U.S. coal industry on track for record low in mining deaths

"They need to clearly indicate to the market what their strategy around Olympic Dam is, around shale gas, all of these things, to return confidence that they're not spending huge amounts of capex for very low returns."

Bitumen is expensive to extract, upgrade and refine and cannot compete with the many new shale oil plays, which have pushed US production to its highest level in a decade.

Today Energy minister Taner Yildiz said that South Korean companies were interested in establishing 5,000-6,000 MW coal-fired power plants in Turkey.

Alison Redford, the premier of the Canadian province of Alberta, promised on Wednesday to spend $3 billion on clean-up projects in the oil sands.

The investment bank argues that gold is not a good long-term investment, but offers a compelling medium term trade.

The world's number three miner bought Alcan's business on the continent in 2007 for $38 billion. So far the $100 billion Anglo-Australian company has been forced to write off $18.2 billion of the purchase price.

The closures and the dearth of new builds are as much a function of new environmental impact laws as it is of the US gas boom, which has sent natural gas prices to decade lows.

Why? For mining the stuff for making China.

Infographics design firm Visual Capitalist has constructed a very interesting infographic on the Canadian oil boom. Thanks mostly to the northern Alberta oilsands, the amount of crude oil underneath Canadian soil or waters has gushed from a mere 7 billion barrels a decade ago to an astonishing 175 billion barrels. The only countries with more crude oil than Canada are Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.