group Sibanye Stillwater Ltd.

The funding, being made through the department’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program, comes as the Biden administration seeks to create a domestic battery supply chain amid a broader goal of half of vehicles sold in the US by the end of the decade be emissions-free.

Demand for lithium, which also is used for grid storage and weapons, is projected to exceed current production by 2030. The US relies on international markets for the processing of most raw materials, according to the department.

“Developing a US supply chain for these materials is a national priority as the country works toward energy independence,” the department said in a statement. “A core focus within the strategy is increasing the availability of the critical materials that are essential components of the clean energy technologies necessary for reaching national climate and economic goals.”

While Asia currently dominates the lithium carbonate refining process, the Rhyolite Ridge deposit is one of two known sizeable lithium-boron deposits in the world, the Energy Department said.

Ioneer expects to get US approvals that will allow the company to start building the project next year with the aim to start producing lithium in 2026, according to the company. It still needs to get final approval from the US Interior Department because public lands near the site are home to the endangered wildflower Tiehm’s buckwheat.

The Energy Department said the company has invested $1.2 million on research to preserve the plant and has revised its mining plan to avoid direct impacts on the plant.

(By Ari Natter)

Nevada lithium mine gets conditional $700M government loan

By SCOTT SONNER

yesterday

1 of 3

 In this photo provided by the Center for Biological Diversity, Tiehm's buckwheat grows in the high desert in the Silver Peak Range of western Nevada about halfway between Reno and Las Vegas, in June 2019, where a lithium mine is planned. The U.S. Department of Energy on Friday, Jan. 13, 2023, announced a conditional loan of $700 million to an Australian mining company to pursue a proposed lithium project in Nevada. But the project still faces a significant hurdle in developing a mining operations plan that will provide adequate protection for the endangered Nevada wildflower, Tiehm's buckwheat. (Patrick Donnelly/Center for Biological Diversity via AP, File)

RENO, Nev. (AP) — The U.S. Department of Energy announced a conditional loan of $700 million Friday to an Australian mining company to pursue a lithium project still facing environmental hurdles in Nevada as the U.S. seeks domestic supplies for a key component in electric vehicle batteries.

The move ups the ante in what’s already a high-stakes battle over President Joe Biden’s energy agenda and conservationists fighting to protect an endangered wildflower found only at the proposed mine site on a high desert ridge halfway between Reno and Las Vegas.

Ioneer Ltd. has hoped to begin mining at Rhyolite Ridge by 2026 in Esmerelda County. The Energy announcement said the site could produce enough lithium to support production of about 370,000 electric vehicles annually for decades.

The loan would be the latest project to demonstrate the Biden administration’s commitment to strengthen the nation’s battery supply chain, electrify the transportation sector and cut reliance on fossil fuels and foreign supplies of raw materials, the Department of Energy said.

Jigar Shah, director of DOE’s Loans Programs Office, said his office is “excited to further develop an environmentally responsible U.S. supply chain for critical materials.”

“Rhyolite Ridge is a major step towards bolstering domestic lithium production for clean energy technologies,” he said.

James Calaway, executive chairman of Ioneer, said the conditional commitment “highlights the project’s strategic role in strengthening the nation’s critical mineral supply chain in providing a secure, sustainable and reliable domestic source of lithium for the growing vehicle ecosystem.” Bernard Rowe, Ioneer’s managing director, said it came after 23 months “of discussion and due diligence” by Energy and “represents a significant milestone” for the project.

But the project still faces a significant legal and regulatory challenge in developing a mining operations plan that will provide adequate protection for the endangered Nevada wildflower, Tiehm’s buckwheat.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in declaring it endangered last year that it is on the brink of extinction and the mining project posed the single biggest threat to its survival.

Conservationists have sued in the past to protect the 6-inch-tall plant with yellow blooms and vowed on Friday to do so again if necessary.

“What this looks like is a fairly transparent effort by the Biden administration to build political and economic momentum for the project in an effort to steamroll the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Endangered Species Act,” said Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin director for the Center for Biological Diversity.

“Ioneer is going to have to completely overhaul the design of this mine if they expect to pass through permitting,” he said in an email to The Associated Press. “We’ve sued or initiated lawsuits over Tiehm’s buckwheat four times already, and we won’t back down until every buckwheat is saved.”

The Energy Department announcement said the Ioneer project is working to minimize impact on the plant. It said the loan is contingent on completion of an environmental impact statement in accordance with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

The Biden administration has made a plan for half a million charging stations for electric vehicles a signature piece of its infrastructure goals. That effort, and the growth of electric vehicle companies such as Tesla, will require much more lithium to make batteries.

Although lithium reserves are distributed widely across the globe, the U.S. is home to just one active lithium mine, in Nevada. Worldwide demand for lithium was about 350,000 tons (317,517 metric tons) in 2020, but industry estimates project demand will be up to six times greater by 2030.

Shah said large projects like this go forward step by step.

“We clearly are not committing any capital to the project yet,” Shah said Friday in a telephone interview with AP. “They still have to meet the conditions. But by doing this, it gives their equity investors some comfort that they should continue to invest in the project.”

Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., is among those backing the project.

“I applaud the Energy Department for providing this loan to help support the mining and processing of Nevada’s critical minerals, help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and contribute to the creation of jobs in our state,” she said in a statement.

Lithium is fundamental to the battery technology that is most common in electric vehicles and battery electric storage systems. But many engineers are working on alternative battery chemistries because lithium involves rock mining, which means major disturbance to the environment.

Ioneer is a lithium focused company based in New South Wales, Australia and Reno.

Another new lithium mining project in development in the U.S. is proposed for Thacker Pass by Lithium Americas near the Oregon line. That northern Nevada mine would make millions of tons of lithium available, but it too faces legal challenges. Native American tribes have argued that it’s located on sacred lands near where dozens of their ancestors were massacred in 1865.

Arkle Resources finds lithium in Ireland

Cecilia Jamasmie | January 12, 2023 | 

Drilling at the Inishowen gold project in Ireland. (Image courtesy of Ankle Resources.)

Diversified explorer Arkle Resources (AIM: ARK) said on Thursday it had found lithium bearing pegmatites at its Mine River Block gold project in Ireland.


The company, until 2019 known as Connemara Mining, said that of 34 rock chip samples taken from the site late last year, six returned lithium grades of more than 0.02%, with one returning 0.09%.

The six samples that showed elevated lithium were all boulders of pegmatite rock collected around mapped granite bodies.

Geochemical results also showed clear pathfinder elements for lithium – caesium, rubidium and tantalum – which can be used to target a coarse type of igneous rock in future soil surveys, Arkle Resources said.

The company, which has so far focused on gold in Ireland, said its directors believe these results are “compelling” as they suggest the Mine River Block is fertile for lithium caesium tantalum (LCT) pegmatite deposits

“These are exciting results,” chairman John Teeling said in the statement. “We have discovered lithium on our licences. We found the rock type needed, pegmatites, and in the pegmatites found lithium and other indicator minerals. This opens compelling new opportunities for our Mine River Block. Prospecting will resume in the near future.”

Shares in the company jumped as much as 21% to 69p after the announcement, but fell sharply in afternoon trading, changing hands at 56p by 2pm local time — 2.6% lower than at Wednesday’s close. This leaves it with a market capitalization of £2.21 million (about $2.6m).

Arkle Resources has been exploring for gold and zinc in the Wicklow granite for more than two decades, but searching for lithium in hard rocks has only been viable since 2018, the company said.

Lithium prices have softened after an outstanding two-year rally labelled “insane” by Elon Musk and “unreasonable” by China’s electric vehicles maker BYD.

Producers believe the cool-off is momentary and that prices will pick up in the coming months, despite market fears over a possible cooling-off of China’s two-year lithium buying spree.

Rock Tech granted permission for early construction of lithium hydroxide plant in Germany

Staff Writer | January 12, 2023 | 

Site of the lithium hydroxide converter in Guben, Brandenburg. Credit: Rock Tech Lithium Inc.

Rock Tech Lithium (TSXV: RCK) has received permission for an early start to the construction of its Guben lithium converter in Germany. First significant on-site work for this strategic critical mineral project is expected within the upcoming next weeks.


Rock Tech first announced plans to build the lithium converter in Guben, Brandenburg, in October 2021. The facility, designed to produce battery-grade lithium hydroxide, will be situated about 60 km away from Tesla’s plant in Grünheide.

The decision follows an Europe-wide search by Rock Tech for a location to refine the raw material sourced from its Georgia Lake lithium project in Ontario.

“Our goal is to be the first company in the world to create a closed loop for lithium. Guben seems to us to be the ideal location for this, with subsidies also playing an important role,” Rock Tech’s CEO Dirk Harbecke stated at the time of the announcement.

In February 2022, Rock Tech applied with the Brandenburg environmental agency for the first partial permit and an early start of the project. In the course of the application procedure, which involved public participation, no objections were received, and the authorities subsequently granted approval for the first tranche of permits.

The approval for an early start is also an encouraging indicator that permission for construction of the Guben converter will be granted in due course, the company said on Thursday. In November, Rock Tech submitted the second and final tranche of permit applications for this to the authority.

Approval for construction of the Guben converter is expected from summer 2023 onwards, according to the company.

“The production of our battery-grade lithium hydroxide will be an essential part of the battery mineral supply chains in Europe – this is another reason why the approval by the authority is an important step towards implementation and sends a clear signal to the market,” added Klaus Schmitz, Rock Tech’s chief operating officer.

Once completed, the Guben converter will be the first of its kind in Europe, with expected annual production capacity of 24,000 tonnes of battery-grade lithium hydroxide from 2025. Total cost of the project is estimated at 650 million euros.

To date, more than 250,000 working hours and over 45 million euros have been invested by Rock Tech in the planning the design and construction of the Guben converter. With the early start permission, necessary groundwork, as well as the construction of roads, office and storage buildings, can now begin.

Shares of Rock Tech Lithium surged 16.5% as of 12:30 p.m. ET, giving the Vancouver-based company a market capitalization of C$249.3 million ($186.6m).

MINING IS NOT GREEN
CHARTS: Mining stocks gain on tech but remain an afterthought for investors

Frik Els | January 13, 2023 | 

Scoop up some mining stocks. Stock image

MINING.COM tracks the world’s top 50 biggest mining companies by market value, and at the end of 2022 the ranking had a combined value of $1.39 trillion.


It’s just a shade below the companies’ combined market cap at the end of 2021. That compares to a 9% drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and a nearly 20% decline in the S&P500 over the course of the year.

The year started with a big bang and measured from individual stocks’ 52-week highs – almost all hit in March/April – the top 50 has shrunk by more than $1 trillion. It’s a precipitous decline, but compared to other sectors, notably big tech, much of those losses were recouped by the end of the year.

The top 5 most valuable tech firms were worth a collective $4.55 trillion at the start of 2023, down an astonishing $2.9 trillion over the past year. That compares to the combined value of $454 billion for mining’s top tier.

But it’s hard to ignore the fact that at Apple’s market capitalisation alone – even after shedding nearly $750 billion in 2022 — you can buy the world’s 50 most valuable mining companies, the next 50, and have enough left over to snap up three years of global copper mine production and buy 2022’s seaborne iron ore — all of it.

While critical minerals and metals (aren’t they all?) are now a geopolitical talking point and developed economies have finally woken up to the fact that they’ve largely been cut out of global hard commodity supply chains, it is clear from the relative valuations of virtual vs real assets that a massive disconnect still exists.

All the way back in 2019, Bernstein’s Paul Gait wrote a paper following the New York money managers’ conference on decarbonisation and the vast volumes of metals and minerals and massive investment in new projects needed to achieve the world’s climate goals.


Gait had this to say about the affordability of meeting those targets and the relative valuation of the big tech stocks and the mining industry:

“It is, however, important to remember that when we highlight the impact of decarbonisation on copper prices there is absolutely no sense in which this can be taken to imply that we ‘cannot afford’ to deliver a “green economy” (and the resulting transformation of industrial and economic processes).

“The market capitalisation of such entities as Facebook or Netflix imply that there is more than enough money, more than enough capital to deliver whatever economic transformation is required. The fact that our revealed preference (amusing cat videos) is at variance with our stated preference (a sustainable economic future for our children) should not be erroneously taken to infer that there is some financial constraint on the ends we choose to pursue.”