查看更多>>摘要：I must begin this month's column with some personal news: this is my final issue as editor of Mining Journal. It has been something of a white-knuckle ride since coming on board in September 2019. Joining with almost zero knowledge of mining, I frequently found myself in front of ashen-faced industry executives suffering the long-term effects of capital starvation. Then came COVID, which did little for professional development, but did trigger a run on metals prices, injecting much needed life into the whole sector (at least from a news perspective).
查看更多>>摘要：Mining industry executives are displaying a disturbing willingness to follow the dictates of others in framing business priorities. The latest Mining Journal Global Leadership Report, published in September, highlighted five priorities among the occupants of the industry's executive suites. Safety topped the list of priorities, according to an industry wide survey and detailed interviews conducted by Mining Journal with executives from leading companies.
查看更多>>摘要："I hate booms, it's when people go broke." A famous and seemingly contradictory comment from the late Len Buckeridge, once Australia's biggest home builder and who was also exposed to the mining industry -which is where a boom is building as shortages trigger a scramble for scarce resources. The sky-high price for lithium and near-record prices for aluminium, tin, copper and a range of other minerals and metals is evidence of the boom conditions developing in commodity markets.
查看更多>>摘要：Graphene has been hyped as the wonder material that will turn the resources sector on its head. A million times thinner than a human hair, 200-times stronger than steel, with high conductivity, graphene could one day become a substitute for a number of base metals, including copper. But nothing much has happened since graphene hit the headlines in 2004. Expensive, complicated and not particularly 'green' to produce, the early entrepreneurs found it well-nigh impossible to scale up operations that were commercially viable. Potential customers became sceptical, disinterested.
查看更多>>摘要：It takes a team effort to recognise and deliver on the huge potential of a large-scale, underexplored region, but that is exactly what the ASX-listed copper exploration and development company Caravel Minerals is doing in Western Australia's Wheatbelt region at its namesake project.
查看更多>>摘要：Uncertainty pervades the outlook for most metals in China this year, with much of the available evidence pointing to a year of slower demand growth as the world's second-largest economy wrestles with structural headwinds. Events in China last year roiled metals prices and further volatility is expected for 2022. China is the world's largest consumer - as well as producer - of industrial metals and minerals, accounting for more than half of global demand.
查看更多>>摘要：C3 Metals' Jasperoide copper project lies at the intersection of large-scale structures traversing through two of the world's most productive copper porphyry strikes - and in 2022, the company plans to drill deeper than ever before. Southern Peru is crisscrossed by some of the world's largest copper-bearing geological formations. Follow the Benoni Fault east from the Las Bambas mine for 40km and it eventually meets the north-south trending Constancia Fault, from which Hudbay Minerals' Pampacancha and Constancia projects lie a similar distance to the South.
查看更多>>摘要：China's primary aluminium capacity -a share of which was laid low last year by an overzealous campaign to control energy consumption and then an unprecedented power crunch - will rev back into action this year, but the industry will need to prepare for long-term "pain" as Beijing marches towards carbon neutrality. Some 3.33 million tonnes of operational aluminium capacity in China, the world's biggest aluminium producer and consumer, was effected by the provincial energy-control measures and electricity shortages last year, according-to Beijing Antaike Information Development, the research arm of the China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association. China had an installed capacity of 43.25Mt at the end of 2021, up by 0.93Mt from the end of 2020.
查看更多>>摘要：There is plenty of untapped potential beneath the Australian soil for ASX-listed copper exploration company Alma Metals, as it focuses on identifying today the low-risk copper projects that will be economically viable tomorrow. Alma Metal's CEO Frazer Tabeart said the company's years of experience in the exploration and mining industry means it is well-placed to unearth the next large-scale copper deposit in Australia, as the industry continues to factor in global decarbonisation.
查看更多>>摘要：The coming boom in battery demand has thrust a range of previously obscure minerals into the spotlight. Lithium, the one non-negotiable ingredient of all economically viable vehicle batteries, continues to take centre stage. Other cathode materials such as cobalt and nickel, and anode materials such as spherical graphite, are all attracting investor attention, with junior projects springing up to meet demand forecasts.
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