Sesa Goa, a subsidiary of Vedanta Resources, on Saturday said it will buy 51% stake in an iron ore making firm in Liberia for $90 million in an all-cash deal. Located in Western part of Liberia and spread over 270 sq km area, the company has an estimated reserve of over 1.05 billion tonnes iron ore. Vedanta's investment follows iron ore giant ArcelorMittal which after five years of ground work started operations at the country's Tokadeh mine earlier this year and is spending $800 million in the first phase of the project to rehabilitate the rail link and port. ArcelorMittal exported the first iron ore from Liberia after a 20 year hiatus on June 11 from the port of Buchanan.

Green Car Congress reports Rio Tinto has signed a deal with with the India's Jindal Steel and Power, part of the $15 billion Jindal group, to develop and commercialize the HIsmelt direct smelting technology. The existing plant in Australia, shuttered by Rio Tinto in 2009 because of depressed pig iron prices, will be relocated to India. HIsmelt, short for high-intensity smelting, is the first commercial direct smelting process for making iron straight from ore. The technology smelts iron ore fines directly using non-coking coals, and provides environmental benefits over traditional ironmaking as it removes the need for coke ovens and sinter plants.

Mining and energy firms have swooped to buy more than 390,000ha across Queensland Australia despite almost unanimous opposition to the sell-off of prime farming land. In the Surat Basin west of Brisbane, small farming communities have been decimated as the race for mining riches forces families off properties after decades of working the land. Fears over the impact of the mining squeeze on communities prompted angry locals to rally at Oakey, while an inquiry has been announced by the New South Wales Parliament into the environmental impacts of the coal seam gas industry.

Canadian Natural Resources announced this week it is poised to restart its Horizon plant seven months after it went up in flames and aims to spend over $2 billion to more than double its capacity. The Horizon outage led to a shortage of syncrude – a light oil manufactured from bitumen – which helped Alberta's producers attract a premium of $18 above benchmark US oil prices. That nice little earner will now likely melt away and follows a Reuters poll that showed a majority of analysts and oil traders expect the spread between US and international crude prices to surpass $30 in the next year.

The Hill's E2-Wire reports Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday that the proposed pipeline to bring Canadian oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries, if approved, will operate under tougher safety standards than the law requires. Clinton addressed TransCanada’s planned $7 billion, 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline — which is under State Department review — after a meeting with Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird in Washington, D.C.

Miners voted Friday to end a two-week long strike at the world's largest copper mine, La Escondida in northern Chile, approving an agreement struck by their union and management. Escondida employees accepted a management offer of a special production bonus for 2010, a year in which the mine had record earnings, a spokesman for the mine's largest union said. Image of the Escodida mine, by BHP Billiton.

The Economic Times reports Botswana is the world’s biggest rough diamond producer by value in 2010. According to statistics release by the Kimberley Process, a UN certified scheme, despite Russia producing more rough diamonds in 2010 at 34 million carats worth around $2.38 billion, Botswana’s 22 million carats mined in 2010 were worth around $2.59 billion — $210 million dollars more than Russia.

The Navajo Nation's allegations that a coal mining company conspired with others to cheat the tribe out of as much as $600 million in royalties was settled in federal court on Thursday. The tribe sued what is now Peabody Energy in 1999. The terms of the agreement are confidential. The US Supreme Court ruled against the Navajo in a similar lawsuit filed against the federal government. Peabody has operated through a business partnership with the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe for more than 40 years in Northeastern Arizona.

Mining companies are expected to invest more than $116-billion in Canada over the next five years, an industry body said on Thursday.