India finalizes uranium deal with Australia

Comex gold and silver futures prices made strong gains in morning trade Monday, with the February gold contract powering to a six week high of $1,679.50 an ounce, up just shy of 1% by midday. Gold is now up over 5% for the year, but still well of the record high above $1,900 hit in September.

While miners and explorers may be hitting the investment conferences looking for funding, NGOs are successfully using crowd sourcing to get projects started.

FLSmidth, a global engineering company out of Denmark, is planning a A$267 million acquisition of Ludowici Limited, an Brisbane-based company that manufactures coal centrifuges, vibrating screens and complementary wear resistant products.

Jose Sergio Gabrielli is no longer CEO of Petrobras, Brazil's state-controlled oil company. He was replaced by Maria das Graças Foster, a business leader with close ties to the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff.

Forty technicians were needed to create a 8.5 mm hole so an endoscope could be lowered inside the stricken Fukushima containament vessel. […]

Peter Kent, Canada's environment minister on Friday referred Teck Resources's newly acquired Frontier Oil Sands project in northern Alberta to an independent review panel because of the propose mine's "potential for significant adverse effects on the environment. "

A Canadian oilsands company, Sunshine Oilsands, is turning to the Hong Kong stock exhange in hopes of raising between $500 million and $700 million through an IPO.

Platts news service is reporting that Kinder Morgan, a pipeline company, and Ambre Energy will submit proposals to build coal export facilities at Port St. Helens, Oregon.

Caving to pressure from environmental groups, the Obama administration on Wednesday rejected the $7 billion-plus Keystone XL pipeline which would have carried 700,000 barrels of crude oil a day from the Alberta oil sands to refineries along the US Gulf coast. The lack of pipelines like Keystone has meant that Canadian crude sells for much cheaper than global oil – on Wednesday the discount widened to over $30.