Airlines ask Supreme Court to hear case on passenger bill of rights

The Canadian Press

A group of airlines is asking the Supreme Court of Canada to hear their case after a lower court largely upheld the validity of Canada's air passenger bill of rights.

Air Canada and Porter Airlines Inc. are among the group seeking leave to appeal to the Supreme Court, along with a number of U.S. and international airlines including Delta Air Lines, Lufthansa and British Airways.

The International Air Transport Association, which represents about 290 member airlines, is also an applicant.

In December, the Federal Court of Appeal ruled against the airlines by largely upholding a slate of passenger protection regulations introduced by the Canadian Transportation Agency in 2019.

Among other things, the air passenger bill of rights bolsters compensation for air travellers subjected to delayed flights and damaged luggage. 

Airlines have argued Canada's passenger rights charter violates global standards and should be rendered invalid for international flights.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 3, 2023.

RENTIER CAPITALI$M CREATES INFLATION

Investors made up 20 to 30% of homeowners in some provinces: Statistics Canada

New Statistics Canada data shows investors made up almost one third of homeowners in some provinces in 2020.

The data agency says investors made up 31.5 per cent of Nova Scotia's homeowners that year and 29 per cent of New Brunswick's property holders.

Investors in British Columbia came in at 23.3 per cent followed by 20.4 per cent in Manitoba and 20.2 per cent in Ontario.

When grouped together, the data agency's calculations show under one in five homes in British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia was considered an investment property in 2020.

Houses used as an investment were mainly owned by individuals living in the same province as the property.

However, condo apartments were used as an investment more often than houses, with Ontario alone seeing the highest rate of condo apartments used as investments at 41.9 per cent.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 3, 2023.

Uranium price expected to rise in 2023 on nuclear power revival

Bruno Venditti | January 31, 2023 |

(Image: Kazatomprom)

There will likely be a further recovery of uranium prices in 2023 as nuclear energy regains popularity, was the sentiment among uranium specialists who spoke on Monday at the Vancouver Resource Investment Conference (VRIC).


With several of the world’s most developed countries announcing plans to extend the life of their existing nuclear power plants and some expanding their fleets, there was an optimistic buzz at VRIC.

Amid the energy crisis accelerated by the Russian-Ukraine war, countries like Japan, France, South Korea, India, the UK, the US, and Germany recently announced new constructions and additional incentives and funding for nuclear power.

“I think the principal factor is the change of public opinion in Japan. With regards to the pace of Japanese restarts, the biggest source of new demand that you could have on the planet is from their 40 existing reactors,” said Rick Rule, CEO of Sprott US Holdings.

“They don’t have to be built, they just have to be restarted. That would raise the structural demand for uranium by between 10 and 12 million pounds a year.”

According to Goviex Uranium CEO Daniel Major, demand is set to increase while supply remains tight.

“At the end of the day, we consume about 190 million pounds a year. Currently, we dig out of the ground about 130 million pounds,” said Major.

Spot uranium started the year rising from $48.66 to over $50/lb in a two-week period.

For Rick Rule, some greenfield supply could come from Kazakhstan, but with a new incentive price close to $70 a pound.

According to the veteran investor, the outlook is also very bullish over the next ten years.

“There’s a billion people on Earth that have no access to electricity at all. There are 2 billion people on Earth who experience energy poverty, either intermittent energy or unaffordable energy,” said Rule.

“When we talk about energy in the West, we talk about stuff like Teslas,” he pointed out. “Increasing the living standards of the poorest of the poor means that we’re gonna need more energy from all sources. Solar, sure. Wind, yeah. Coal, of course. But nuclear is a wonderful source of post-construction, cheap, reliable, non-carbon generating baseload power.”

Related: Are metals headed for a golden age?

THE RECESSION IS A MYTH

2022 was strongest year for gold demand in over a decade — report

Staff Writer | January 31, 2023 |

File image.

Demand for gold has reached its highest in over a decade on the back of colossal purchases made by central banks, as well as vigorous retail investor buying and slower ETF outflows, the World Gold Council (WGC) said on Tuesday.


Annual gold demand jumped 18% to 4,741 tonnes, almost on a par with 2011 – a time of exceptional investment demand, the WGC said in its 2022 Gold Demand Trends report. The strong full-year total was aided by record Q4 demand of 1,337 tonnes.

The investment portion of demand reached 1,107 tonnes in 2022, representing a 10% increase over 2021. Demand for gold bars and coins grew 2% to 1,217 tonnes, while holdings of gold ETFs fell by a smaller amount than in 2021, which further contributed to total investment growth. Quarterly fluctuations in OTC demand largely netted out over the year.

Jewellery consumption, on the other hand, softened a fraction in 2022, down by 3% at 2,086 tonnes. Much of the weakness came through in the fourth quarter as the gold price surged.

Demand for gold in technology saw a sharp Q4 drop, resulting in a full-year decline of 7%. This was a consequence of deteriorating global economic conditions, which hampered demand for consumer electronics.
Central bank buying

In 2022, central banks added 1,136 tonnes of gold worth some $70 billion to their stockpiles, which was by far the biggest purchase of any year since 1967. Purchases in Q4 alone (417 tonnes) almost matched that of 2021 (450 tonnes).

The trend underlines a shift in attitudes to gold since the 1990s and 2000s, when central banks, particularly those in Western Europe that own a lot of bullion, sold hundreds of tonnes a year. Since the financial crisis of 2008-09, European banks stopped selling and a growing number of emerging economies such as Russia, Turkey and India have bought.

Central banks like gold because it is expected to hold its value through turbulent times and, unlike currencies and bonds, it does not rely on any issuer or government. It also enables central banks to diversify away from assets like US Treasuries and the dollar.

“This is a continuation of a trend,” WGC analyst Krishan Gopaul said in a Reuters note.

“You can see those drivers feeding into what happened last year. You had on the geopolitical front and the macroeconomic front a lot of uncertainty and volatility,” he added.

Outlook for 2023

Looking ahead, the WGC said it has not altered its view of a good year for gold, with more upside potential than downside risk given a growing risk of recession in the US and Europe.

“A lacklustre 2022 for ETF and OTC demand is likely to set the stage for a year of growth in investment,” said the WGC, noting that “gold’s stable performance in 2022, despite strong headwinds from rising rates and a strong dollar for most of the year, has reignited investor interest.”

“Jewellery demand is also likely to capitalize on a resilient 2022, driven primarily by the reopening of China,” the WGC added.

Central bank buying – despite the latest trend – is unlikely to match 2022 levels, according to the Council, as demand remains difficult to forecast partly because it can be policy driven and does not always respond to the most common economic drivers.

“Lower total reserves may constrain the capacity to add to existing allocations. But lagged reporting by some central banks means that we need to apply a high degree of uncertainty to our expectations, predominantly to the upside,” the WGC said.

(With files from Reuters)

South Africa reports safest year in mining, government urges more

Reuters | January 31, 2023


South Africa is coming off its safest year on record in mining, with accident-related deaths falling to 49 from 74 the previous year, a government report showed on Tuesday.


A total of 1,946 serious injuries were reported in 2022, down from 2,123 a year earlier, the report showed, prompting Mines Minister Gwede Mantashe to say more needed to be done to improve safety.

“We are improving in fatalities, we are improving in injuries, but the numbers remain high. An incident is a pointer that there was a potential fatality,” Mantashe said during the report’s release in Pretoria.

Mine fatalities have declined since 309 lives were lost in 1999, though 2020 and 2021 saw deaths rise again, industry data shows.

“The industry will build on the momentum we achieved during 2022 when we halted and significantly reversed the regression in safety during the previous two years in which 74 and 60 of our colleagues died in 2021 and 2020, respectively,” said Lerato Tsele, acting head of safety and sustainable development at the Minerals Council of South Africa.

In a statement, the Minerals Council said industry-wide safety initiatives were helping, including a push to eliminate accidents involving falling rocks.

These, which once accounted for about half of all deaths in the sector, fell to six last year from 20 in 2021, the report showed.

(By Nelson Banya; Editing by Jason Neely)

Vedanta said to scrap plans to sell mega Indian copper smelter

Bloomberg News | January 31, 2023 

Sterlite Copper Plant – Image courtesy of Vedanta

Vedanta Ltd. has shelved the plan to sell its copper smelter in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which accounted for almost 40% of the metal’s production in the country, and has doubled down on its efforts to restart the plant, according to people familiar with the matter.


After scrapping the seven-month-old process to offload the 400,000 tons-a-year Sterlite Copper plant, the company will now work with the local population to restart the factory that was shut on environmental concerns, the people said, asking not to be named as the information is not public. Vedanta’s petition to lift a local government order to close the plant will be heard by the Supreme Court on Feb. 21.

Restarting the smelter will lead to a surge in India’s copper output and cut imports. The refined metal is poised to play an important role in the nation’s shift toward electric vehicles and renewables and has lured interest from billionaire Gautam Adani’s group, which has the ambition to become one of the largest copper producers in the country.

India “can’t afford to close this plant permanently when the demand for copper is at its peak in the country,” a spokesman for Vedanta said in an emailed statement, replying to a query on it scrapping the sale process. “There has been a positive sway among the people of the region with more voices coming forward to support the reopening of the plant.”

The company, controlled by billionaire Anil Agarwal was working with Axis Capital Ltd. to sell the assets and had invited bids from prospective bidders in a newspaper advertisement in June. The smelter has been closed since 2018 on orders from the state government following the death of more than a dozen people when police opened fire on villagers protesting pollution from the facility.

India had turned a net importer of the metal for the first time in almost two decades following the plant’s closure, Vedanta’s spokesperson said.

(By Anto Antony, with assistance from Swansy Afonso and Shruti Mahajan)

Tombador Iron halts Brazil mine due to unrest
Cecilia Jamasmie | February 1, 2023 |

Tombador says its lump product is among the best in the world. 

(Image courtesy of Tombador Iron.)

Australia’s Tombador Iron (ASX: TI1) has temporarily halted production at its flagship iron ore mine in Brazil, as an ongoing blockade in the state of Bahia is disrupting logistics.


Unrest hit Brazil in early January as supporters of ex President Jair Bolsonaro who refuse to accept his electoral defeat stormed Congress, the Supreme Court and presidential palace.

Protests have continued despite government efforts to boost security, with right wing leaders calling for blockades and power lines being brought down in a coordinated efforts to cause chaos and prompt a military coup to overthrow Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s government.

Tombador said it was working with key stakeholders to reopen the mine, but did not provide further details.

The company and its trading partner, Trafigura, secured last month contracts to supply two export shipments of its high-grade iron ore to the Asian market.

Tombador first produced premium-grade lump and fines hematite iron ore in May 2021.

Last year, it produced over 754,000 tonnes of high-grade iron ore last year, according to its annual report.

Shares of Tombador fell as much as 14.3% on the news, closing 7.4% lower at A$0.026 each. That left the company with a market capitalization of A$55.56 million ($39m).

Simandou iron ore project to restart in March, Guinea says

Reuters | February 1, 2023

Simandou holds over two billion tonnes of iron ore reserves and some of the highest grades in the industry (66% – 68% Fe which attracts premium pricing).

 (Image courtesy of Rio Tinto Simandou)

Work on Guinea’s massive Simandou iron ore mine and infrastructure project is set to restart in March, Guinea’s military junta said in a Jan. 30 statement seen by Reuters on Wednesday.


Guinean authorities ordered work on Simandou to stop in July last year in a bid to force the shareholders – which include Rio Tinto, Aluminium Corporation of China (Chinalco), China Baowu Steel (Baowu) and Winning Consortium Simandou (WCS) – to agree joint venture terms.

The partners aim for final terms to be agreed at the latest on Feb. 28, Guinea’s military junta said in a statement summarizing a visit by coup leader Colonel Mamady Doumbouya and other top officials to China from Jan. 11-22, during which they met with Baowu.

“The mission was excellent and conclusive as it commits to the huge Simandou project restarting as soon as possible in March 2023, subject to negotiations on the project terms being finalized on Feb. 28 at the latest,” the junta’s communications department said.

Rio Tinto, Chinalco, Baowu and WCS did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

According to the statement, Doumbouya gave Baowu his support for its investment in Simandou, but reminded the company of the deadlines the project must meet.

In March last year the junta, which took power in a Sept. 2021 coup, said the Simandou infrastructure – a 600-kilometre railway and a port – must be completed by Dec 2024 and production must start by March 31, 2025, a timeline analysts say is highly ambitious.

(By Saliou Samb, Sofia Christensen and Helen Reid; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)

How a Soviet nuclear site could be key to Europe’s EV market

Bloomberg News | February 1, 2023 | 

Neo Performance Materials’ facility in Sillamae. 

Source: Estonian Chemical Industries Association

On the edge of Sillamae, a town of just over 12,000 people in northeast Estonia, sits a grassy hill with a secret.


It’s here, on the Baltic Sea coast close to the Russian border, where the past is buried. And it’s here, according to one company, where the future lies if Europe wants to loosen China’s grip on the supply of components to industries seen as critical to the continent’s economy.

The artificial mound covers a radioactive pond from when the town covertly processed uranium for the Soviet nuclear industry until 1989. Today, the adjacent facilities are home to oil and fertilizer storage terminals, but also the only major processing plant outside Asia for rare earth metals used in the automotive industry.

The plant’s Canadian owner, Neo Performance Materials, says the knowledge honed in the remote region over decades is now key to nurturing a European industry for magnets, particularly for electric vehicles. Backed by the Estonian government, Neo plans to build Europe’s first rare earth magnets manufacturing site next door to Sillamae, which will provide the processed raw materials needed to make them.

“You look at the whole of Estonia — 1.4 million people is the size of a small city anywhere else in the world — and yet it has the potential to become an innovation hub for critical materials for all of Europe,” said Constantine Karayannopoulos, Toronto-based Neo’s chief executive officer.

The vision may sound grand, but rare earth metals are in demand and incredibly niche. They are a set of 17 elements from the periodic table and have hundreds of uses, from missiles to banknotes.

The biggest is for making incredibly powerful magnets, which make up about 90% of the market’s value worldwide, according to the industry’s lobby group. Chinese companies dominate production while US and European capabilities have shriveled in the face of cheaper competition over the last three decades.

The electric car industry is going to need a lot more magnets in coming years as the European Union moves to ban internal combustion engines by 2035. The challenge in Europe is sourcing the raw material and then convincing customers it’s worth paying a premium on Chinese products, said Nabeel Mancheri, secretary general of the Rare Earth Industry Association in Belgium.

Neo’s previous owner, Molycorp Inc., was one of several firms that shut down production. It previously attempted to build a mine-to-magnet supply chain — like Neo is now attempting — but failed, partly because of often wild price fluctuations in the rare earth metals market.

“In Europe, it’s a problem of capacity,” said Mancheri. “Magnets is not rocket science. The only problem is that you need to have a close collaboration with supply chain partners from the upstream to the downstream.”

China’s overwhelming sway over rare earths has become more concerning for Western companies after the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and blockages on the Suez Canal exposed the vulnerabilities of supply chains.

Europe’s automotive industry is now establishing its own production of everything from semiconductors and batteries to the lithium used inside them. The region is not just in an accelerating race with China, but also the US, where President Joe Biden is luring manufacturers with some $370 billion worth of clean-technology subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act.

Companies are also eager to see more localized and ESG-compliant supply chains of magnets and are putting pressure on Neo to establish that capacity, said Karayannopoulos. He said his company is in talks with all of the major electric vehicle drivetrain suppliers, including Robert Bosch GmbH, Schaeffler Group, Siemens AG, Stellantis NV and Tesla Inc.

There are manufacturers “screaming for this European supply chain capability,” said Karayannopoulos, who co-founded Neo 30 years ago. “They expect their tier-one suppliers to respond.”

Neo makes tantalum, cerium, lanthanum, neodymium, praseodymium — materials for automotive, aerospace, microelectronics — in Sillamae. It has about 70% of the market in neodymium magnets outside of China, according to Yuri Lynk, a Montreal-based analyst at Canaccord Genuity. It recently bought exploration rights to a mine in Greenland and also owns magnet plants in China and Thailand.

At the moment, the company has to ship materials processed in Estonia to those facilities in Asia, only to transport the finished product back to customers in Europe. The new €100 million ($106 million) Estonian facility that will be built in Narva, a Russian border city 25 kilometers (16 miles) east of Sillamae, is supposed to solve that.

It will make a magnetic powder essential for electric vehicle drivetrains and the company aims to have it up and running in 2025. The target is to produce 1,500 tons a year initially, worth €150 million in revenue, Karayannopoulos said. At full capacity, it could produce 5,000 tons. To put that into perspective, it would meet demand for all of Europe’s 1.7 million electric vehicle registrations in 2021, he said.

“I don’t think they’d build the plant if they didn’t see the demand there,” said Lynk, the analyst. “They’re a small company, but the market that they’ve traditionally dealt with is a small market.” Neo’s shares have risen 24% since mid November, shortly after it announced the Estonian government would back the new plant with an €18.7 million EU subsidy.

A handful of Neo’s competitors is seeking to build up rare earths capabilities outside of Asia, but most don’t have the head start thanks to the Sillamae facility.

In California, MP Materials, a company that owns the only major rare earths mine in the US, is aiming to build a supply chain. It’s ramped up production so that the US is producing more rare earth minerals than ever before. But the country lacks the refining and magnet-making capabilities, which MP Materials is now trying to fix by building a refinery at its mine and a magnet factory in Texas.

“For the entire industry, the primary driver of growth is traction motors for electric vehicles,” said Matt Sloustcher, a senior vice president for communications at MP Materials.

With refining and production capabilities “systematically offshored and hollowed out” in the US and Europe, MP Materials says the industry has to be rebuilt from the ground up. “China is dominant across mining, refining and the production of metals, alloys and magnets,” said Sloustcher. “And so from a resiliency point of view, that’s a weakness in the global supply chain. That is a threat.”

In Sillamae, the former uranium extraction plant was built by prison labor in the aftermath of World War II. It was sold off by the Estonian government after the tiny nation declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The covered “Uranium Lake,” which sits less than 50 meters from the Baltic shore, remains contaminated with about 12 million tons of waste.

The town was seen as essential for the nuclear industry back in the day, said Tonis Kalberg, Sillamae’s mayor. Now he talks about renovating the seaside promenade, sailboat rentals and fishing for tourists.

“The whole town was built for the purpose of this plant,” Kalberg said in an interview at his office in the town hall. “It was a closed town. The plant was secret.”

In Narva, which like Sillamae is mainly Russian-speaking, the advent of the new plant would be a timely boost to the city of 54,000 after the war in Ukraine hit the cross-border economy. Estonia’s industrial heartland has long been in decline, precipitated most recently by plans to wind down production at oil shale-fueled power plants, which employ thousands in the region.

Katri Raik, Narva’s mayor, is hopeful that Neo’s plans come through. She’s been fielding calls from an HR company inquiring about kindergartens for Neo employees. The city’s new slogan is “Europe Starts Here.” “We need to applaud the investors who come here next to Russia,” she said. “It’s up to us to convince them they made the right decision.”

(By Ott Tammik, with assistance from Stefan Nicola)

American Lithium estimates almost $600m in annual cash flow for Tonopah

Staff Writer | February 1, 2023 |

American Lithium’s Tonopah project in Nevada would mine from an open pit for 40 years. Credit: American Lithium

Analysts say American Lithium‘s (TSXV: LI; NASDAQ: AMLI) Tonopah project in Nevada could run at world-beating costs based on a new study including the sale of by-product magnesium.


The operating cost of the Tonopah Lithium Claims (TLC) project, about 340 km northwest of Las Vegas, is estimated at $817 per tonne of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) including selling 1.7 million tonnes a year of magnesium sulphate, and at $7,443 per tonne of LCE without, according to a preliminary economic assessment (PEA) released on Wednesday.

Toronto-based Echelon Capital Markets called the magnesium “an unexpected benefit” that makes the project one of the lowest cost operations its analysts have researched globally. Tonopah also gains from very low strip ratios compared with other projects, Echelon said.

“This PEA puts American Lithium’s TLC project firmly among the leading North American-based potential producers of lithium for what is expected to be a regional supply deficit,” Echelon wrote in a note on Wednesday. “This project (is) one of the lowest operating cost projects on the global cost curve shown in our sector report.”

American Lithium’s PEA forecasts an after-tax net present value of $3.3 billion at a discount rate of 8% for an after-tax internal rate of return of 28%. The project would generate $591 million a year in after-tax cash flow and pay back investors in 3.7 years, the Vancouver-based company said.

Simon Clarke, chief executive officer of American Lithium, noted the impact of the magnesium and said the site’s 99.4% LCE purity offers the opportunity to produce battery-grade lithium carbonate or hydroxide.

“Not only are the economics very strong for high-purity lithium production, but TLC also has the potential to produce high-purity magnesium sulphates as by-products for agriculture and other end uses,” Clarke said in a news release. “Even assuming conservative pricing, these by-products can add significant economic value.”
Truck and shovel

The study envisions producing 24,000 tonnes a year of LCE from truck and shovel open-pit mining before doubling to 48,000 tonnes in year seven. After 20 years the mine would process a stockpile of ore with more than 1,000 parts per million (ppm) lithium for another two decades.

The initial capital cost is pegged at $819 million (construction time of 1.2 years), total capital costs at $1.4 billion and sustaining capital at $792 million.

Analysts expect lithium to remain in high demand for years as automakers switch production lines over to electric vehicles where the light metal is used in batteries. American Lithium’s study arrives a day after GM announced plans to invest $650 million in Lithium Americas’ (TSX: LAC; NYSE: LAC) Thacker Pass project, the largest amount by a car builder in a battery metals development.

The American Lithium study uses an LCE price of $20,000 a tonne, while the spot price on Wednesday was about $72,000 per tonne. Echelon said the developer should use a higher base price because spot prices could persist above at least $40,000.

The Tonopah project could add $100 million in construction costs and $406 per tonne of LCE in operating expenses to refine LCE into battery grade lithium hydroxide, according to the study. Lithium hydroxide was selling for $73,500 a tonne on Wednesday.

The TLC claystone project in the state’s Esmeralda lithium district has a measured resource of 860 million tonnes grading at 924 ppm lithium for contained metal of 4.2 million tonnes LCE, according to an updated resource estimate issued in December. The indicated resource is 1.2 billion tonnes lithium grading 727 ppm for 4.6 million tonnes LCE.