USA and Canada

Toronto-based Barrick Gold, the world’s largest gold miner, is building up its copper portfolio with an agreement to acquire copper producer Equinox Minerals.

Equinox has two primary assets, the Lumwana mine in Zambia (100 per cent owned) and the Jabal Sayid development project in Saudi Arabia (70 per cent owned, but Equinox is in the process of acquiring the remaining 30 per cent).

The Turkish Government has chosen US manufacturer Sikorsky to supply 109 Turkish Utility Helicopters, derived from the BLACK HAWK helicopter, for multi-mission use.

The aircraft will be assembled in Turkey by Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) as the prime contractor and will include components supplied by Sikorsky and other American and Turkish companies.  

The Defense Industry Executive Committee (DIEC) has estimated the total program value to TAI at $3.5 billion, inclusive of work to be performed by Sikorsky and other program partners.

A year and a day after the Deepwater Horizon accident, BP has signed an agreement with federal and state agencies to provide up to $1 billion (£600 million) to speed up the implementation of projects to restore affected areas in the Gulf of Mexico.

Express Integrated Technologies, a US-based manufacturer of heat transfer and combustion engineering equipment for the energy exploration industry, has today opened a Canadian office in Calgary, Alberta.

A new company, Express Integrated Technologies Canada, Ltd, has been created to provide technical expertise, aftermarket support and business development personnel to support the ongoing oil sands recovery projects using EIT's once through steam generators (OTSGs).

April 20 marks the first anniversary of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico—not an occasion for celebration, certainly, but an event that will live in many memories for a good few anniversaries yet.

A news conference will be held at Myrtle Grove Marina, Sulphur, Louisiana at 10.30am Central time in which speakers will urge Congress to dedicate fines collected under the Clean Water Act to restore degraded coastal wetlands.

US friction management and power transmission company Timken plans to increase its annual steelmaking capacity by 120,000 tons across its steel manufacturing facilities in Canton, Ohio.

This has been made possible by a series of improvements at its Harrison Steel Plant following the $60 million rolling-mill investment completed there in 2008.

Over the last two years, continuous improvement efforts at the Harrison plant have allowed Timken to achieve record output well beyond the new mill's original design.

Mixed news on the economic front again today, with the release of index figures for industrial production and prices, and consumer prices for March.

Industrial production increased 0.8 percent in March and rose at an annual rate of 6.0 percent for the first quarter as a whole. Manufacturing output increased 0.7 percent in March, its fourth consecutive month of strong expansion, producing an annual rate of 9.1 percent for the first quarter.

The Export-Import Bank of the United States has given preliminary approval for an $805.6 million direct loan to South Africa’s state-owned utility Eskom.

The financing, if eventually approved, will support Eskom's purchase of engineering and construction management services which will be used to construct the Kusile power plant, located in the Emalahleni area of Mpumulanga Province.

The loan includes a business contract for Kansas, US-based Black & Veatch to provide the engineering and construction management services to Eskom.

The first country to discover and develop key nanotechnologies will lead the next technology era, a Congressional committee was told today.

Nanoelectronics is a priority for the US economy, for high paying jobs and for the nation's ability to innovate and compete in the future, was the message put across by Dr. Jeff Welser, director of the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative (NRI) tothe House Committee on Science, Space and Technology's Subcommittee on Research and Science Education.