In a media statement, the DOE said that this funding—made possible by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—will support a variety of locally-driven projects that range from solar, microgrids, and pumped storage hydropower to geothermal and battery energy storage systems and that can be replicated in other mining communities across the country.

“President Biden believes that the communities that have powered our nation for the past 100 years should power our nation for the next 100 years,” Jennifer M. Granholm, the US Secretary of Energy, said in a statement.

“Thanks to the President’s Investing in America agenda, DOE is helping deploy clean energy solutions on current and former mine land across the country—supporting jobs and economic development in the areas hit hardest by our evolving energy landscape.” 

Three projects are on former Appalachian coal mines, thus supporting economic revitalization and workforce development on land that is no longer viable for industrial purposes. In the West, two projects seek to displace fossil-fuel use by ramping up net-zero mining operations and providing the critical materials needed for a domestic clean energy supply chain. These projects are also expected to create more than 3,000 construction and operations jobs.   

From geothermal to PV

In Graham and Greenlee Counties, Arizona, a project led by Freeport seeks to deploy direct-use, geothermal, clean heat combined with a battery energy storage system at two active copper mines, helping decrease the mines’ reliance on onsite thermal backup generators while supporting the annual extraction of 25 million pounds of copper.

In Bell County, Kentucky, Rye Development proposes converting former coal mine land to a closed-loop, pumped-storage hydroelectric facility with the potential to dispatch up to eight hours of power when needed, such as during times of peak demand or extreme weather events. This project will support the increase of local tax revenues that have decreased steadily since the 1970s and create approximately 1,500 construction and 30 operations jobs.

In Elko, Humboldt and Eureka Counties, Nevada, a project led by Nevada Gold Mines aims to develop a solar photovoltaic facility and accompanying battery energy storage system across three active gold mines.

“By shifting to clean energy, this project could demonstrate a replicable way for the mining industry to reach net-zero operations, while meeting growing demands for minerals across multiple sectors—including the clean energy supply chain,” the DOE’s release states.

In Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, Mineral Basin Solar Power, a subsidiary of Swift Current Energy, plans to repurpose nearly 2,700 acres of former coal mining land to support the largest solar project in Pennsylvania. At 402 MW, Mineral Basin will generate enough clean energy to power more than 70,000 homes. This project is expected to increase regional access to clean energy and fill a critical electricity generation gap following the closure of the Homer City coal plant.

The initiative is also expected to provide $1.1 million in annual tax revenue to Goshen and Girard townships, Clearfield County and the Clearfield County School District.

In Nicholas County, West Virginia, a project led by Savion, a company that’s part of Shell, plans to repurpose two former coal mines with a utility-scale, 250 MW solar PV system that would power approximately 39,000 West Virginia homes. These two inactive mine sites provide land and access to existing energy infrastructure that will transmit the clean, solar energy the project generates to the grid.

“The Clean Energy Demonstration Program on Current and Former Mine Land will help provide the mining industry with a range of ways to decarbonize their operations and minimize environmental impacts and air pollutants, abating greenhouse gas emissions and disturbances to fragile, surrounding ecosystems,” the brief reads.

“Simultaneously, replicating clean energy technologies like these on other current and former mines will help maximize local workforce development and community opportunities for generations.”   

Echoing a demand last week by activist Tribeca Investment Partners, investors said the polluting fossil fuel would be a lucrative option – for a decade or two at least – even as it is phased out in favour of renewable energy.

The Swiss-based miner and trader is set to see its coal unit grow sharply after it completes a $6.9 billion deal to buy the majority of Canadian miner Teck’s one, but said it plans to list the combined assets separately in New York.

Glencore is already a top producer of thermal coal with output of around 110 million tonnes a year, and also has coking coal assets.

By buying Teck’s business, in a deal set to close by the third quarter this year, it will add 20 million tons of annual steelmaking coal capacity and create a powerhouse that analysts say should generate $5-$6 billion a year in free cash flow.

A greater focus on climate risk in recent years has seen a number of pension and investment funds, financiers and insurers cut support for coal companies, leading some including Rio Tinto and Anglo American to sell or spin theirs out.

While doing so can lead to a share price bump, critics say the assets are often shifted into the private markets and run for longer with no investor oversight, potentially leading to a worse climate outcome.

For a long time, Glencore had adopted the same line, and said ditching coal would do little to cut its emissions, only to change its mind after the Teck deal was agreed, with chief executive Gary Nagle saying it would consult shareholders for their views on spinning off once the acquisition is concluded.

Ahead of any vote on the plan, though, three top-15 investors spoken to by Reuters said they would oppose the attempt to spin off its coal assets.

One top-10 shareholder said they ‘strongly disagree’ with the idea and had already told the company. The shareholder declined to be named as they are not authorised to speak publicly.

Andrew Mason, head of active ownership at Abrdn, which holds shares in Glencore, said: “In most circumstances, we do not believe that simply divesting as quickly as possible will achieve the best outcome.”

“Companies need to have credible strategies that support real-world decarbonisation,” he said, adding that a timed phase-out would facilitate a “just transition” to a greener future that minimised the impact on workers and communities.

A responsible wind down of coal is better than a divestment, given the “rapidly diminishing” global carbon budget, the emissions allowed before the world breaches its goal of capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius, said Naomi Hogan at non-profit climate group Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility (ACCR).

“Fundamentally, good corporate governance requires Glencore to take responsibility for the emissions from its coal portfolio,” Hogan added.

Glencore’s carbon emissions rose 8.8% in 2023 from the previous year partly due to higher coal production, but were still down 21.8% from a 2019 baseline, according to its annual report.

“This is an extremely concerning step backwards for Glencore,” Hogan said in a note.

According to the Climate Action 100+ investor group, Glencore’s efforts to-date are mixed, as it failed to meet or partially meet their climate expectations on issues including capital expenditure and decarbonisation strategy.

Data from LSEG, however, places it among the best-performing of its peer group on a range of environmental, social and governance-related metrics, ranking it 4th out of 455 companies.

As well as the environmental argument, Tribeca said the coal assets would continue to be profitable as long as they were active and could benefit the rest of the portfolio – something the top-10 investor echoed, citing a likely surge in demand for cheap electricity from data centres in the years ahead.

Ian Woodley, portfolio manager at Old Mutual, agreed: “The likelihood is in 10 to 12 years, we’ll have another big upcycle, maybe once, maybe twice. And you see just how much cash the assets generate.”

After hitting an all time high above $400 a ton in 2022 when countries sought alternatives to Russian gas after the start of the war in Ukraine, thermal coal prices now trade around $130, while coking coal rose to above $300 a ton last year.

“In a private company, that would be paid out as dividends, but Glencore can take that cash and invest it in the rest of their portfolio,” Woodley added.

(By Clara Denina and Simon Jessop; Editing by Veronica Brown and David Evans)

While China’s total coal imports over January and February surged 23% year-on-year to 74.5 million tons, Russia’s sales fell 22% to 11.5 million tons, according to the latest customs data. Import levies were restored at the start of the year, although other major suppliers like Indonesia and Australia aren’t affected due to free-trade agreements with Beijing.

The tariffs were removed in May 2022 to guard against supply risks after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine roiled global energy markets. That helped pave the way for record imports last year, which included an increased portion of Russian coal shunned by other buyers. Now, policy has shifted to protecting China’s mining companies from the consequences of a glut after domestic output also rose to an all-time high.

Russia is still China’s No. 2 supplier after Indonesia, but the threat of trade actions could start to affect its eastward flows.

The US put sanctions on Russian coal exporters including Suek JSC, the nation’s biggest producer of the fuel, and Mechel PJSC in February. That’s curbing interest from buyers in China, worried about being hit by punishments that could involved restricting their access to shipping or banking services.

“Russian imports may stay at current levels, given the political uncertainties,” Feng Huamin, an analyst at the China Coal Transportation and Distribution Association, said at a media briefing on Wednesday.

Sydney-based coal miner Whitehaven Coal Ltd.’s deal last month to secure a $1.1 billion loan for buying two mines attracted 17 private credit lenders and only one bank. A consortium led by Golden Energy and Resources Pte Ltd. also is sounding out private credit funds, as well as banks, to secure financing for its $1.65 billion acquisition of a coal mine in Australia, according to people familiar with the matter.

Their talks reflect the growing prominence of private credit, which has ballooned to a $1.7 trillion market worldwide by taking on riskier projects with attractive margins. Private credit firms’ forays into the coal business signify more battles ahead for ESG proponents even while banks back away from environmentally questionable projects.

“There’s different forms of private capital, family office money and other individuals who don’t have the same ESG obligations or pressures as what some of the big funds do,” said Nick Sims, co-head of investment banking, Australia & New Zealand at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. “There’s a role for them and they have been playing that role.”

More broadly, private credit is one of several alternative funding sources that the energy industry has tapped in recent years as ESG-based lending metrics hamper banks. Private equity firms have been more active in the business amid the retrenching. Asset-backed bonds, supported by oil and gas reserves, have also come into play.

Another funding source for coal miners is to sell a minority stake to their customers, such as steel manufacturers, who want to ensure their supply can be sustained, according to Rory Simington, principal analyst for Asia Pacific thermal coal research at analytics firm Wood Mackenzie. JSW Steel’s reported talks to buy a 20% stake in a Whitehaven-owned coal mine may be an example, he said.

Higher borrowing costs

Whitehaven’s reception from private credit firms is in sharp contrast to its struggles last year. The company had to pull a A$1 billion ($653 million) loan refinancing due to banks’ unwillingness to extend the loan, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

Some of Australia’s major banks — Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd., Commonwealth Bank of Australia, National Australia Bank Ltd. and Westpac Banking Corp. — all have committed to limit or refrain from lending to thermal coal miners.

Whitehaven’s new pool of lenders are mainly international funds, such as Hong Kong-based Asia Research & Capital Management Ltd, Farallon Capital Management LLC and Sona Asset Management Ltd.

Its deal also underscores the fact that alternative lenders would be typically more expensive. Whitehaven is paying 650 basis points over SOFR for the debt.

“Mainstream lenders do not want to finance coal, so they have to go to higher cost hedge funds and family offices,” said Patrick Marshall, head of private credit at Federated Hermes.

Private credit could also come in handy as coal miners transition into new business lines. Whitehaven’s private credit loan refinances a $900 million bridge loan to back the takeover of two mines for metallurgical coal, a key ingredient in steel manufacturing and considered less environmentally threatening than thermal coal.

“If you can badge your project or your company as metallurgical coal rather than thermal coal, it makes a huge difference in terms of who you can talk to or who’s able to finance,” Simington at Wood Mackenzie said.

(By Sharon Klyne and Megawati Wijaya)

The projection comes on the back of record output in 2023, when the world’s largest coal consumer mined 4.66 billion tons of the polluting fossil fuel.

The China Coal Transportation and Distribution Association (CCTD) expects domestic coal prices to decline at an accelerated pace, partly due to weakness in its real estate markets, said Feng Huamin, senior analyst at CCTD’s research department.

Feng pointed to government orders to suspend infrastructure projects in some heavily indebted provinces as one of the key reasons for the pressure on prices.

Declines in property investment and sales in China have slowed amid government efforts to arrest a protracted downturn in the sector, but analysts were wary of calling an end to the pain in the fragile housing markets just yet.

Output from non-fossil sources will add to pressure on thermal output this year, with power output expected to grow in line with its 5% economic growth forecast, Feng said.

“A large portion of forecasting institutions believe that hydropower generation will see clear improvement this year,” Feng said, adding that higher solar and wind installations could help address about 70% of the expected growth in power demand.

Drought-like conditions in key generating regions resulted in China headlining an alarming decline in hydroelectricity output in Asia last year, as its output plunged at the steepest pace in decades.

Some miners have paused production for longer after the Lunar New Year break, sources familiar with the matter said. Feng said a few mines are already at risk of hitting their storage limits due to high inventory levels.

Separately, the top coal producing hub of Shanxi is expected to cut output by 40 million tons this year, partly due to a slew of accidents in the recent past, Feng said.

Shanxi saw mine accident-related deaths surge over 50% in 2023, pushing the mining safety regulator to issue a notice last month asking mines to curb overproduction to prevent accidents.

However, power use by industries during the first two months of 2024 grew at a surprisingly high 9.7%, Feng said, a trend which could push stockpiles lower if it continues.

(By Colleen Howe and Sudarshan Varadhan; Editing by Jacqueline Wong and Miral Fahmy)

The country produced over 99.8 million tonnes of coal in the period on the back of rising power demand.

India, the world’s second-largest coal user, generatedrecord-high coal-fired electricity in January as rising demand for air conditioning meant that power generation firms did not make big cuts to the use of coal and other fossil fuels.

Other minerals such as iron ore, a key raw material for steel, reported a nearly 41% year-on-year growth in sales value amid growing steel demand in the country. India produced 25.2 million tonnes of iron ore in the month.

The PIB release also showed that the production of minerals such as magnesite – used to make synthetic rubber – grew over 90%, and copper concentrate – used to make refined copper – grew over 34%.

India’s refined copper production is estimated at around 555,000 million tonnes per year in the coming fiscal year while domestic consumption is expected to come in at more than 750,000 metric tons.

(By Manvi Pant; Editing by Janane Venkatraman)

The Swiss company totalled 432.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent last year, compared with in 2022, reversing the downward trend of recent years.

In its 2024-2026 Climate Action Transition Plan (CATP), Glencore noted it was still “on track” to meet its 15% reduction of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions for its industrial assets from 2019 levels by the end of 2026, and of 50% by the end of 2035.

The rest of Glencore’s revised climate plan is much like a previous plan it released — but this time includes the interim 2030 target.

“[The new plan] reflects a wide range of inputs, including analysis of the evolving market landscape, new regulatory requirements, mining and energy peer approaches, the IEA’s latest modelling, stakeholder inputs, and emerging insights from the most recent United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) dialogue,” chief executive officer Gary Nagle said in a statement.

“We have also undertaken extensive engagement with our shareholders and appreciate their time and support as we have developed this CATP,” Nagle noted.

Glencore, like most of the world’s biggest listed companies, published its first climate action plans in 2020 in a bid to help with reaching the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of capping temperatures within 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The Baar, Switzerland-based firm, one of the top global thermal coal exporters, has faced backlash for being one of the few top miners still involved in the extraction of the fossil fuel used to generate electricity.

After facing pressure from major investors and shareholders, Glencore committed to run down its coal mines by the mid-2040s, closing at least 12 by 2035.

“We recognize the different roles of thermal coal and steelmaking coal – and the different transition pathways for both,” Nagle said while presenting the new strategy.

The executive noted the company “remains committed” to the responsible phase-down of its coal portfolio and is not progressing any greenfield thermal coal investments. 

The company continues to produce and recycle commodities considered key for today’s cleaner transition technologies. Nagle said the speed and direction of Glencore’s decarbonization efforts are significantly shaped by geopolitics, policy decisions, and technological advancements.

Tackling Scope 3 emissions

Glencore plans to cut “Scope 3” emissions — those produced when customers burn or process a company’s raw materials — by 30% by 2035 and achieving net zero Scope 3 emissions by 2050.

The company did not include its marketing activities in the these goals. It justified the decision by saying that, by trading in the third party volumes, its activities do not generate additional Scope 3 emissions, “which in the ordinary course are associated with the transformation or use of the product by third parties”.

Glencore recently acquired a 77% interest in Teck’s (TSX: TECK.A, TECK.B)(NYSE: TECK) steelmaking coal business, Elk Valley Resources (EVR). The transaction remains subject to mandatory regulatory approvals and is expected to close by no later than Q3 2024.  

The report, commissioned by the Kootenay-based environmental organization, underscores a substantial disparity between the C$1.9 billion required by the province for Teck to reserve for emergency shutdowns and mine reclamation, and the projected expenses of the company’s initiatives to combat selenium pollution resulting from coal mining in BC’s Elk Valley.

Selenium, a naturally occurring element toxic to fish in high concentrations, has been seeping for decades from waste rock piles surrounding Teck’s coal mines.

Teck, in response to Reuters, said Wildsight’s estimates were inaccurate and inconsistent with calculations made under BC government policy.

“Their provisions with respect to capital spend do not align with BC government policy and their use of simplified assumptions overstate ongoing water treatment operating costs alone by 50-60%,” Dale Steeves, Teck’s director of stakeholder relations said.

The report, conducted by consulting firm Burgess Environmental, calculated the C$6.5 billion by assessing the costs of implementing Teck’s current plan, which involves constructing water treatment plants until 2027 and operating them for 60 years.

Since 2014, Teck has allocated over C$1.4 billion towards mitigating selenium concentrations, with plans to invest an additional $150 million to $250 million by the end of 2024.

The miner sold its coal assets to Glencore and two Asian steelmakers for $8.9 billion last year as it shifts its focus to critical metals like copper. The deal is pending approval from the Canadian government.

Glencore declined to comment on the report.

“We hope that both Glencore and the Canadian government will give careful consideration to this report as they assess the sale, ensuring accountability for the selenium crisis is upheld throughout the ownership transfer,” said Simon Wiebe, mining policy and impacts researcher at Wildsight.

(With files from Reuters)

In a paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the UB scientists present a global atlas of unburnable oil. This map was designed with environmental and social criteria that warn which oil resources should not be exploited to meet the commitments of the Paris Agreement signed in 2015 to mitigate the effects of climate change.

The atlas reveals that to limit global warming to 1.5°C, it is essential to avoid the exploitation of oil resources in the most socio-environmentally sensitive areas of the planet, such as natural protected areas, priority areas for biodiversity conservation, areas of high endemic species richness, urban areas and the territories of Indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation.

It also warns that not extracting oil/coal resources in these vulnerable places would not be enough to keep global warming below 1.5°C as indicated in the Paris Agreement.

New roadmap

In this context, the unburnable oil atlas provides a new roadmap to complement the demands of international climate policy—based primarily on demand for fossil fuels—and to enhance socio-environmental safeguards in the exploitation of energy resources.

“Our study reveals which oil resources should be kept underground and not commercially exploited, with special attention to those deposits that overlap with areas of high endemic richness or coincide with outstanding socio-environmental values in different regions of the planet,” lead researcher Martí Orta-Martínez said in a media statement. “The results show that the exploitation of the selected resources and reserves is totally incompatible with the achievement of the Paris Agreement commitments.”

Orta-Martínez pointed out that there is now a broad consensus among the scientific community to limit global warming to 1.5°C to avoid reaching the tipping points of the earth’s climate system, such as melting permafrost, loss of Arctic sea ice and the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, and forest fires in boreal forests.

“If these thresholds are exceeded, this could lead to an abrupt release of carbon into the atmosphere – climate feedback – and amplify the effects of climate change and trigger a cascade of effects that commit the world to large-scale, irreversible changes,” he said.

Carbon budget nearly exhausted

To limit average global warming to 1.5°C, the total amount of CO2 emissions that must not be exceeded is known as the remaining carbon budget. In January 2023, the remaining carbon budget for the 50% chance of keeping warming to 1.5°C was about 250 gigatonnes of CO2 (GtCO2).

“This budget is steadily decreasing at current rates of human-induced emissions—about 42 GtCO2 per year—and will be completely used up by 2028,” Lorenzo Pellegrini, first author of the article, said.

Pellegrini noted that the combustion of the world’s known fossil fuel resources would result in the emission of about 10,000 GtCO2, 40 times more than the carbon budget of 1.5°C.

“In addition, the combustion of developed fossil fuel reserves – that is, those reserves of oil and gas fields and coal mines currently in production or under construction – will emit 936 GtCO2, four times more than the remaining carbon budget for a global warming of 1.5°C,” co-author Gorka Muñoa said. “The goal of no more than 1.5°C global warming requires a complete halt to exploration for new fossil fuel deposits, a halt to the licensing of new fossil fuel extraction, and the premature closure of a very significant share (75%) of oil, gas and coal extraction projects currently in production or already developed.”

With this prospect, the authors call for urgent action by governments, corporations, citizens and large investors such as pension funds to immediately halt any investment in the fossil fuel industry and infrastructure if socio-environmental criteria are not applied.

”Massive investment in clean energy sources is needed to secure global energy demand, enact and support suspensions and bans on fossil fuel exploration and extraction, and adhere to the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty,” the team concluded.

Coal production dropped 4.2% from a year earlier to 705 million tons for January and February combined, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics. That’s the first year-on-year decline since September 2021.

Authorities in China put renewed emphasis on coal after a 2021 energy crisis — and the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — made energy security a top priority for President Xi Jinping. Coal output soared to record levels late last year.

Mine safety has become a bigger issue in recent months, with a rising death toll triggering more government scrutiny and forcing a slowdown in output in some key coal hubs.

Still, falling mine output doesn’t yet mean less reliance on coal-fired power, which expanded by 9.7% in the first two months by relying on a burst of imports to offset declining domestic coal supplies. That outpaced overall power generation, and offset softness in renewable power.

The coal numbers were part of China’s broader dump of data on Monday that showed a mixed picture for the economy and for commodities activity.

Oil processing reached record levels for the first two months of the year as refiners cranked up plants to feed a travel boom around the lunar holiday. Steel output edged up, while aluminum production was close to all-time highs.

China combines output data for January and February to smooth out the impact of the Lunar New Year holiday, which this year fell in the middle of last month. The leap year also included an extra day in February.

Thungela, which ships thermal coal burned in power stations, bought the Ensham mine as part of a strategy to shift its sources away from home, where companies are struggling to export the fuel due to insufficient rail capacity.

While it wants to extract maximum value from the new mine, Thungela, which was spun out of Anglo American in 2021, also wants to purchase more coal assets, CEO July Ndlovu said.

“We are looking for the right quality assets, assets that are fairly priced, that we can add value but we also have to be diligent in terms of what we look for,” Ndlovu told a media conference.

The Johannesburg-based miner said on Monday its net profit slumped 73% to 4.97 billion rand ($264.81 million) in the year ended December 2023 from about 18 billion rand the previous year due to lower coal prices and persistent rail constraints in South Africa.

It proposed a $27 million share buy back and declared a 10 rand per share final dividend. Thungela’s shares were up 5.11% at 1002 GMT, with the broader JSE All Share index down 0.18%.

The Ensham mine is forecast to ramp up output to about 4 million tons by 2026 from 2.9 million tons last year. This could help Thungela raise group output to about 15 million tons, even as some mines in South Africa gradually run out of commercially viable ore, Ndlovu said.

Thungela said output from South Africa is forecast to stay steady at around 11 million tons due to the expiry of some mines. The company shipped about 15 million tons of the fuel in 2021, but its South African output is not expected to rise again to those levels, Ndlovu said.

($1 = 18.7679 rand)

(By Nelson Banya and Felix Njini; Editing by Louise Heavens, Kirsten Donovan and Miral Fahmy)

The acquiring entity, GEAR M Illawarra Met Coal, has mandated Grant Samuel as an adviser in its fundraising talks for the deal to acquire Illawarra Metallurgical Coal from Australia-based South32 Ltd., said the people who asked not to be identified as the talks are private.

Golden Energy, controlled by Indonesia’s Widjaja family, owns a 70% stake in GEAR M Illawarra Met Coal, while M Resources Pty Ltd. holds the remaining 30%.

If the deal proceeds with private funding, it will be the latest example of direct lenders stepping in to fill the spots left vacant by banks that are more tightly scrutinizing environmentally questionable projects.

GEAR M Illawarra Met Coal has yet to formally circulate an official request for proposal to lenders, the people said.

The proposed deal includes an upfront cash payment of $1.05 billion at the time of its completion, deferred cash payment of $250 million payable in 2030, and a contingent price-linked cash component of up to $350 million, according to a filing by South32 last month when the sale was announced.

The sale is expected to close in the first half of 2025, subject to regulatory approvals, it said.

Golden Energy didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. M Resources declined to comment. Grant Samuel declined to comment.

Golden Energy is no stranger to the private credit market. Stanmore Resources Ltd., an Australian metallurgical company that Golden Energy controls, last year sought a $1.1 billion loan, including a $750 million private credit portion, to back its bid for BHP Group Ltd.’s Daunia coal mine.

Whitehaven Coal Ltd. eventually emerged as the winner for Daunia and another mine. To finance the deal, Whitehaven received a $1.1 billion loan from a group of lenders — including 17 private credit providers but only one bank.

(By Megawati Wijaya and Sharon Klyne)

Exxaro’s shares were up 5.19% at 0910 GMT after the miner declared a special dividend of 5.72 rand per share, in addition to a 10.10 rand per share payout.

It earlier reported that logistics constraints and softer coal prices contributed to a 22% dip in Exxaro’s headline earnings to 11.33 billion rand ($609.19 million) last year. Exxaro had about 14.8 billion rand in net cash at the end of last year.

The Johannesburg-based company, which also has interests in iron ore and renewable energy, wants to acquire assets in copper and manganese to take advantage of the global shift from fossil fuels toward cleaner energy.

“We are actively looking. We’re in the market, but we’re not desperate,” Tsengwa told Reuters.

She declined to say if the company had begun any negotiations.

Exxaro was among investors that wanted to buy Khoemacau copper mine in Botswana but were eventually outbid by China’s MMG, which paid about $1.9 billion for the assets.

“There’s nothing that passes us by, there’s nothing we do not know that is out there on the market,” Tsengwa said. “You know, people do talk to us because they know we’re interested.”

Exxaro is weighing a number of opportunities, chief growth officer Richard Lilleike said.

Along with rivals, such as Thungela Resources, Exxaro is battling a profit squeeze from challenges in the South African market, including lack of sufficient rail capacity to move coal to ports for export.

($1 = 18.5986 rand)

(By Nelson Banya and Felix Njini; Editing by Jacqueline Wong, David Goodman and Tomasz Janowski)

The previous nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) government resisted attempts led by environmental campaigners to close the mine at Turow, which supplies lignite to an adjacent power plant responsible for 8% of Poland’s energy.

On Wednesday, PAP reported a court had overturned a 2022 decision that allowed the mine to continue operations. However, it reported the court had not ruled on policy, meaning the mine can still operate.

The main Turow case is pending at a Warsaw administrative court that will rule on a government decision dating from February 2023 that would allow Turow to continue mining until 2044.

“The judgment regarding the environmental decision does not result in the suspension of the operation of the Turow mine. The state’s energy policy was not subject to the court’s assessment,” PAP cited the court as saying.

Environmental groups have long criticized the environmental impact of the open-pit mine, and filed several lawsuits aimed at halting its operations.

“PGE GiEK is waiting for written justification of the judgment and is analyzing further steps in this case,” state-controlled utility PGE unit, which owns the Turow mine and adjacent power plant, wrote in a statement.

The present government, elected last October, has said it wants to kickstart the country’s transition to lower carbon energy.

(By Alan Charlish, Marek Strzelecki, Anna Koper and Karol Badohal; Editing by Barbara Lewis and Aurora Ellis)

Tribeca wrote to the Swiss commodity giant’s board this week with a list of proposals, including moving its listing to the Australian Securities Exchange to boost its share price, which it said had lagged behind its rivals, according to the report.

The Australian hedge fund also recommended increasing dividends by discontinuing share buybacks and divesting a minority stake in Glencore’s lucrative trading division via an initial public offering instead of spinning off its coal business, the FT said.

Glencore declined to comment on the report.

Last year, after a Glencore-led consortium agreed to buy Canadian miner Teck Resources’ steelmaking coal unit in one of biggest deals in the sector in years, it paved the way for an eventual spin-off of its own coal business.

Glencore CEO Gary Nagle said in February that when they announced the deal, their intention was to spin out the unit, but it was always subject to what shareholders wanted.

“We will consult with our shareholders, and it’s the decision of the shareholders ultimately to do that,” he had said then.

(By Aatrayee Chatterjee and Richard Rohan Francis; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta and Shinjini Ganguli)

For seven years, Ashley Shade and Samuel Barnett have been studying soil microbial communities in Centralia, Pennsylvania. The town is the site of an underground coal mine fire that has been burning since 1962 at depths of up to 90 metres over a 13-kilometre stretch of 15 square kilometres. Estimations state that, at its current rate, it could continue to burn for over 250 years.

The Centralia fire started accidentally when efforts to clean a landfill ignited the adjacent mine, and it has been burning continuously since then. As the fire burns, it moves through the abandoned underground mine shaft, heating the soil above it as it travels. It is considered a ‘press disturbance,’ meaning, a long-term, continuous, human-caused disturbance as the heat from the fire changes the structure of the microbial communities.

From 2015 to 2021, the researchers selected sampling sites along the fire’s path and examined the soil before, during, and after being heated. The team also sampled nearby sites that were completely unaffected by the fire.

“We go out every October and we take soil cores,” Barnett explained. “We have a big PVC pipe that we sterilize and drive into the soil and pull out about 20 centimetres or 8 inches of soil. Then we sieve the soil to get rid of roots and rocks and the stuff we don’t want and then freeze it in liquid nitrogen and bring it to the lab.”

The next step was to extract bacterial DNA and RNA. They sequenced the DNA to determine which types of bacteria were present. They then looked at the ratio of RNA to DNA to determine which bacteria are biologically active and which are dormant.

“Dormant is a word for a reversible state of activity that many life forms assume at some point. It’s a really important strategy to help organisms withstand stress in their environment,” Shade said.

“An incredible number of soil microbes are simply not active and functioning at any given time. This is an important point because the active microbes are the ones that contribute to ecosystem functions. I think this is special about this study because most research does not consider this question of who’s active and who’s not.”

The researchers infused this perspective into the recovery of microbial communities.

“If we can understand what wakes up the dormant microbes, we can try to manage the microbiome, for example, to wake up when we need it to wake up, to go to sleep potentially when we need it to go to sleep,” Shade said.

The scientists pointed out that microbes – tens of thousands of which live in soil – are vital to maintaining healthy, fertile soil, which, in turn, is vital to the overall health of ecosystems. Thus, they hope their findings spur additional research into the development of strategies for microbiome restoration for ecosystems impacted by climate change and other press disturbances.

The world’s third-biggest coal miner after China and India undercounts methane emissions from production of the fuel by six to seven times, according to Ember, which cited independent estimates from scientists using satellites and mine-level data compiled by nonprofit Global Energy Monitor.

Indonesia neglected to include methane releases from underground reserves, Ember said. And though the country’s last official report to the United Nations used an approved approach that applies an emissions factor to each ton of coal extracted or produced, Ember said that given the nature of the country’s open-cut mines, a higher factor would have been more appropriate.

The Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry said the agency needs to review the findings, a spokesperson said Monday, a holiday in Indonesia.

The discrepancies could jeopardize Indonesia’s efforts to slash releases of the gas and meet emissions reductions commitments under the Global Methane Pledge. More than 150 nations have signed the agreement vowing to cut methane 30% by the end of this decade from 2020 levels.

Methane is the primary component of natural gas, but it can also leak during coal production when rock strata or coal seams are fractured and operators routinely vent methane into the atmosphere to reduce health and safety risks for workers. Few mines use available above-ground capture technology.

To improve accuracy Indonesia should collect data and analyze emissions from individual mines and distinguish between emissions from underground and surface mines when its reports the releases, according to Ember.

Estimates from satellites and independent analysis suggest that many countries underreport their methane emissions. In 2022, Australia revised its calculations for methane pollution from open-cut coal mines, a change that meant total national annual emissions were on average 0.3% higher than stated for more than 30 years.

Methane has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide during its first 20 years in the atmosphere, and clamping down on avoidable emissions from fossil fuels is one of the cheapest, fastest ways to avoid levels of climate change that scientists agree would be catastrophic.

(By Eddie Spence and Aaron Clark)

A research panel will look for ways to reduce contamination from coal mines in BC’s Elk Valley flowing into Lake Koocanusa, a reservoir straddling the border and into US rivers. Due to pollution concerns in this watershed, the US and Canada asked International Joint Commission (IJC) to establish a board of experts and knowledge holders by June that will study the issue over two years and devise options for action.

Indigenous groups in British Columbia, Montana and Idaho had lobbied for intervention by both federal governments to stop the flow of coal pollution, the Associated Press reported.

Elevated levels of selenium have reportedly been found in fish and fish eggs from Montana’s Kootenai River, downstream from coal mines in the Elk River Valley. A legal action filed in May 2023 in Montana named Teck Coal Ltd. as one of three defendants in a request for judicial review by environmental groups in Montana and Idaho over levels of contamination from its British Columbia mines in US waters.

“Our two countries are committed to a collaborative, science, and Indigenous knowledge based, action-oriented path forward,” US Ambassador to Canada David L. Cohen and the Canada’s Ambassador to the United States, Kirsten Hillman said in a joint statement.

The two nations will work in partnership with Tribal Nations and Indigenous Peoples, consistent with the principles outlined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. They’ve asked the IJC to assist federal and Indigenous governments, British Columbia, Idaho, and Montana, to establish a formal governance structure for the study board by the end of June.

Teck closed the sale of a minority interest in its coal business to Nippon in January. The remaining sale of 77% of the business to Glencore (LSE: GLEN) is expected to close in the third quarter.

The mines operated for over 100 years in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole and one of the world’s northernmost inhabited areas. They were specifically situated 77° North of the Equator.

The operation shut down in 2015 and, at the same time, landscape restoration of the mining settlement and infrastructure, stretching more than 20 kilometres from the sea up to 700 metres above sea level, was started. Enabling both dynamic ecological and geomorphological processes was the focus of the landscape restoration once roads, housing, industrial facilities, landfills and quarries were removed.

Where vegetation cover in Svalbard is sparse and slow-growing, the geological processes, such as glacial, slope, fluvial and coastal, are highly active. Thus, facilitating geodiversity meant keeping in mind that the abiotic conditions support a mosaic of vegetation cover and habitats, as well as landscape character.

“When targeting the reconstruction and design of post-mining landscapes, there is a risk of neglecting the dynamic geomorphological processes,” Dagmar Hagen, senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research and co-author of the paper, said in a media statement. “Rather than designing a new landscape, we argue that preparing the future landscape for active geological processes will align with the overall ideas of nature restoration.”

Hagen explained that a multidisciplinary approach in planning such large-scale restoration in the High Arctic was crucial to understanding the relationships between ecological and geomorphological processes and to propose the best possible solutions. Placing geomorphology, botany, and landscape knowledge at the core was key, as was keeping in mind their connections to cultural heritage and pollution management.

The extensive restoration effort at Svea also required a consensus on restoration principles among all participants, from project leaders to all personnel working on the ground. To foster a common understanding, all personnel participated in “green training,” gaining insights into the landscape, geodiversity, biodiversity, and restoration standards.

“Ultimately, the people operating excavators, bulldozers, and dump trucks carry out the restoration work and shape the new landscape, and a significant portion of the positive results should be attributed to their efforts,” Hagen said.

“We believe that the success of a restoration project of this size depends on a multidisciplinary approach, including all aspects of the management of the mine’s interior, pollution, cultural heritage, and natural diversity.”

Coal is being displaced in the power sector thanks to a huge surge in wind and solar additions last year, while the real estate crisis is helping to cool demand from heavy industry, said Zhang Hong, deputy secretary-general of the China National Coal Association. At the same time, the growth of renewables means coal is in demand to help balance out intermittent generation.

A sharp drop in consumption, therefore, will not come swiftly.

“Coal demand is reaching a plateau period, but its fundamental role in supporting China’s energy supply safety is hard to change in the short-term,” Zhang said at the China Coal Import International Summit in Xiamen, southeastern China. “The role of coal as primary energy and a fallback for ensuring energy security remains unchanged, even when it is close to reaching a plateau.”

China mines and burns more than half the world’s coal, making its power sector the single biggest contributor to planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. A series of power shortages in recent years led the government to boost mining to a record and go on a spree building new coal power plants, even as it invests more than any other country in clean energy.

Coal consumption rose 5.6% last year, a faster increase than the prior year, as the country left Covid-19 restrictions behind at a time when hydropower generation was hit by an historic drought. Still, the International Energy Agency forecasts coal consumption in China will fall in 2024 and plateau through the next two years. President Xi Jinping has promised that the country’s use of the fuel will begin to decline from 2026.

The debate over fuel’s trajectory continues, though. At the same conference, Wu Wenbin, head of coal management at Guangdong Energy Group, said he expects a 4% increase in consumption this year. Fenwei Digital Information Technology Co., the conference organizer and a coal industry research firm, forecasts a 2% rise this year for power-station coal.

Beijing should control mining activity, limit output and consolidate smaller producers into state-owned firms to “reduce disorderly competition,” Shanxi Coking Coal Energy Group chairman Zhao Jianze told local media. China should also build strategic reserves of the steelmaking fuel, which he called “a ballast stone in China’s industrial economic system.”

While blessed with an abundance of thermal coal for power generation, China’s reserves of the steelmaking variety are far more scarce. That’s led to an over-reliance on imports, which has created vulnerabilities. A ban on Australian supplies — the only effective substitute for Chinese coking coal, according to Zhao — drastically curtailed shipments for more than two years before it was lifted in early 2023.

Zhao is a national committee member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, one of two legislative sessions being held in the capital this week. Officials typically use the meetings to catch the attention of policymakers as they draw up the government’s agenda for the year ahead.

Coking coal producers have suffered an outsized impact in recent months from a spate of fatal mining disasters in China, which has disrupted operations and curbed supply. The protracted slump in China’s property market is also sapping demand from their customers at steel mills.

While experts continue to debate the potential implications of adopting AI at both a personal and business level, the mining industry has not stayed still waiting for the conclusions.

The sector has already embarked on a quest to transform operations from the traditional heavy-equipment and men-on-site operations, to mines that integrate connectivity, automation and AI.

On a visit to MWC Barcelona, an annual trade show dedicated to the mobile communications industry, MINING.COM was able to see how the world of telecommunications and mining are increasingly intertwined. 

Invited by telecommunications giant Huawei, MINING.com — the first mining media to ever attend MWC — saw sensors, smart cameras and 5G relay boxes ready to be deployed to mines around the world.

There was buzz around the new generation of mobile internet — “5.5G,” or “5G Advanced”. The new standard is expected to make the networks themselves more “intelligent” through the application of AI and machine learning, while also boosting performance and reducing overall power consumption.

When Huawei vice president of global marketing and solutions for mining and oil and gas, Jack Chan, was asked why the company began developing solutions for the industry, the answer was as quick as clear: safety.

“In China we have almost 3 million coal miners working in 4,400 coal mines, which are underground and often register deadly accidents,” Chan said. “When taking workers out of the tunnels and into a room full of screens displaying numbers, graphs and images, not only a company is saving lives, but is also more appealing to the new generations.”

Chan added that Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure is crucial to support intelligent mining. Without fast and reliable communication networks, robust computing power, rapid data storage, and vigilant network security, essential tasks, including real-time monitoring and instant data exchange would be impossible, he explained.

“Young people don’t want to spend hours underground, hot and breathing recycled air, but they are happy to sit in a room with air conditioner and monitor activities in real time,” he said.

Data on extraction, personnel location and danger detection is centralized on a system designed to eliminate problems caused by human error and miscommunication. Instead of people, robots patrol and inspect the dark and narrow underground corridors.

“AI service architects and AI algorithm engineers will become key roles in the era of intelligence,” Chan predicts.

Remote and digital solutions are common in other coal operations, such as those in Canada and Australia, but China has lagged and now the government has set the goal of achieving basic digitalization of all mines by 2035.

Huawei is a step ahead with is AI-based Pangu Mining, a suit of applications launched in July last year, which were developed based on the pilot verification of large AI models at industrial levels. 

The name Pangu comes from ancient Chinese mythology and folklore. The legendary figure is associated with the creation of the world.

There are altogether 21 application scenarios related to nine operating activities, namely, coal mining, tunneling, primary transportation, auxiliary transportation, lifting, safety monitoring, rock burst prevention, coal preparation, and coking.

Rock bursts are a particularly challenging issue in mining. The primary means of preventing rock bursts is drilling destress holes, whose quality matters. Shandong Energy has managed to address this challenge in its Lilou and Xinjulong coal mines by deploying Huawei’s AI model. 

Thanks to its visual recognition capabilities, Pangu can intelligently analyze the quality of stress relief drilling, and assist rock burst prevention personnel in quality verification, reducing their review workload by 82%. It used to take three days to complete such checks; now the time has been shortened to 10 minutes, with a 100% acceptance rate.

Chile’s Codelco, the world’s largest copper miner, has also adopted Huawei solutions with the goal of turning around under-performing mines and projects that have crimped both production and profit.

The state-owned company is looking to streamline structures and prioritize productive areas at a time when copper output is at the lowest level in a quarter of a century.

It’s all about connectivity

Being a telecommunications company at heart, Huawei has been able to deploy connectivity solutions, from networks to an operative system able to run a wide range of equipment and smart machines. Named Harmony, the OS enables different devices to speak the same language, facilitating better connection and collaboration, and bringing a simple, continuous, secure and reliable interaction experience in all scenarios.

“In the era of intelligence, digital intelligence transformation can be accelerated only by combining AI technology with industry cognition and valuable data accumulated by enterprises,” Jason Liu, President, Learning & Certification Services of Huawei told the audience during MWC Barcelona 2024.

Liu said AI solutions should be used as a tool, not as a replacement of human intelligence.

Pangu, for instance, can detect a problem, inform the location and characteristic of such problem and provide solutions suggestions. The application is predictive, in the sense it can fill in the blanks at a very deep level.

AI is enabling mining companies to become insight‐driven enterprises that utilize data to make faster, accurate decisions, improve health and safety, boost efficiency through error elimination and reduce operations footprint.

Digital thinking is not just a tool for mining companies, but a core value that shapes their business. One of Huawei’s key messages is that to succeed in the industry, miners need to foster an organizational culture that embraces innovation and adapts to changing technologies.

According to the consultancy firm, this decline makes renewable energy increasingly competitive with conventional low-cost coal power, driven by a significant reduction in capital costs for renewable power. Renewable energy costs in 2023 were 13% cheaper than conventional coal and are expected to be 32% cheaper by 2030.  

“Utility PV solar has emerged in 2023 as the cheapest power source in the region, while onshore wind is expected to become cheaper than coal after 2025,” Alex Whitworth, VP – head of Asia Pacific power research at Wood Mackenzie, said in a media statement. “Renewables firmed with battery storage are becoming competitive with gas power today but will struggle to compete with coal before 2030.” 

Whitworth pointed out that China is leading the way in lowering the cost of renewables, with utility photovoltaics, onshore wind, and offshore wind being 40-70% cheaper compared to other Asia-Pacific markets. 

“China will maintain a 50% cost advantage for renewables out to 2050, allowing the country to maintain its lead in renewables deployments,” the report states.   

The dossier also notes that solar photovoltaic power costs saw a significant decline of 23% in 2023, marking the end of two years of supply chain disruptions and inflation. In fact, utility PV emerged as the cheapest power source in 11 out of 15 countries in the Asia Pacific.

The report states that the expectation is that new-build solar project costs will drop another 20% by 2030, driven by falling module prices and increasing oversupply from China. The decline in solar technology costs in 2023-24 has put pressure on coal and gas, with LCOE for utility PV dropping by an average of 23% across Asia Pacific in 2023, driven by a 29% decline in capital costs. 

Distributed solar, on the other hand, has shown an even greater decline in costs –a 26% decrease in 2023, and the technology is now 12% cheaper on average than residential power prices creating a large potential for more rooftop solar applications.   

“This trend has made distributed solar increasingly attractive for end-users in many markets in Asia-Pacific, with costs already 30% below rising residential tariffs in China and Australia. However, some markets like India with subsidized residential power tariffs will need to wait until 2030 or later to achieve competitive distributed solar prices,” said Sooraj Narayan, senior research analyst, APAC power & renewables at Wood Mackenzie. 

Wind and fossil fuels

While onshore wind costs were higher than solar by 38% in 2023, Wood Mackenzie forecasts a 30% drop by 2030 as cheaper Chinese turbines gain market share. 

“Markets such as Australia and Southeast Asia will benefit from the low-cost import of wind power equipment from China, while Japan and South Korea with more limited Chinese turbine uptake and focus on the local supply chain will observe onshore wind costs staying above US$80/MWh by 2030,” the dossier reads.

The report also highlights the increasing competitiveness of offshore wind with fossil fuel power in Asia-Pacific, with costs falling by 11% in 2023. 

“Offshore wind costs are now on par with coal power in coastal China and are expected to become cheaper than gas power in Japan and the Taiwan region by 2027 and 2028, respectively. Falling capital costs and technology improvements are opening up new markets for offshore wind in India, Southeast Asia, and Australia over the next 5-10 years.” 

Meanwhile, coal and gas generation costs have increased by 12% since 2020 and are projected to continue rising through 2050, primarily due to carbon pricing mechanisms. 

“Developed markets in Asia-Pacific are expected to experience a significant increase in carbon prices, reaching US$20-55/tonne by 2030, while the carbon prices in Southeast Asia and India are expected to remain low,” WoodMac’s document states. “Gas power costs remain above US$100/MWh on average out to 2050, meaning they gradually lose the battle on costs with offshore wind over the next decade.” 

Russia, historically a minor exporter of the fuel to India, began boosting shipments to the south Asian country after Western sanctions against Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine.

The latest US sanctions also include Russia’s payment system, financial institutions and energy production.

“With the new sanctions, I do not expect any of the big Indian companies to buy Russian cargoes,” one major Indian trader told Reuters on the sidelines of the Coaltrans conference in the western Indian state of Goa.

The traders, two Indian and one Russian, declined to be named as they are not authorised to speak to the media.

“Shipments of coal will still not stop, but people will be more hesitant to touch Russian cargoes,” the second Indian trader said, adding that the sanctions could benefit other coal suppliers such as Indonesia, Australia and South Africa.

Ship tracking data reviewed by Reuters shows Indian conglomerates JSW Group, Vedanta and consortium Arcelor Mittal Nippon Steel India were among the biggest importers of Russian thermal coal in the last six months.

The three companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment on any potential impact from the new sanctions.

SUEK, Russia’s largest coal producer and exporter, did not reply to an email seeking comment. Reuters was not immediately able to reach Mechel for comment.

Evidence of any immediate adverse impact of the new US sanctions announced last week could not be ascertained, as cargoes of thermal coal typically take more than two weeks to sail from Russia to India.

Russian supplies of thermal coal rose by 19% in 2023 to 10.06 million metric tons, or nearly 6% of Indian imports of the fuel, consultancy Bigmint said.

India’s trade ministry had no immediate comment on the impact of the sanctions on trade with Russia, but in a note on Wednesday the oil ministry highlighted “longstanding ties” with Moscow and future plans for partnerships across sectors.

India had become the biggest buyer of Russian seaborne crude since the start of the Ukraine war, a trade that also faces hurdles from the new US sanctions.

While expanding trade with Moscow since Western sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, New Delhi has consistently called for “complete cessation of all hostilities”, including in the note released by the oil ministry on Wednesday.

(By Sethuraman N R, Sudarshan Varadhan and Brijesh Patel; Editing by Alexander Smith)

BHP Group Ltd., the world’s biggest miner, has embarked on a major restructure of its global business, affecting units from mine-planning to decarbonization and heritage protection, according to a report in the Australian Financial Review.

The changes led by chief executive officer Mike Henry will see several specialist teams disbanded and their functions reassigned in a bid to cut costs and simplify operations, the AFR reported, without saying where it got the information. Individual commodity units will have more responsibility to run themselves self-sufficiently, it said, adding that BHP has started shedding jobs in Australia.

“As part of our continuous improvement in how we approach work, we have made some changes to better align work activities within assets and support quicker decision-making,” BHP said in an emailed response to questions from Bloomberg News. It didn’t comment on job cuts.

BHP — a major producer of everything from iron ore to copper and metallurgical coal — suffered a sharp profit slump in its fiscal first half. While that was largely due to a $2.5 billion writedown in its nickel business, most major miners have been hit by cost inflation and softer commodity prices.

In its financial results last week, BHP said the cost of mining was higher than prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, and warned that while prices pressures from energy and logistics had eased, labor costs remained a key risk.

In Australia, BHP’s country president Geraldine Slattery sent a message to staff outlining the changes to functions including health, safety, environment and mine planning.

The AFR report didn’t say how many staff members might be affected by the restructure.

Read More: BHP says nickel faces “difficult multi-year run”

The deal comprises an upfront payment of $1.05 billion at completion, and a deferred cash consideration of $250 million payable in 2030, among others.

The buying entity will assume economic and operating control of Illawarra on completion of the deal, including all current and future liabilities.

The Illawarra project generated $1.64 billion underlying revenue in fiscal 2023 for South32, about 18.2% of its total underlying revenue of $9.05 billion.

The deal is expected to complete in the first half of fiscal 2025, subject to certain conditions including an approval from the Foreign Investment Review Board.

South32 CEO Graham Kerr said the deal will streamline the company’s portfolio and unlock capital to invest in development projects in copper and zinc.

“The transaction will also simplify our business and reduce our capital intensity,” Kerr added.

GEAR would hold 70% of the project, while M Resources would hold rest of the stake, post completion of the deal.

(By Echha Jain; Editing by Maju Samuel and Shailesh Kuber)

The project is being financed by part of the roughly 1 billion rand ($52 million) provided by Thungela Resources Ltd., a company spun off by Anglo American Plc, for rehabilitation and securing disused mine shafts.

The goal is to reintroduce 17 species of fish, ranging from hardy tilapia to eels and tiny catfish, to the 112 km (70 miles) of the Wilge and Olifants river systems that were wiped out by the Feb. 14, 2022, spill of acidic water after illegal miners broke a seal at an operation that had been shuttered since the 1960s.

The 2022 toxic spill is indicative of the environmental risks posed to South Africa from the more than 400 disused coal mines in the country. Along with idled gold mines, these are being targeted by illegal miners who profit from tapping the remaining reserves. The spill was from an operation near the Khwezela Colliery in South Africa’s eastern province of Mpumalanga.

“The impact environmentally goes far beyond the few tons of coal people will steal,” July Ndlovu, Thungela’s chief executive officer, said at an event at the Loskop Dam Nature Reserve on Feb. 23.

The mining company is funding a fish breeding facility at the reserve that began releasing banded tilapia and southern mouthbrooders, two small cichlid species that will need to establish themselves in the rivers before larger predatory species are put back. Other fish to be reintroduced include longfin eels, shortspine suckermouths, yellowfish, stargazer catfish and bulldogs, a small fish that generates an electric field to hunt and orient itself.

“I’ve been working in nature conservation for 42 years and this is the cherry on the cake,” said Andre Hoffman, an aquatic scientist brought out of retirement to work on the project. He spoke as he slowly coaxed small southern mouthbrooders out of a plastic container into a stream. “It’s not nice for this to have happened but we can learn a lot from it.”

The river system could take five to 10 years to recover even with the intervention, but need take 40 to 50 years without it, he said.

In addition to the breeding facility, Thungela has built water treatment plants at a cost of 398 million rand and is restoring wetlands, setting up a plant nursery and restoring vegetation. Over 500 million rand has been spent securing old mines.

(By Antony Sguazzin)

But metallurgical coal is also a key input, and this fuel has quietly been a top performer in the energy commodity space in recent months.

Australia dominates the seaborne market for metallurgical coal, accounting for more than half of global volumes, and about three times the shipments of the next biggest exporter, the United States.

The price of Australian metallurgical coal, also known as coking coal, on the Singapore Exchange ended at $315 a metric ton on Wednesday.

The contracts, which are linked to the free-on-board price in Australia, have risen 40.3% since the 2023 low of $224.50 a ton on July 6.

In contrast, high-grade Australian thermal coal is only 0.5% higher than its 2023 low, while Brent crude oil has risen 13.4% from its low in December, and spot liquefied natural gas is down 2.2% from the weakest it was in 2023.

While the price is well below the record $635 a ton reached in March 2022 amid fears to global supplies after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February of that year, it’s still well above the broad $100-$250 range that prevailed from 2018 to mid-2021.

Unlike iron ore, which is dominated by China gobbling up more than 70% of global seaborne volumes, coking coal is a more evenly-spread market with demand centres in both the developed countries of North Asia and the developing nations of South Asia.

It’s likely that much of the increase in prices in coking coal in recent years is down to increased demand from India, which has seen imports rise from 53.32 million tons in 2020 to 70.49 million in 2023, according to data compiled by commodity analysts Kpler.

Australia remains the biggest supplier to India, with imports in 2023 coming in at 41.0 million tons, down slightly from 43.22 million the prior year.

It’s worth noting that India has turned to Russian coking coal since Moscow’s war on Ukraine, snapping up discounted cargoes that can no longer go to Europe because of sanctions against Russia.

India’s imports of Russian metallurgical coal rose to 11.76 million tons in 2023, almost double the 6.07 million the previous year and four times the 2.63 million from 2021.

China’s imports of seaborne coking coal also rose in 2023, reaching 36.8 million tons, up from 27.05 million the previous year.

This is largely a reflection of the return of Australian coal to China after Beijing lifted its informal ban, imposed in 2020 amid a series of political disputes with Canberra.

Australia record

Australia’s exports of coking coal have been trending lower in recent years, largely as a result of supply disruptions caused by bad weather in the main producing state of Queensland.

However, they have rebounded in February, with Kpler data showing shipments of 17.86 million tons, the second-highest on record behind the 18.65 million from June 2019.

The strength wasn’t really a China or India story, with Japan leading import growth in February, with Kpler assessing arrivals at a three-month high of 4.56 million tons, of which Australia provided 3.86 million.

South Korea also saw higher imports in February, with arrivals of 3.45 million tons, the most since November 2021, according to Kpler.

The overall picture that emerges for seaborne coking coal is one where demand in Asia is recovering, with Kpler data showing imports by the region rose for a third straight month in February, likely reaching 19.8 million tons, up from 19.46 million in January and the best month since October.

The longer-term outlook is more nuanced, given efforts to reduce carbon emissions in the steel sector.

BHP Group, the world’s largest shipper of metallurgical coal, believes the market has decades of life left in it as the alternatives to using coal to make steel are either not competitive on a cost basis or unlikely to emerge at scale for decades.

However, the company also warned in its results presentation this week that investment in new mines is less attractive, especially in Queensland where the state government imposed sharply higher royalties in July 2022.

While it is to be expected that a company will rail against higher taxes, the trick for BHP is to invest to keep production high enough to meet demand, but low enough to also keep prices strong, but not so low that the Queensland government follows through on its threat to strip the company of its mining licences should it not invest sufficiently.

(The opinions expressed here are those of the author, Clyde Russell, a columnist for Reuters.)

(Editing by Sonali Paul)

Canada’s eight largest pension funds hold some C$2.1 trillion in assets but only a quarter was even invested in the country last year, according to research by Montreal-based fund manager Letko Brosseau. The so-called Maple Eight devoted just 3% to domestic equities, the lowest of a group of six countries including the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan, data show.

“They’ve taken the vast majority of this money – 75% of it – and invested it outside Canada to create jobs outside of Canada to the detriment of Canadians,” Lassonde, a founder of Franco-Nevada (TSX: FNV; NYSE: FNV) and a former president of Newmont (NYSE: NEM; TSX: NGT), said in a phone interview this month. “Essentially, the mining industry has been ignored.”

Pension funds are not investing in large Canadian mining companies, which may in turn invest in juniors, in part because few domestic options remain. Switzerland-based Glencore’s (LSE: GLEN) acquisition of most of Teck Resources’ (TSX: TECK.A/TECK.B; NYSE: TECK) coking coal assets in November for about C$9 billion is the latest large deal scooping up Canadian assets.

Xstrata, now part of Glencore, bought nickel giant Falconbridge for C$39 billion in 2006, the same year Brazil’s Vale (NYSE: VALE) purchased the country’s other main nickel producer, Inco, for C$19 billion. Australia’s Rio Tinto (NYSE: RIO; LSE: RIO; ASX: RIO) followed a year later in acquiring aluminum producer Alcan for C$38 billion. Lassonde and Giustra say pension fund investing might have helped them stay.

“We’re talking about very large companies, mining giants that we lost to foreigners,” said Giustra, who founded Lions Gate Entertainment (Fahrenheit 9/11, The Hunger Games) and helped start Wheaton Precious Metals (TSX: WPM, NYSE: WPM; LSE: WPM) and Endeavour Mining (TSX: EDV; LSE: EDV).

“These aren’t risky companies. This was the backbone of our mining industry in this country.”

Rules eroded

Indeed, Canadian pensions were required to invest 90% of their assets domestically in 1990, but federal governments gradually reduced the limit before removing it entirely in 2005. Total domestic exposure as a percentage of assets ranges from 55% held by the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan to 13% run by Public Sector Pension Investments (PSP). The average of other pension funds around the world is 52%, according to Letko Brosseau.   

Pensions are the largest repository of wealth in many countries and globally hold nearly $50 trillion. Reaching net zero emissions by 2050 will require annual clean energy investment worldwide to more than triple by 2030 to around $4 trillion, according to the International Energy Agency. Just mining enough battery metals over the next three years will cost as much as $450 billion, the agency said. In 2022, Ottawa budgeted nearly C$4 billion in spending on critical minerals by 2030 but it’s not clear how pension funds are being engaged to support projects.  

“The government of Canada continues to engage with critical minerals stakeholders, including pension plans and other institutional, arms-length investors,” Michael MacDonald, a spokesman for the federal Natural Resources Ministry, said in an emailed reply to questions.

It was MacDonald’s only reference to pension funds in what was otherwise a page-long list of government programs stemming from its critical minerals strategy. He suggested the Canada Development Investment Corp. (CDEV), a federal Crown corporation that advises the government on financial matters, might explain how mining companies could seek funding from the C$15 billion Canada Growth Fund. CDEV didn’t reply in time for this story.

Pensions mum

Pension funds themselves were even more reticent to discuss the issue. Only the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), which Lassonde praised for its resource funding, replied to emails seeking comment. The Canada Pension Plan (CPP), the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP), the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS), and the PSP didn’t reply or declined to speak.

“CDPQ is active in the mining sector in Quebec and Canada and has an investment team dedicated to the sector,” Kate Monfette, the pension’s media director, said by email. “Among other things, with a fund like Sodémex which supports exploration projects, we remain on the lookout for developments and opportunities in the mining and materials ecosystem. Our priority is to focus on the most promising companies in order to help them develop while generating a return for our depositors.”

British Columbia Investment Management (BCI) said it invests 29.4% in Canada and referred other inquiries to its annual report. OMERS said it wouldn’t comment on the topic.

Canada should consider Australia’s example, Lassonde and Giustra said. Its pensions, which are called superannuation funds, hold A$3.5 trillion (C$3.1 trillion), the third-largest amount behind the US and the UK. Domestic equities make up 21.9% of their assets. The large stakes prevent foreign takeovers, the entrepreneurs argued.

“That’s what keeps their domestic mining industry alive,” Giustra said. “We’re a comparable country in terms of how prolific our mining opportunities are, same as Australia, and we don’t have that same opportunity.”

Letko Brosseau says Canada’s top eight pension funds have invested more in China than in Canadian companies: C$88 billion versus C$81 billion. CPP has 2% in domestic shares, BCI has 0.5% and OTPP has 0.1%, the firm says.  

Economics urged

Giustra said mining CEOs must lobby pension funds with moral suasion for why they should invest in Canada and make an economic argument. With China’s current woes from property market turmoil and a long-term population decline in motion, its boom years are over and it’s time for Canadian pension funds to repatriate funds to the world’s second-largest country by landmass that has top-tier mining regulations.

Lassonde went further and said federal and provincial governments must legislate pension funds to increase their investments in Canadian resource companies. He’s backed Letko Brosseau’s presentations to finance ministers in BC and Ontario as well as to officials in Ottawa.

“We’re trying to get to the decision makers and trying to make them understand what Canada is losing by doing nothing,” he said. “They created these funds, it’s in their power to legislate how these funds are managed.”

Giustra, who heads private equity firm Fiore Group invested in Aris Gold (TSX: ARIS) with mines in Colombia, and Ontario-focused explorer West Red Lake Gold Mines (TSXV: WRLG), said Canadian asset managers slashed their non-pension dedicated mining funds to C$2.8 billion in 2022 from C$16 billion in 2010.

“There’s just no source of capital, the industry starves,” he said. “You don’t have the seniors funding them, the pension funds aren’t there and we’ve lost the traditional mining funds here as well.”

Lassonde, who led a group of investors assembling an offer in May for Teck’s coking coal assets that was later beat by Glencore, said he approached BCI and Ontario pensions for input but got no response.

“If you want steel and you want the lowest carbon-emitting steel in the world, it’s that coal, OK, and there was nobody to talk to,” he said. “In Australia, we could have done this deal in about five days.”

MOFs are porous materials that can selectively absorb carbon dioxide and have three kinds of building blocks in their molecules—inorganic nodes, organic nodes, and organic linkers. These can be arranged in different relative positions and configurations. As a result, there are countless potential MOF configurations for scientists to design and test.

To quickly determine which configurations work, the scientific team comprised of researchers from the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Chicago, is using generative artificial intelligence (AI) to dream up previously unknown building block candidates.

They are also testing a form of AI called machine learning and a third pathway that is high-throughput screening of candidate materials. The last is theory-based simulations using a method called molecular dynamics.

By exploring the MOF design space with generative AI, the team was able to quickly assemble, building block by building block, over 120,000 new MOF candidates within 30 minutes. They ran these calculations on the Polaris supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF).

They then turned to the Delta supercomputer at UIUC to carry out time-intensive molecular dynamics simulations using only the most promising candidates. The goal is to screen them for stability, chemical properties, and capacity for carbon capture. Delta is a joint effort of Illinois and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

The team’s approach could ultimately allow scientists to synthesize just the very best MOF contenders.

“People have been thinking about MOFs for at least two decades,” Argonne computational scientist Eliu Huerta said in a media statement. “The traditional methods have typically involved experimental synthesis and computational modeling with molecular dynamics simulations. But trying to survey the vast MOF landscape in this way is just impractical.”

A supercomputer may provide the answer

Even more advanced computing will soon be available for the team to employ. With the power of the ALCF’s Aurora exascale supercomputer, scientists could survey billions of MOF candidates at once, including many that have never even been proposed before. What’s more, the team is taking chemical inspiration from past work on molecular design to discover new ways in which the different building blocks of a MOF could fit together.

“We wanted to add new flavors to the MOFs that we were designing,” Huerta said. “We needed new ingredients for the AI recipe.”

The group’s algorithm can make improvements to MOFs for carbon capture by learning chemistry from biophysics, physiology and physical chemistry experimental datasets that have not been considered for MOF design before.

To Huerta, looking beyond traditional approaches holds the promise of a transformative MOF material—one that could be good at carbon capture, cost-effective, and easy to produce.

“We are now connecting generative AI, high-throughput screening, molecular dynamics, and Monte Carlo simulations into a standalone workflow,” Huerta said. “This workflow incorporates online learning using past experimental and computational research to accelerate and improve the precision of AI to create new MOFs.”

The atom-by-atom approach to MOF design enabled by AI will allow scientists to have what Argonne senior scientist Ian Foster called a “wider lens” on these kinds of porous structures.

“Work is being done so that, for the new AI-assembled MOFs that are being predicted, we incorporate insights from autonomous labs to experimentally validate their ability to be synthesized and capacity to capture carbon,” Foster said. “With the model fine-tuned, our predictions are just going to get better and better.”

Coal miners in Shanxi were asked to reduce output and carry out safety checks from March to May, according to the Feb. 19 notice by the provincial emergency management, mine safety and energy bureaus. The province produces 29% of China’s coal supply, including thermal coal for power plants and coking coal, a key steelmaking ingredient.

Brokerage China Futures said the order could reduce supply by a combined 5 million to 6 million metric tons for two major producers, Shanxi Coal International Energy Group and Shanxi Luan Group. Officials at the companies could not immediately be reached for comment.

“The influence might not merely be confined to the two companies, and this is what the market is concerned about,” China Futures analysts wrote in a Wednesday note.

The most-actively traded coking coal futures contract on the Dalian Exchange, a benchmark for China, rose as much as 8% on expectations of tighter supply and ended the session up 6.19%, the highest close since Jan. 31.

The move is aimed in part at curbing mine accidents resulting from overproduction.

“In the past several years most miners in China were running with full capacity and there were a lot of small scale accidents,” said Liu Shaoyi, a Xiamen-based coal trader.

“Now overall domestic and international coal supply is sufficient, and Shanxi has enough time and space to manage the coal production safety problems that have occurred in the past, without stimulating the excessive growth of coal prices.”

The China Coal Industry Association said in late November that accidents in 2023 had increased by 53% compared to all of 2022. The increase prompted a notice from China’s cabinet that safety checks would be ramped up.

China’s coal output rose to a record high of 4.66 billion tons last year amid an ongoing focus on energy security, with around 1.36 billion tons from Shanxi, according to statistics bureau data.

(By Colleen Howe, Amy Lv and Beijing newsroom; Editing by Tony Munroe and Christian Schmollinger)

The country’s biggest mining investors are halting plans to spend billions of rand on new projects in response to a slump in profits due to myriad local challenges and weakening prices of commodities such as platinum.

The layoffs and investment cuts come against a backdrop of high unemployment and weak economic growth that are looming large over the parliamentary vote, due in May and likely to see the governing African National Congress (ANC) lose its parliamentary majority for the first time in 30 years.

A rally in recent years in the price of commodities such as palladium, rhodium, coal and iron ore helped the likes of Anglo American Platinum, Sibanye Stillwater, Kumba Iron Ore, Exxaro Resources make windfall returns – allowing them to partly paper over domestic constraints including power cuts, a poor rail network and crime.

But with prices plummeting since last year, companies are in restructuring mode and cutting jobs.

“The challenge is now just to be able to operate, to be able to produce on a continuous basis,” said Claude Baissac, the CEO for Eunomix Research.

“Unless there is a fundamental change of policy and state capacity, we are going to end up with a marginal mining industry, providing marginal jobs.”

The mining sector’s contribution to South Africa’s gross domestic product stood at 6.2% last year from 7.3% in 2022 and 8.3% a decade earlier, according to Minerals Council South Africa, an industry lobby group. The sector employs about 477,000 people.

Loss making

Anglo American’s platinum and iron ore units in South Africa this week announced plans to cut more than 4,000 jobs and review agreements with a combined 780 contractors.

The restructuring, which includes postponing spending plans at some platinum shafts and closing a metals processing plant, aims to save Anglo 13 billion rand ($687 million).

Some 15 of South Africa’s biggest mining companies, including Amplats, Kumba and Glencore, contributed 110 billion rand in taxes and royalties in 2021, the bulk of about 360 billion rand in corporate tax collected by the treasury, according to RMB Morgan Stanley analysts.

The analysts forecast that amount halved in 2023.

Sibanye, which is South Africa’s top employer in the mining sector, plans to cut about 4,000 jobs at its platinum mines. Smaller platinum producers and some coal producers have also announced job cuts.

About half of the country’s platinum mines, some of which are the world’s deepest and costly to operate, are loss-making at current prices, said Impala Platinum spokesperson Johan Theron.

“That means if nothing changes (in terms of prices), more than 50% of the industry will disappear in some shape or form over time,” he said. “Nothing is sustainable that is fundamentally loss-making.” Impala has said it may cut jobs and last year asked workers to take voluntary exit packages.

Rail crisis

South Africa’s 2023 coal exports hit the lowest level since 1992 because of the dire state of its railway network, operated by state group Transnet and hampered by a lack of wagons and spare parts, cable thefts and inadequate maintenance. For a while companies stockpiled their commodities hoping the situation would improve, but more recently they have been scaling down production and cutting jobs to cushion losses.

Anglo American’s Kumba, Africa’s top iron ore miner, has cut mining output for the next three years until rail capacity improves, CEO Mpumi Zikalala said on Tuesday. Kumba had about 7 million tons of the steel-making ingredient stockpiled at its mines as of December.

“Clearly, for as long as there is no immediate solution to the electricity crisis, and rail and port infrastructure challenges, we will continue to lose jobs,” said the National Union of Mineworkers, one of South Africa’s biggest and most powerful trade unions which was once led by Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s current president.

($1 = 18.9349 rand)

(By Felix Njini and Nelson Banya; Editing by Olivia Kumwenda-Mtambo, Silvia Aloisi and David Evans)

JSW Steel, India’s largest steel producer by capacity, is conducting due diligence and expects to get a coking coal sample from the mine this month to check specifications, the source said.

Whitehaven in January said it was exploring a potential sell-down of about 20% of Blackwater to global steel producers as strategic joint venture partners.

The miner acquired the Blackwater and Daunia mines from BHP Group in a $4.1 billion deal last October, and expects the acquisition to complete in early April.

JSW Steel could consider acquiring more than a 20% stake in Blackwater, the source said.

JSW has held initial talks with Blackwater but has yet to see the specifications of the coking coal from the metallurgical coal mine in Australia, the source said.

A spokeperson for Whitehaven declined to comment on any talks with JSW Steel but referenced mention of the joint venture sell-down in the company’s earlier statements.

A JSW Steel spokesperson declined comment.

JSW Steel has been scouting for coking coal assets overseas.

The company currently imports coking coal from Canada, Australia, the United States, and some grades from Russia.

Last year, JSW Steel was in talks with Canada’s Teck Resources for a stake in its coking coal unit but eventually a Glencore-led consortium agreed to buy it for $9 billion.

Coking coal is emerging as a top option for companies to make a foray into, as it is used to make steel, an important component in large infrastructure and renewable projects.

India was planning to form a consortium of state-owned companies to facilitate coking coal imports to help domestic steel companies tide over shortages, Reuters reported last month.

Indian steel companies consume around 70 million metric tons of coking coal annually, and imports constitute around 85% of the country’s total requirement.

(By Neha Arora and Melanie Burton; Editing by Mayank Bhardwaj and Christina Fincher)

The world’s largest listed miner was cautiously optimistic on a demand recovery in the developed world in the next 12 months but said it was not yet clear how effective stimulus policies have been in China, its biggest customer.

It was more bullish on India, which it said “has considerable positive momentum behind it”.

BHP said it expects a “more balanced global economy and evidence that the worst of the general inflationary wave is behind us will have a positive impact on our industry in calendar year 2024.”

For the first-half, BHP’s strong revenue growth of 6% was underpinned by higher iron ore and copper prices and contributions from new projects, but was partially offset by lower energy coal prices.

BHP said underlying profit attributable to shareholders was $6.60 billion for the six months ended Dec. 31, unchanged from the previous year, but topping an LSEG estimate of $6.42 billion.

It declared an interim dividend of $0.72 per share, compared with $0.90 per share a year earlier. That beat Citi’s expectation of $0.68, and a Visible Alpha consensus of $0.70.

“(The) market should take a modestly higher dividend than expected as a reflection of BHP’s improving confidence regarding (the) outlook on commodity demand/prices,” analysts at Citi wrote.

Shares in BHP edged down 0.3% to A$45.91 amid a sour tone in resources stocks.

Nickel impairment

BHP, which announced a $2.5 billion impairment charge for its Western Australia Nickel business last week, said it sees the nickel industry facing “a difficult multi-year run,” amid a flood of new supply coming out of Indonesia.

“Our base case is that the market may rebalance by the late 2020s,” BHP said.

BHP operates a nickel smelter and a refinery in Western Australia, employing 3,000 people, and has warned that the slump in nickel prices could slow development of its West Musgrave copper nickel project.

“You should be expecting that to be a decision in months, not years,” said Henry. “Clearly we weren’t expecting the nickel market to plunge as quickly and as significantly as it has,” he told analysts at a results briefing.

While it welcomed Australia’s moves to shore up the nickel sector though a production tax credit, BHP said that should not take the focus of ensuring “the right policy settings are in place to drive long term competitive positioning of Australia as a nation.”

The company wants the government to improve industrial relations policies, fiscal settings and permitting requirements, CEO Mike Henry said, but added that might not be enough for miners that have already put their operations into care and maintenance.

“Given just how significant the challenges in the nickel market are today, that may not be enough to alter course.”

($1 = $1.0000)

(By Sameer Manekar, Himanshi Akhand and Melanie Burton; Editing by Chris Reese, Leslie Adler and Sonali Paul)

Related Article: Australia’s iron ore giants to lean conservative on dividends, analysts say

The proposed law would also allow the expropriation of mining assets in some circumstances, for coal as well as other types of mines.

The bill seeks to advance the nation’s “decarbonization goals,” according to the text which is currently open for comments on the Energy and Mines Ministry’s website. The bill hasn’t yet been sent to congress.

President Gustavo Petro came into office in 2022 on a pledge to wean the country off its dependency on fossil fuels. While his administration has refused to sign new coal and oil contracts, the proposed bill would go further by banning new coal licenses by law.

At the COP28 in Dubai, Colombia announced it joined a group of nations calling for the end of fossil fuels. Oil and coal are Colombia’s top two exports, accounting for about half of its export revenue.

The text of the bill also includes a proposal that would allow the government to expropriate mining assets in some circumstances. The assets would need to “contribute to the country’s reindustrialization, energy transition, agricultural development and public infrastructure” and “generate direct qualified and unskilled jobs in decent conditions” among other requisites.

(By Andrea Jaramillo and Oscar Medina)

The world’s second largest coal user, India began auctioning coal blocks to private companies in 2018, ending restrictions on the sale and use of the fuel, which was dominated by Coal India until then.

Output from mines auctioned to private companies is expected to boost production of coal by over 40% to 20 million metric tons in 2024/25, Reuters reported earlier this month.

“A total of 33 bids have been received … where two or more bids have been received for eight coal mines and single bids have been received for 5 coal mines,” the statement said.

The remaining seven bids have been received for a second attempt to auction a tranche of three coal mines, it added.

(By Sakshi Dayal; Editing by Mark Potter)