Mining and Exploration

The licence has been granted by the Ethiopian Ministry of Mines following a detailed review by it and other government departments of the Project’s Feasibility Study and Environmental, Social and Health Impacts Assessment (ESHIA), which was approved in May 2013 by the Ethiopian Environmental Protection Authority and Ministry of Mines.

Having been founded under the name of New Millennium Capital Corp, it was in June 2011 that the company changed its name to emphasise its transition towards being a producer of iron ore. With that New Millennium Iron Corp. (NML) came into being.

With a head office located in Calgary, Alberta, and corporate offices in Montreal and St. John’s, NML has evolved over the course of the last decade, growing from being a capital pool company into an emerging producer controlling one of the largest iron ore resources in the world.

The Canadian company Goldcorp Inc acquired the Cerro Negro project in late 2010 through the acquisition of Andean Resources. Cerro Negro is a camp-scale compilation with at least 6 veins – Eureka, Mariana Central, Mariana Norte, San Marcos, Bajo Negro and Vein Zone - already identified and located near surface which allow for development of relatively shallow ramps which will reach depths of 300 metres, on average.

The Latin American precious metals business, based in Lima, currently holds a 60 percent interest in the Pallancata mine and the Inmaculada project assets. In order to acquire the remaining percentage of the assets the company has said it will acquire its owner International Minerals.

Hochschild said it planned to raise between $48-$96 million in an equity placing to partially fund the acquisition and noted the company is still on track to produce 20 million attributable silver equivalent ounces in 2013.

Once considered home to one of the largest gold deposits in India, the Kolar mines were nationalised in 1956 and 1972, before operations were handed to BGML. Mounting losses and falling revenues however led to BGML’s closure in 2001. In June of this year, India’s Supreme Court approved the government’s plan to issue a global tender for BGML’s assets, so that the Kolar gold mines could be restated.

Cerrejón is an integrated mining and transport complex in the La Guajira region, jutting out into the Caribbean Sea from the north of Colombia. The mine is independently operated, but belongs in three equal parts to subsidiaries of BHP Billiton, Anglo American, and Glencore Xstrata: between them these partners approved investment of $1.3 billion in 2011 for an expansion project that will increase Cerrejon’s production and export capacity by 8 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) in 2012 - 2014 to reach a 40 mtpa production by 2015.

The First Quantum Minerals (FQM) story began in the late 90s and spans humble beginnings from a tailings retreatment process at Bwana Mkubwa in Zambia, to its present day achievable aspiration to be one of the world’s leading copper producers. The financing and development of Kansanshi marked the transition of the company to a fully fledged miner and the beginning of a spectacular growth story for the company over the last decade.