We land with Air France in Bamako, the capital of Mali on the Niger River. Bamako means “crocodile river” in Bambara. The French under general Gallieni built a railroad at the end of the 19th century all the way from Dakar on the Atlantic to reach the Niger at Bamako. This was an extraordinary engineering … Read more
There are very few places left in the world where a prospecting geologist can come across a gold mining camp with over nine thousand hand-dug pits. A gold mineralising system which has never been drilled! That is the singular experience I had on the 16th of April 2010 and one I never expect to forget. As usual … Read more
“If the present tries to sit in judgement of the past, it will lose the future.” – Winston Churchill Several western zinc mines have recently closed or are running out of ore quickly. Glencore recently announced that its zinc production fell 18 per cent to 306,000 tonnes as two of its mines have reached the … Read more
Epithermal or Ephemeral? In March 1997 rumours that Bre-X had apparently not discovered gold at Busang in Indonesia staggered the markets. The downward spiral began on March 18th as reports swept the world that Bre-X geologist Michael de Guzman was missing in the Borneo jungle and presumed dead after falling 240 metres from a helicopter … Read more
According to the prospectus for its $10bn initial public offering in May 2011, Glencore supplied 60 per cent of the international third-party market in zinc metal and 50 per cent of the international third-party zinc concentrates market. This was before Glencore’s takeover of Xstrata was completed in May 2013. To meet antitrust approval for the … Read more
We will eventually come though this smothering grasp of the bear when good projects struggle for support and we will move quickly into a bull-run when even the dogs attract hot money. It is the natural cycle of things just as sure as season follows season. …… and something strange is starting to happen which suggests to … Read more
So it turns out that Rare Earth elements (REE) are not rare! REE are not rare in that they are common in the earth’s crust and disseminated in rocks ranging in concentrations from 150 to 220 parts per million which even exceeds copper (55ppm) and zinc (70ppm). Unlike most commonly mined base and precious metals it is … Read more
In 1974, some forty years ago now, Marc Rich and co-worker Pincus Green set up their own company in Switzerland as Marc Rich & Co. AG. In his book King of Oil, Daniel Amman describes how Marc Rich’s attempt in the early 1990’s to corner the zinc market was the worst deal of his career. This … Read more
Zinc now accounts for only 30 percent of revenue from “Zinc” mines, that is zinc mines in the broadest sense, as polymetallic deposits become proportionally a more important source of zinc and contributor to zinc production. In some of many of these precious metal dominant polymetallic mines zinc is often not much more than a by-product and will be produced … Read more
