Trump official disclosed millions of dollars of shares in Canadian mining company. Amid Prime Minister Mark Carney’s calls that the Canada-U.S. relationship is ruptured, Ottawa has committed $175 million to a mining project in northern Quebec whose major U.S. investor is closely linked to the Trump administration. Energy and Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson says the Carney government’s support for the rare earth mine is necessary to protect Canadian jobs and the economy. “We’re doing things that are exceptional because we are in exceptional times,” Hodgson told the fifth estate in an interview. I’ll go back to what the prime…
Author: TJ Markle
From blind corners to GNSS-denied environments, underground mines operate with inherent limits on visibility and awareness. Technologies such as V2X and wearables are improving response times, but human oversight remains critical. Underground mining accidents are rarely random. They tend to occur in predictable conditions: at intersections, around blind corners and in confined drifts where vehicles and people move through shared space without full visibility. In these environments, operators are required to make decisions with incomplete information and within limited reaction windows. The interaction between heavy mobile equipment and personnel is often compressed into seconds, leaving little margin for error once…
Mining giants are watching hungrily as president targets the world-leading law keeping a tenth of planet’s ice masses safe Javier Milei was in a reflective mood earlier this month. “Why did the Creator give us the planet?” mused Argentina’s president at the Córdoba stock exchange. “To contemplate it?” No, not that… Milei’s government wants to modify a 2010 law – the first of its kind – that protects each of Argentina’s 16,968 glaciers (almost 10% of the global total) and periglacial zones. The change sailed through the senate on 26 February with 40 votes in favour and 31 against. If it passes…
David Mwape has spent 24 years working as a teacher in Kabwe, in central Zambia, where his students grow up in one of the planet’s most polluted cities, exposed to a neurotoxin that can permanently damage their mental development and physical health. On the playground, children in bright red uniforms shout, hula-hoop, and climb on a rusted slide less than half a mile from what was once one of the world’s largest lead and zinc mines. The Broken Hill mine and smelter opened in 1906 and shut down in 1994, but the site was never properly cleaned up. Its estimated…
American Rare Earths is pleased to announce that it has engaged Tetra Tech, a U.S. based major consulting and engineering services company, to complete an Oxides to Metals study for the Company’s heavy rare earths stream. The study will evaluate options to convert separated heavy rare earth oxides from the American Rare Earths Halleck Creek Project in Wyoming all the way to metal, a critical midstream step immediately preceding the manufacture of permanent magnets relied upon by defense and advanced technology sectors. Positioning into the U.S. midstream Today, China dominates the midstream of the rare earth value chain, including oxide…
Fuerte Metals Corporation is pleased to announce the commencement of a 40,000 m drilling program at its Coffee Gold Project (“Coffee” or “The Project”) in Canada’s Yukon Territory. Coffee hosts 3.0 million ounces (“Moz”) of gold in open-pit heap-leach Measured and Indicated Resource and an Inferred Resource of 0.8 Moz of gold. The drilling program will initially focus on infill drilling to convert a portion of the 0.8 Moz of Inferred gold resources to the Indicated category, for inclusion in the Feasibility Study being carried out by G Mining Services and scheduled for completion in late 2026. Subsequent drilling will…
China’s emergence as a dominant force in industrial metals is increasingly being driven not only by its access to raw materials, but by the scale and structure of its electricity system as it emerges as the world’s leading “electrostate”. A report by Rhodium Group argues that China’s ability to generate vast quantities of cheap and reliable power has become the decisive factor underpinning its leadership in aluminium, steel and processed critical minerals. The country produces roughly one-third of the world’s electricity, a scale that allows it to sustain energy-intensive industries that would be uneconomic elsewhere. “Electricity, rather than raw material access, is the critical…
Aluminum closed in on prices not seen since 2022 following Iranian attacks on two Middle Eastern producers over the weekend, heightening fears of a supply crisis for the industry. Futures prices on the London Metal Exchange initially jumped 5.5% on Monday to briefly touch $3,492 per tonne, a price last seen in April 2022. It pulled back slightly by Monday afternoon to land 3.5% higher at $3,381 per tonne. Aluminum has risen around 10% since the conflict began on Feb. 28, though it fell briefly last week alongside most other asset classes amid fears of a global recession. EGA said…
By unraveling iridium’s hidden chemistry at interfaces between a solid and liquid, Argonne scientists are helping strengthen the scientific basis for technologies that produce fuels and valuable chemicals and critical materials. Iridium is a key component in many electrochemical technologies used for chemical transformations. These include producing hydrogen fuel from water, manufacturing chlorine from seawater for use as a disinfectant and extracting metals from their ores. Yet scientists still know surprisingly little about how this metal behaves at the very spot where those reactions unfold — the thin boundary where the surface of a solid electrode meets a water-based electrolyte.…
The grains on our beaches and riverbeds might seem infinite, but they’re actually running out. For almost my entire life, and that of my 82-year-old father, a company called McCallum Brothers has been taking sand from Pākiri, the vast white beach a few kilometers north of our family home. Most of those grains were sold to construction companies in the nearby city of Auckland. Some now sit in the concrete cylinder of New Zealand’s tallest building, the Sky Tower, with others in the foundations of the Auckland Harbour Bridge. A few stayed closer to their original purpose: shoveled onto city…