CHARTS: Big mining’s surge in value shames tech giants

Shri Beni Prasad Verma, Union Minister for Steel, said that India will become the world's second largest producer of steel by 2013.

FLSmidth has been awarded a contract worth approximately EUR 25m (approximately DKK 180m) by Jhabua Power Ltd. for the supply and installation of the first phase of a 1,800 tons per hour coal handling plant for their upcoming power plant project at Jhabua in the state of Madhya Pradesh in central India.

Australia's Highlands Pacific and China Metallurgical Group can now power on their $1.5 billion Ramu nickel project in Papua New Guinea after a judge threw out the environmental challenge to the project's planned deep-sea disposal of tailings after an 18-month legal battle. Ramu is situated on Papua New Guinea's north-west coast and is completely built – annual production is estimated at more than 31,000 tonnes of nickel and 3,300 tonnes of cobalt for over 20 years.

Indian Express reports Karnataka Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa, currently holidaying in Mauritius, is among a slew of politicians, many of them from the BJP party, set to be named in a damning 8,000-page report on the illegal plunder of the Indian state’s iron ore resources over a decade. The report from the Lokayukta, an anti-corruption ombudsman organization, may lead to so called President's rule in Karnataka when a state legislature is dissolved or suspended and the state is placed under direct federal governance and is proving to be a huge embarrassment to the BJP leadership.

Indonesia’s huge reserves of thermal coal — used for power plants — are being aggressively targeted by energy-hungry China and India. The demand, combined with high commodities prices, is driving a resources boom in remote Indonesian provinces, and creating billions of dollars in personal wealth.

A freeze on licenses to explore for minerals is no small matter in Mongolia, a country undergoing a huge resources boom, as miners such as Anglo-Australian giant Rio Tinto (RIO) and the Chinese-backed Shenhua Group compete for the right to extract coal, copper, gold, molybdenum, and uranium. It is a resource play that is expected to bring a flood of money into the impoverished country over the next decade, centered around huge mining projects such as the Shivee Ovoo and Tavan Tolgoi coal reserves, estimated to be worth $300 billion and $400 billion, respectively, and the copper and gold mine Oyu Tolgoi, worth some $300 billion. (Image is of the Nadaam Festival, traditional Mongolian wrestling in Central Mongolia. Photograph by Oksana Perkins taken on July 10, 2009 / Shutterstock.com.)

Chinese state-owned company Dafeng Port Group plans to set up a ferronickel industry in Kotabaru, South Kalimantan with a production capacity of 200 million metric tons a year. The president director of Dafeng Port Group Co. Ltd., Ni Xiangrong, said here on Saturday the Dafeng Port Group Co.Ltd. has successfully developed an integrated economic zone in China and plan to build a ferronickel industry and its support industries in Kotabaru.

JSW Energy Ltd., the Indian power producer controlled by the billionaire Jindal family, delayed expansion of an electricity project because of high coal costs. The company will shelve a planned 3,200-megawatt expansion at a plant in Ratnagiri in the western state of Maharashtra as it waits for coal-pricing “clarity” from Indonesia and Australia, Chief Executive Officer Lalit Kumar Gupta said in an interview in Mumbai yesterday.

According to the World Steel Association (WSA), production of steel in China during the January-June period of the current year stood at 350.543 MT, almost half of world output during the same period and the single highesat by any country.