Category — Mining

What I call the New Space Race is about to “take off” in a big way.

And front and centre is asteroid mining.

Yes, I mean literally digging into asteroids to extract ores and other materials

Not long ago, this was the stuff of sci-fi. (It smacks of the 1998 movie Armageddon, in which a team of roughnecks lands on an asteroid on a collision course with Earth in order to blow it out of the sky.)

Today, it’s a reality, thanks to advances in three fields – low-cost computing, cheaper rockets, and advanced robotics. [Read more →]

Do you believe company executives have a vested interest in seeing their company stock price go up? Or that they are the best people to ask about the company and the product the company deals in? After all, they’re surely in the best position to know.

Two weeks ago Jim Chanos confirmed that his hedge fund has short sold shares in Fortescue Metals Group [ASX: FMG]. His reasons for short selling the iron ore firm? He says a falling iron ore price could mean FMG won’t be able to repay their debts if its creditors come calling.
Chanos said (emphasis added is our own),

‘Increasingly, with any kind of reversion to the mean of iron ore prices to $US100 per tonne or less, we’re going to see a dramatically lower ability to service the debt and to service the capital programs they have. And a stock price materially lower than it is today.‘

[Read more →]

This article is contributed by Pinnacledigest.com. One of the TOP sites for up to date information on the Canadian and US Stock Markets. For more information subscribe to their free newsletter.

Dear member,

The leader of our new Featured Company has come to find success in a different way than your typical mining CEO. He is not a wheeler and dealer. He is not one to be at the restaurant or conference promoting his company to every ear that will listen.

This man is a problem solver and one who lives for the discovery and the understanding of geological formations. He is a geological engineer by education and trade and lets his results speak for themselves. His passion lies in the hunt.

We will get to this CEO’s collective accomplishments, but first, you have to understand the story which brought us to the selection of our new Featured Gold Company – Comstock Metals (CSL:TSXV).

The CEO of our new Featured Company (Comstock Metals) is also leading another junior explorer which has been around for a couple years. He has already delivered drill hole results, with this other company, that the vast majority of geologists never find.

What kind of results? Less than 3 months ago this CEO delivered a drill hole which intersected 213.9 metres (m) of 1.63 g/t gold (g/t Au), starting at 11.70 metres depth. To say he has proven himself in the mining industry is an understatement. [Read more →]

April 19th 2012 – Australasian Investment Review – (AIR)

April 18th 2012 – Australasian Investment Review – (AIR)

Rio Tinto is looking at a sharp fall in earnings in 2012 after the first quarter production and sales report was released yesterday, along with production guidance for the company’s major commodities.

Production and sales bounced back in the three months to March from a year ago because of better weather.

But the odd cyclone and wet weather still cut production to below the level of the drier December and September quarters in some cases.

CEO Tom Albanese said the mining giant had a solid three months to March 31 with increased production of iron ore, coal, bauxite, alumina and titanium dioxide because weather was better than in 2011 and operating performance was consistently high. [Read more →]

April 17th 2012 – Australasian Investment Review – (AIR)

April 16th 2012 – Australasian Investment Review – (AIR)

Australian miners and interest rates, US quarterly earnings, Spain’s struggles and the IMF’s latest economic outlook for the world and major economies will dominate headlines here and offshore in the coming week.

In Australia, it will be a week to test the health of the resources sector with giants like BHP, Rio Tinto, Fortescue Metals, Santos and Woodside reporting quarterly production and sales data.

They will tell us how the resources boom is travelling, and more importantly, give us a clue as to if the weak pricing for some commodities (but not so much oil) is having an impact on production and sales.

Rio Tinto and Fortescue release their reports tomorrow: for Rio it’s a first quarter report, for Fortescue it’s for the third quarter.

BHP Billiton releases its third quarter production and sales report on Wednesday. [Read more →]

Millions of miles of barren ice, freezing temperatures and months of continuous darkness make the Arctic Circle one of the most inhospitable places on earth. The landscape is so unforgiving that it was only in the last century that humans reached the North Pole. Indeed, with earlier claims now widely discounted as bogus, historians believe 1926 was probably the first time a modern explorer crossed the Pole.

So while 20th-century trade and population growth created metropolises in the plains of Africa, the deserts of the Middle East and the jungles of Asia, the Arctic remained untouched. Apart from the odd scientific mission or Cold War-era radar base, the sole inhabitants of the Arctic Circle – a ring that begins at latitude 66.46° north and covers almost 6% of the world’s surface – remained native peoples, such as the Inuit, who have lived there for over 1,000 years.

But that’s changing fast. One reason for this is our apparently insatiable demand for resources. Prices for most commodities have surged over the past decade. Given time, rising prices encourage explorers to look for more resources and make it profitable enough to justify the high costs involved in setting up in more remote or hostile regions. Even if a slowdown in China ends up hurting commodity prices, at least some of these projects will continue. [Read more →]

It sounds like science fiction – mining for metals at the floor of the Pacific Ocean, at a depth of four kilometres.

More people have been to the moon than the depths of the ocean. So how on earth could we mine the ocean floor?
How would you operate machinery at that depth? Get the minerals to surface? Or avoid causing environmental damage?

And, more importantly, how are the drill rig operators supposed to have a smoko break?!

When it comes to mining in such extreme places, there are many challenges. [Read more →]

US author Michael Lewis’s most famous book is Liar’s Poker.

In it he tells the story of working for U.S. broking firm, Salomon Brothers during the late 1980s. (It’s a must-read book if want to understand the early years of the subprime mortgage market.)

Lewis’s second most famous book – in America anyway – is Moneyball. Written in 2003, Lewis tells the story of cash-strapped baseball team, the Oakland Athletics (the A’s) and their general manager, Billy Beane.

(Unless you’ve got a basic understanding of baseball, we don’t suggest you read it.)

In short, baseball is a game where rich teams usually end up with the best players. [Read more →]