TPT January 2008

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From the AmericaS
January 2008 106 ›
the House Natural Resources Committee, declared on November 1,
“The robbery of American gold and silver must stop”.
The bill arouses a similar passion in opponents, who claim that
the proposed royalties on mining operations would amount to a
tax on an already struggling industry and would send mining jobs
overseas. “This legislation hurts, perhaps even kills, the domestic
mining industry and with it the towns and communities in western
Nevada and rural America,” said Rep. Dean Heller, Republican
of Nevada, whose state is the fourth-highest gold producer in the
world, after South Africa, Australia, and China.
As with many other contentious issues before the US Congress
these days, the proposed mining royalties were quickly
suspected of posing a threat to national security. Opponents
circulated a letter asserting that the bill could limit domestic
availability of such minerals as magnesium, critical to the US
military.
The prospective rewrite of the hard-rock mining law would put
new environmental controls on such mining, establish a cleanup
fund for abandoned mines, and permanently ban cheap sales
of public lands for mining. Coal mining and the oil and gas
industries already pay royalties on materials extracted from
public lands.
The likelihood of passage of the Hardrock Mining and Reclamation
Act of 2007, in the House and then the Senate, is perhaps not great.
President George W Bush said he would veto the bill if and when it
reaches his desk.
Of related interest . . .
› Canada will now consider issues of national security before
approving foreign takeovers of Canadian companies, Prime
Minister Stephen J Harper said on October 4. The new scrutiny
was prompted by the announced plan of a company owned by the
government of Abu Dhabi to acquire PrimeWest Energy Trust, an
oil and gas producer based in Calgary, Alberta, with properties in
Western Canada and in the northwestern US states of Montana,
Wyoming and South Dakota.
An earlier plan – eventually abandoned – by a company controlled
by the government of China to acquire a Canadian mine operator
aroused strong resistance in Canada. The national security
evaluation will not be required in takeovers that had already been
announced.
The world’s largest gold miner offers a
sporting proposition
Barrick Gold Corp, of Canada, will award $10 million to any
scientist, researcher, or inventor (an all-inclusive category) who can
increase the amount of silver the world’s largest pure gold mining
company recovers from a mine in Argentina. Taking note of an
“unusual approach to research and development”, Ian Austen of the
New York Times wrote that the company’s decision to stake a prize
for a new process grew out of its frustration at recovering only 6.7
per cent of the silver in the Veladero mine, compared to an 80 per