Mining and Exploration

“Business since we last spoke has been good for the company,” enthuses Adrok’s Managing Director, Gordon Stove. “We have been growing steadily and in the process increased our turnover for last year compared to that achieved in 2012. At the heart of this has been our ability to win more clients, and with this they have brought us fresh contracts and new sources of revenue. What that means is that at this time we are well on course to increase that turnover again for 2014, so things are going very nicely for us indeed.”

Between 1886 and the early 1970s the Central Rand Goldfield was intensively mined, with overall gold output estimated to have reached around 250 million ounces. All good things, as they say, must come to an end however and by the mid-70s a combination of factors including depressed gold prices, ageing infrastructure and the reduction in the availability of high grade reefs meant that the area was declared “worked out”.

Praxis Earth Works (Praxis), based in Grande Prairie in northern Alberta, is a new company, led by its General Manager Ryan Martin since October 2010 – yet in terms of experience it lacks nothing when it comes to rock crushing, its core competency. The company started out operating a single crusher, making aggregate for a mixture of private clients, government departments and municipalities within a reachable radius of Grande Prairie.

For more than 20 years (since 1993 to be exact) Royal Arctic Line has been a premier provider of specialist services and skills to customers in Greenland and the wider Arctic region. Wholly owned by the Government of Greenland, Royal Arctic Line and its vessels hold an exclusive concession for the transportation of general supplies by sea to and from Greenland, and between the various Greenlandic towns and settlements.

An agreement by the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) with South Africa's biggest platinum mining companies, has brought to an end the nation's longest-running strike.

It puts the current gold market into perspective when one looks back just a couple of years. In 2012 when we last looked at Alacer Gold's Çöpler gold mine gold prices stood at just over $1,000 an ounce. Since then they have risen of course to as high as $1,800 in mid-2011 before setting out on a steady decline.

To say that 2013 was a good year for African Minerals is, in truth, something of a major understatement. While the company itself may be more modest about such things the reality is that this is the company that last year was responsible for completing Africa’s fastest major mine development.

Previously delayed for a number of years, the Simandou project is poised to become the largest iron ore and infrastructure project developed in Africa.

The $20 billion "investment framework" deal signed by the aforementioned players provides legal and financial backing for the project. If ratified, the three parties said they would complete a feasibility study, including timeline and costs, within about a year.

The Boikarabelo field in South Africa's Waterberg region, to the north of the country and close to the border with Botswana, is an outstanding coal asset by any standards. An extensive coal seam, between 120 and 130 metres in depth and containing zones of varying quality thermal and soft coking coal, lies only 20 metres below the surface in terrain that is flat and easy to get at. It is the ideal site for an open pit mine: the shallow overburden means that a small fleet of equipment can produce a lot of coal.

Since its founding in 1931, H. J. O’Connell Ltd. (HJOC) has been a leading figure within the heavy civil engineering and construction industry. Originally led by Montrealer Herbert John O’Connell, the company has spent the last 80-plus years growing to become one of the planet’s leading specialists in heavy civil infrastructure construction, mining applications and energy development, and is today a vital supplier to Canada’s vast and lucrative resource industries.