It will be interesting to see how the environmentally sensitive French react to the widespread use of the controversial hydraulic drilling technology known as “fracking on their home turf. Toreador Resources, a Texas oil company, has been awarded drilling rights to 750,000 acres of the Paris Basin, its licenses stretching for hundreds of kilometers from [...]
The Senate passed the $636 billion Department of Defense appropriations bill this week that includes millions of dollars for military-related projects that will either consume metals or improve the technology used when working with them. When you look at the list of projects you have to wonder how much they are for purely military applications [...]
Copenhagen has failed and American workers should heave a sigh of relief. Not because global warming does not have any scientific basis “ we don’t have the evidence to refute or support the proposition that man-made emissions are impacting global temperatures, we have our doubts and hunches but truthfully they are nothing more. No the [...]
JP Morgan has come out with their predictions for 2010 and said they see two principal drivers to commodity prices taking hold. The first is a return to the fundamentals of supply and demand driving prices. The second is the withdrawal of liquidity from the investment market as the US stimulus package is wound down [...]
Alcoa hasn’t lost sight of the long term even as it juggles production capacities and investment projects around the world in an extremely tight financial investment climate. Where Rio backed out of its 49% stake in the Ras Azzour aluminum smelter earlier this year because it failed to raise the capital for what was then [...]
According to a report in Reuters, China backed down from a plan to reclassify large electric bicycles as motorbikes last week, a move that threatened to derail the phenomenal growth in the e-bike market and a major driver for lead consumption. The proposed legislation stirred widespread fears that more than 2,000 e-bike factories would close [...]
In a Dec 17 post entitled Outokumpu moves into India with Service Center we reported the Finnish stainless producer had dusted off plans for a full stainless service center on India’s west coast and had made a commitment to proceed with the investment. We got it wrong; picking up on some over enthusiastic domestic Indian [...]
Never mind reducing oil or coal consumption, nuclear power is making a case to solve a much more serious commodity shortage “ water. Las Vegas could be one of the first US cities to be hit by a serious water shortage says the Telegraph Newspaper, some are even questioning whether it can survive in its [...]
