Having risen solidly from mid-December, the oil price took a bit of a hit just prior to the new year as worries about the spread of the omicron variant and its possible impact on travel and GDP growth hit prices. The new year has started more optimistically, though. While significant work days are being lost […]
Stuart Burns
Europe’s aluminum smelters in turmoil amid rising power costs
As our colleague Fouad Egbaria noted this week, rising power costs in Europe, almost wholly down to the cost of natural gas, resulted in reduced output at Europe’s largest aluminum smelter, Aluminium Dunkerque Industries France. Losses there ballooned to €20 million ($22 million) during November, as natural gas prices quadrupled this year. Most aluminum smelters […]
Europe faces severe energy risks heading into coldest part of winter
It seems perverse to say that COVID could come to the rescue of the European energy market. But the reality is the market is in a precarious state. Restrictions hindering businesses and industries’ power consumption could alleviate the energy crunch by reducing power use. At the height of the 2020 lockdowns, power demand fell by […]
2021 proved a disruptive one for metals, mining supply chains
The pandemic certainly created a challenging environment for business in 2021. Lockdowns hampered operations. Metal scarcity and rising metal prices caused immense cost pressures, loss of profits and, in some cases, bankruptcies. One, although by no means the only issue, was disruption to global supply chains. Research into the causes and potential solutions will be […]
What impact could inflation expectations have on metal prices?
You cannot turn on the TV or read a news feed without hearing dire warnings of surging inflation. The U.S. Consumer Price Index rose 6.8% year on year in November, the fastest pace since 1982. Meanwhile, while Eurozone inflation climbed to a record 4.9%. More than three-quarters of countries analyzed by Pew Research had higher […]
Logistics costs ease heading into the New Year, but bottlenecks remain
Importers of metals and metal components may be seeing a glimmer of light at the end of what has been a very long tunnel of logistics chaos, sky-high freight rates and shipping delays. Freight rates have eased from peaks per 40ft container in the summer for some shippers of up to $15,000 to $9,000 last […]
Iron ore prices surging on higher imports
It is always a challenge reading markets, whether you look at fundamentals of supply, demand and macro economic developments or whether you are a chartist looking at price trends to see how they compare to previous models, assessing price movement relative to Fibonacci levels and indications from high/low daily pricing data. One issue we repeatedly […]
Aluminum price moves sideways but looks to China for cues
The medium term future for the aluminum price depends on China. How many times have we heard that before? Not just for aluminum but for a host of other base metals, too. But the reality is China is running a deficit and sucking in metal from the rest of the world, where demand is already […]
US will release 50 million barrels of oil from its strategic reserves — will it affect prices?
Well, so far, the simple answer to the question posed in the headline is “no.” On Tuesday, the White House announced the Department of Energy will “make available releases of 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower prices for Americans and address the mismatch between demand exiting the pandemic and […]
Aluminum inventories dwindle toward zero
Longtime readers of MetalMiner may recall a number of aluminum posts we have put out over the years since the financial crisis that explore shadow stocks or the “stock and finance trade” inventory that have referred to the murky world of “off-warrant,” or non-exchange, reserves of aluminum. Those reserves are often hard to determine in […]
