Welcome back to your weekly mining news recap. At the end of the week we’ll catch you up on the mining news from CIM Magazine and elsewhere you may have missed. In this week’s headlines: Canada grants a five-year renewal of the mineral exploration tax credit, a terrorist attack at Foraco’s camp in Niger kills eight, and infighting in Canada’s oil industry hampers its lobbying efforts.

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Rio Tinto will sell sustainable aluminum to Nespresso for their coffee capsules, the company announced on Monday. Rio Tinto’s aluminum has been certified by the Aluminium Stewardship Initiative, a non-profit made up of members of the aluminum value chain that creates industry standards for sustainability and supply chain transparency. The company’s aluminum refinery, smelters and casthouses in Quebec and the associated infrastructure, as well as its Gove bauxite mine in Australia, have been ASI-certified.

Internal divisions in Canada’s oil industry are preventing it from lobbying the government with a consistent message, according to Bloomberg. Rifts have fractured the relationships between Canada’s pure producers affected by drops in local crude prices and larger companies who are mostly untouched; and between oil-sands producers and frackers and conventional drillers. “The Canadian divisions bubbled to a head late last month, when top executives from 15 of the nation’s top oil producers met with Alberta Premier Rachel Notley and, instead of presenting a unified front and a list of demands, they were said to have sparred with each other in front of her,” Bloomberg reported.

Canada renewed its mineral exploration tax credit until 2024 in its fall economic statement. The move comes after almost two decades of industry lobbying for more than a single-year renewal. Mining sector groups have argued a multi-year METC would give companies and investors more stability. The fall economic statement also had other goodies for miners, including the accelerated investment incentive, which will allow mining companies to write off three times the eligible cost of acquired assets in the year they purchase them.

McEwen Mining’s Gold Bar open-pit project in Nevada will start commercial production in March 2019, Mining Magazine reported. (Also, this story has a great headline.) Currently 70 per cent complete, Gold Bar is expected to produce 62,000 ounces of gold annually over its seven-year mine life.

Seven Foraco employees and one civil servant were killed on Wednesday in a terrorist attack on a company camp site in Niger’s southeast Diffa region. Five other employees were also injured, with two in serious condition. Foraco said on Thursday it was working with authorities to evacuate the wounded to a nearby hospital for medical attention.

The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached a new high last year, according to a report by the U.N. World Meteorological Organization. The report found CO2 levels rose from 403.3 parts per million in 2016 to 405.5 ppm in 2017. The growth rate is in line with the average growth rate of the last decade, which the WMO said was the fastest increase in 55 million years. The report comes a month before U.N. climate talks in Poland, where Paris Accord countries are supposed to agree to a rule book for implementing the agreement.

Companies with greater gender board diversity experience fewer environmental lawsuits, according to a study conducted by Adelaide University senior lecturer Chelsea Liu. The study posits that more women on the board can disrupt existing relationships among directors and reduce complacency about policies, leading to better decision-making in managing environmental exposure. Other experts told us that gender-diverse boards also have other benefits, like reducing groupthink and an openness to other perspectives.

If you're looking for some weekend reading, we have two new features from our November issue on the website. With the automation revolution well underway in mining, the next step toward a truly intelligent mine is to connect data silos and facilitate information sharing.

And at Goldcorp’s Musselwhite mine, the company tried a new mining method enabled by Orica’s WebGen wireless blasting system, which reduced dilution in its production stopes.