Global Mining and Financing Issues

Thursday, May 8, 2014

Mines and Money London 2011

This post concludes the archives of my Global Mining and Financing Issues Blog that I was running 2009-2011. At this time the Blog was visited daily - I got over 300,000 pageviews from all over the world. The Mines & Money 2011 show was my last effort with Earthstone Holdings, after that - I moved to other businesses in Indonesia (one other Blog in Indonesia, though not a big one, was Oil and Gas Issues in Asia (2013) where I covered some topical issues). I do hope that this archive may be of a use for scholars and professional, since some information presented is more or less actual. I witness the interest now with daily hits on my archive pages.

THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AUGUST 01, 2011

Mines and Money London 2011

December 6-7, 2011, Earthstone sponsored Mines and Money London 2011 Conference at Business Design Centre, Islington, London.

It is well known that London is one of the financial centers of the world, and this event served its purpose for the global mining industry to cultivate long term partnerships with its mining stakeholders and investors. Despite negative economic news from the Eurozone and the ongoing banking crisis, a lot of investors were present at the Conference. That shows that miners appear to offer good investment potential in a market where other sectors are suffering.

Earthstone opened the Plenary Session with the corporate presentation

- this report planted the seeds in minds of many investors and industry professionals that followed up with their visits to Earthstone’ Meeting Room

As a Special Guest for Earthstone, the delegation of Mali Ministry of Mines, headed by Honorable Amadou Cisse, was attending the show. Corporate top management and officials from Mali were engaged in a number of fruitful negotiations and discussions with investors and mining professionals on development of mining projects in West Africa

Mining 101: Reserves and Resources

THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AUGUST 01, 2011

Mining 101: Reserves and Resources

A recent publication of U.S. Geological Survey Mineral Commodity Summaries 2011 lists a comprehensive data on major commodities – worldwide and in the USA.

As an example, here is the latest data on iron ore:

Besides all factual data, there is a nicely complied APPENDIX C—Reserves and Resources, that in concise language explains salient notions that are associated with these two terms.

“Reserves may be considered a working inventory of mining companies’ supply of an economically extractable mineral commodity. As such, magnitude of that inventory is necessarily limited by many considerations, including cost of drilling, taxes, price of the mineral commodity being mined, and the demand for it. Reserves will be developed to the point of business needs and geologic limitations of economic ore grade and tonnage. For example, in 1970, identified and undiscovered world copper resources were estimated to contain 1.6 billion metric tons of copper, with reserves of about 280 million metric tons of copper. Since then, about 400 million metric tons of copper have been produced worldwide, but world copper reserves in 2010 were estimated to be 630 million metric tons of copper, more than double those in 1970, despite the depletion by mining of more than the original reserves estimate.”

I recommend to download the brochure, as it is a useful and handy reference material in everyday operations for miners.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Mining News on Internet – July 2011 Ranking

THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JULY 17, 2011

Mining News on Internet – July 2011 Ranking

Continuously monitoring industry news, I noticed that at this time the use of Internet by miners is rather modest. In fact I was in discussion with organizers of a mining conference in London last May to make a presentation on this issue, however, they thought better of it (not important issue) and it never happened. Indeed when one Googles the words -- it is obvious, as compared to other industries – almost 2.5 times less hits, than for oil and gas (to say nothing about agriculture):

To get a well-defined picture, as to what sources are available now, I have performed the search with top 3 Internet search engines, and have located 31 information resources that are currently available with up-to-date information on mining. I have used Alexa Internet Service – based on its results I have compiled the following ranking.

The "Traffic Rank" measures the site’s popularity and is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors to the site and pageviews over the past 3 months(as of July 16, 2011). The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews is ranked #1. The “Audience” column is representing (if available) Alexa’s results on biggest share of visitors to this site.

Position	Title	Traffic Rank	Country	Audience
1	Commodity On Line	33,895	India	India, Asia
2	InfoMine	36,968	Canada	USA, Canada
3	MBendi: Information for Africa	53,123	South Africa	South Africa
4	MineWeb	64,354	Intl., South Africa	USA, Ecuador, Netherlands
5	Mining Weekly	117,865	Canada	South Africa
6	www.mining.com	128,875	Canada	Canada
7	Metal Miner	237,349	Intl., USA	Mexico
8	British Geological Survey	253,040	UK	UK, Europe
9	Mining Technology	269,314	UK	USA, UK
10	www.miningne.ws	400,814	Intl., South Africa	Australia, India, Pakistan
11	Mining Journal	628,450	UK	USA, South Africa
12	Northern Miner	637,081	Canada	Canada
13	Mining Nerds	658,020	USA	USA
15	Minesite	778,126	UK
16	AMM	896,495	USA	USA
17	Mining Top News	949,122	Intl.	Indonesia
18	Mining News	1,102,436	Australia	Australia, South Africa
19	Pit and Quarry	1,512,516	USA	-
20	Iran Mining	1,870,869	Iran
21	Republic of Mining	1,902,411	Canada	Canada
22	Roskill	2,283,230	UK	-
23	Resource Information Unit (RIU)	3,186,075	Australia	Australia
24	Engineering and Mining Journal	3,476,302	Intl., USA	-
25	Mining World	3,514,410	UK	-
26	Intierra	4,920,386	USA	-
27	Canadian Mining News	5,717,895	Canada	-
28	BuySellMines	6,787,744	Indonesia	-
29	Miners News	7,691,755	USA	-
30	mining-info.com	8,253,688	Intl.	-
31	Investment In Mining And Mineral Exploration	9,497,388	USA	-
32	Asian Mining	19,029,650	Australia	-

Analyzing the data, it is obvious, that there are three white spots on the international mining map: Europe, South America and MENA countries. There are no specialized mining information sites for these areas (or probably they are – but not prominent on the Web). Interesting exception is the #20 Iran Mining – the only MENA country, noticeably represented in the search engines and having a decent traffic.

Probably the readers may submit more entries to the table – and I hope I can update it????

P.S. I humbly inserted this Blog, which surprisingly for me is at its 28^th position…..

Update.

All of a sudden I got the mail with reference to a good Australian mining information resource:

Mining IQ- a mining guide and mining learning portal and an international online community focusing on providing mining professionals with mining industry knowledge, information and an online networking and communication platform. Alexa provides the traffic rank as 3,237,697, which is around 23^rd in my ranking.

Notable observations: