Welcome back to your weekly mining news recap, and happy February! At the end of every week we’ll catch you up on the mining news from CIM Magazine and elsewhere that you might have missed. Among this week’s headlines: Suncor gears up for an autonomous fleet, the blockade at Torex’s Mexico mine comes to an end, and Cameco begins its McArthur River-Key Lake layoffs.

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Suncor announced Tuesday it will build a fleet of more than 150 driverless trucks over the next six years, which will ultimately eliminate around 400 jobs in the transition, according to the Canadian Press. The company currently has nine Komatsu trucks with autonomous capabilities. The vehicle roll-out will begin at the North Steepbank mine north of Fort McMurray and will be a mix of purpose-built autonomous haulers and retro-fitted ones. The previous day, Suncor announced that its Fort Hills oil sands mine had begun continuous operations. The project, a joint venture between Suncor, Total and Teck Resources has the capacity to produce 194,000 barrels per day, a current mine life of at least 50 years, and employs approximately 1,400 workers.

Vancouver miner Turquoise Hill Resources, a subsidiary of Rio Tinto and the company behind the Oyu Tolgoi mine is alleged by Dutch non-profit SOMO to have avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes in multiple countries. According to the Toronto Star, the company is said to have used a “complex network of tax haven subsidiaries and [lent] money to itself at high interest rates” to avoid paying $559 million in Canadian corporate income taxes, and an additional US$230 million to the government of Mongolia. Rio Tinto has contested the SOMO report as “flawed” and containing “a number of unsubstantiated and incorrect allegations.”

The blockade at Torex Gold’s El Limon-Guajes (ELG) mine came to an end in late January when government forces stepped in to remove the striking workers. The striking workers are represented by Mexico’s largest union, but want to be represented by Los Mineros, a more independent Mexican union with close ties to Canadian labour groups. As we reported on Wednesday, the months-long saga at ELG has highlighted a controversial Mexican labour practice called “protection unions,” which are said by labour experts to prevent workers from organizing on their own and do not provide the benefits of actual union membership.

Layoffs at Cameco’s McArthur River mine and Key Lake mill have begun, the Canadian Press reported on Thursday. The last of the 845 affected employees at the northern Saskatchewan operations will have worked their last shifts by the weekend. Only care and maintenance crews will stick around at the operations. Cameco said it has “finalized a plan it hopes will ensure skilled workers are still around if and when the doors reopen later this year.”

United States President Donald Trump withdrew protections for millions of acres of Utah wilderness, a move that went into effect at 6 a.m. Friday. It will allow citizens and companies to stake claims for copper, silver, gold, uranium and other precious metals under the General Mining Law of 1872, which Reuters called “Wild West-era” legislation.