Welcome back to your weekly mining news recap, where we catch you up on some of the news you may have missed. This week’s headlines include the definitive closure of Barrick’s Pascua Lama project in Chile, Umicore’s investment in an electric vehicle battery materials plant in Ontario and PureGold scrambling for financing to sustain its Red Lake mine.

Suncor’s CEO Mark Little stepped down last Friday after the death of a contractor at the company’s Base Plant mine, and investors are now wondering if more board members might follow suit, as reported by Bloomberg News. Little’s departure comes in the wake of increasing safety concerns at the company following several on-site fatalities. “I think the street wants [Little’s replacement] to be somebody from outside the company to change the culture,” said Laura Lau, chief investment officer of Suncor shareholder Brompton Funds.  

Umicore will invest $1.5 billion into an electric vehicle (EV) battery materials manufacturing plant in Loyalist Township in Ontario, where it will produce both cathode active materials and precursor cathode active materials, a first in North America. Current estimates project that the plant will provide materials for nearly 20 per cent of North American EV production by the end of the decade. The 350-acre plant will operate on renewable energy exclusively, with its construction set to begin in 2023 and its production expected to start in 2025.

The closure of Barrick Gold’s US$8.5 billion Pascua Lama gold and copper mining project was definitively ratified by Chile’s Supreme Court after environmental regulators first ordered it to shutter back in 2018, as reported by Reuters. While Barrick appealed on the grounds that the environmental regulator had acted outside of its powers, the claims that the project damaged native flora and fauna, did not adequately monitor melting rates of nearby glaciers and dumped acidic waters into a local river were upheld by the Supreme Court.

With net zero by 2050 goals firmly set, energy efficiency in mineral processing represents a key path to carbon-footprint reduction for miners saddled with non-renewable power sources. Since investing in more efficient equipment – such as high-pressure grinding rolls, high intensity grinding and stirred or vertical mills – can be quite costly, making the right decisions and optimizing flow-sheet design come with high stakes. Geometallurgy and new technological innovations will also have their part to play in bringing down mining’s carbon emissions.

The government of Alberta will invest over $40 million in 11 projects tied to carbon capture utilization and sequestration, which, if successful, could lead to the reduction of about 24 million tonnes of emissions annually. This would be equal to reducing the province’s annual emissions by almost 10 per cent, at the cost of over $20 billion in capital expenditures. All the funded projects are planned to be up and running by 2030, some involving large-emitter sites related to Alberta’s oil sands sector.

After an underperforming run at its gold mine in Red Lake, Ontario, since it first entered production in 2021, PureGold Mining is now considering its options for its long-term financing, including the sale or merger of the company and the sale of all or part of its mine, as reported by Northern Ontario Business. This strategic review process comes on the heels of prior efforts by the company to achieve a positive cash flow by Q3, such as cutting jobs, reducing spending at the mine and raising capital.

Rio Tinto will invest $240 million in its Alma smelter in Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec, to increase the production capacity of high-value aluminum by 202,000 tonnes, as reported by Kitco News. The investment will expand the plant’s casting centre to accommodate new equipment, including a casting pit and furnaces, to allow for more of the produced aluminum to be converted to higher value billets. Construction is projected to begin in May 2023, with commissioning expected for the first quarter of 2025.

While a decision was expected for mid-August, Minister of Northern Affairs Dan Vandal announced he will need a further 90 days before he can issue a decision on Baffinland Iron Mines’ expansion plans, as reported by CBC. Vandal justified the delay by stressing the need for Inuit to have enough time to review the report on the matter produced by the Nunavut Impact Review Board, which recommended that the expansion not proceed due to environmental concerns.

From March to May, 50.8 per cent of internet of things (IoT) job postings in the mining industry were in North America, up from 42.1 per cent in the same quarter last year, with Canada leading the charge as the fastest growing country for IoT job ads, as reported by Mining Technology. Opportunities in the country represented 21.1 per cent of industry postings during the period, compared to 2.6 per cent through the same quarter last year. Vancouver led the world, claiming 17.4 per cent of all mining-industry IoT postings.

A Treadstone Gold miner was operating an excavator in Yukon’s Klondike fields when he stumbled upon the frozen 30,000-year-old corpse of a female baby woolly mammoth, as reported by the Toronto Sun. The animal, which is estimated to have been roughly one month old when it died, makes for the best-preserved mammoth to be found in North America. Experts have guessed that the baby was likely buried by mudflow from a storm, mirroring the weather when it was recovered by the unsuspecting miner and his team.

That’s all for this week. If you’ve got feedback, you can always reach us at editor@cim.org. If you’ve got something to add, why not join the conversation on our Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram pages?