The Gulf of Mexico Oil Slick Satellite Photo

Not easy to see in blogsize so click on it to get better detail.

click to enlarge (gets very big)

By the way; please don't refer people to this post. If you want to spread the image around, please download it yourself and post it to wherever you want. This kind of image won't make it to the general public conscience if we leave it to MSM.

This may turn into man's worst ever single act of pollution.

Newsflash! Miners can be human beings too!

The strong news from Dynasty Metals (DMM.to) this week that concerned progress made by its Zaruma production facility was featured in this IKN post yesterday. The result was that the stock has dropped (go figure) but underneath yesterday's post site friend, regular commenter and raving lefty locojhon (but in the nicest possible way, dude:-) ) added the following comment and it's worth a look and a comment. Here's locojhon, commenting on one detail of the DMM presser:

This part intrigued me. It is very vague, but seems to indicate reduced environmental water-borne pollution going offsite when it states "The grey water treatment facility constructed by the Company supplies all the water used at the plant. Water that is required is diverted before entering the local river untreated, purified and used in the operation of the plant." Have they actually reduced or better yet eliminated pollution or are they playing smoke and mirror games that not only damage the environment, but later require massive governmental funds to clean up later.

Are there proprietary ways of mining without polluting they employ that others can't? Brainiacs or rockheads???

TIA,,,locoto

The idea of using 'grey water' at a mining production facility is an environmentally sound one. The technical details run into 150 page reports, but we can sum it up in the following way:

1) Water from the local sewage system or water previously used by other artisanal miners is piped to the plant. It's dirty and needs treatment before it can be used.

2) The mining company cleans up the water and then uses it for its own purposes

3) The water is then filtered again by the company before leaving the facility and put back into the local water system.

So to answer your question, loco, it's not some kind of smoke'n'mirrors thing going on. The valley where Dynasty Zaruma operates is chock full of artisanal mining operations (been that way for generations) that use the local water supply and don't give a fig about how much pollution they add to it before it runs into the local rivers. So what DMM.to is doing is diverting this water before it gets to the river, cleaning it up, using it, then cleaning it again before letting it go. It's an environmentally sound policy and is certainly helping to clean up an environment that's been contaminated by old workings for as long as anybody can remember.

By the way, this is the exact same water supply method that Fortuna Silver (FVI.to) will use at its new mine at San José Oaxaca, Mexico. These people aren't making the localities dirtier and they aren't leaving things the way they were; they're actually making things a lot cleaner.

Not all mining companies are the same and IKN will continue with its policy of championing good, responsible mining companies while at the same time highlighting those that bring shame to the sector.

Madre de Dios, Peru: We're now allowed to worry, because......

...English language media now consider the story important.

The BBC (damned Eurocommies won't let a guy do a fair day's work, eh?) starts its report like this. Click thru for the rest

Peru's gold rush sparks fears of ecological disaster

The high price of gold has drawn thousands of miners to a region of south-east Peru, but deforestation and the high levels of mercury used in mining has led to fears of an imminent ecological disaster, as Dan Collyns reports.

It is only from the air that you can see the full extent of the destruction.

The forests seems almost endless until it is abruptly interrupted by the raw colours of sand and earth; rivers torn open and thousands of hectares denuded and pocked with dead, stagnant pools of water.

Alluvial gold mining in Peru's southern Amazon rainforest has spread, driven by the high price of gold, now more than $1,100 (£680) per ounce, or $36 a gram.

Close to 200 sq kms (77 sq miles) of jungle have been lost in the evocatively named Madre de Dios (Mother of God) region.

"To know what we are losing, this area of Peru - the western Amazon - is the world's enclave of biological diversity," says biologist Ernesto Raez, who heads the Environmental Sustainability Centre in Lima's Cayetano Heredia University.

CONTINUES HERE

Peru: Madre de Dios gold mining, as seen by Hambone

The Amazon jungle, as seen by Peruvian gold mining
companies and ignored by its government

I've been given permission by the author to paste up part of chapter 17 of the great book 'Peruvian Plunge' by Sam 'Hambone' Mitchell (another excerpt is here, along with a link to get your own copy...only $5 and well worth your time) that covers the ecological disaster area known as the Madre De Dios gold mining zone (that we covered in this post earlier in the week).

We join our hero as he goes through a difficult waters moment while travelling on a boat up the Madre De Dios river. Read on.....

"....my bladder stretched to the bursting point by two cups of coffee, I begged the captain to pull over for a pit stop. “I know just the spot coming up,” Pablo – who spoke perfect English – assured me. Two minutes later, we drew near to what first appeared to be a rocky beach on the left shore. As we pulled up to it, however, I noticed that the “beach” had been stripped bare of all vegetation as if it had been grazed by a Brontasaurus (who knows, maybe it had); just a few yards back from the waterline, three boxcar-sized pyramids of loose gravel and slag had been heaped there by some unseen giant hand. No bird stirred and no grasshopper whirred in the eerily still, almost sterile air of the place. What the Hell?

“Your first Madre de Dios gold mine, but certainly not your last,” announced Pablo when the motor had died. He indicated the riverside wasteland with a dismissive wave of his hand and weary ironic smile. “This one was just abandoned; I wish I could say the same for the others.”

Thinking that the ruined crescent of beach was “all” there was to the abandoned mine, I scrambled out of the boat and up one of the thirty-foot high slag heaps to find a private place to pee, as no tree or bush remained standing on the waterline. Cresting the top of the pile of loose stones, my eyes were speared by a shocking sight: stretching several hundred feet back into the jungle behind the slag heaps was two to three acres of sun-blasted, scorched-earth wasteland. In the middle of this ruined barren moonscape, covering perhaps a quarter-acre, was a slimy pool of toxic sludge that looked more like anti-freeze than water. Scattered about were stray bits of rusted-out machine parts and plastic jetsam. I added my own stream of human waste to the decoupage of destruction, and retreated back to the boat rocking gently in the waters of the Mother of God.

“This was just a small-time operation, what they call a ‘pirate mine’ because it had no permits to operate by the Peruvian government,” Pablo explained as we waited for the other passengers to finish their business. I asked him if the government had shut this mine down; Pablo laughed a “yeah, right” snort. “The government has neither the money nor the will to shut these mines down. The miners move in wherever they want to, dig until they think they can do better somewhere else, then move further into the jungle. These guys are set up somewhere else by now.”

As I had read but never paid much attention to, the other problem with these mines, legal or illegal – besides the total destruction of the fragile riparian corridor – is the fact that the miners leach the sand and pebbles through mercury, which binds to the gold dust, allowing them to harvest the tiny yellow flecks that have been luring fortune-seekers to Peru for centuries. Once the gold is collected, the mercury is washed on down the river to poison the fish – and anyone who eats the fish, be it bird, otter or human – downstream. Out of sight, out of mind, like so much else in the jungle. With the Peruvian government’s full knowledge and cooperation, hundreds of gallons of the toxic metal are simply washed away down the river for someone else to deal with.

As Pablo knew from experience all too close to home, it wasn’t just the folks downstream from the mines who suffered. “My brother went to work in one of these mines. When he got there, there was no fresh water for the workers to drink. His boss told him, ‘Drink from the creeks and river like everybody else.’ Pretty soon he was sick, then in the hospital for six weeks. He’s better now, but he says he will never work in the mines again.”

Everyone back in the boat, we headed off again. We hadn’t gone a mile before the real nightmarish visions began. They started out small enough, with the one- or two-man small-potato operations. While one guy would shovel wheelbarrows full of sand and gravel to fill the gravel-washing sluices (themselves supplied by a gas-powered water pumps from Hell), his buddy would wash the material through the mercury, ever alert for the tiny flakes that were the ultimate goal of all this carnage. Working together in teams, these small-time Planet Nibblers might be able to destroy a few acres of riverside in a year.

As we chugged on downstream, we came to the next level of Planet Eating – huge dredges set on barges in mid-stream that sucked the river bottom off its bed like a giant vacuum cleaner sucking up dust from a dirty floor, coughing the sand and rock up onto huge conveyor belts that were combed through by several workers. The tons of mercury-stained silt were dumped directly back into the heart of the river.

But the true, undisputed winner of the Planet-eating blue ribbon prize for inflicting, hands down, the most harm against the Mother of God weren’t the small-potato pirates or the Idaho-baker barges, but the legal “official” gold mines operated with the full encouragement and permits of the Peruvian government. These full-scale assaults against Mother Earth – clearly paid for and operated by some mega-buck multi-national mining corporation – didn’t screw around with piss-ant little wheelbarrows and water pumps. To truly lay waste to a planet, you need bulldozers, front-end loaders, and dump trucks the size of houses to move that rock around. You could almost smell the mercury hanging in the air.

Staring dumbfounded at this unbelievable in-your-face carnage stretching for miles along both banks of the Mother of God River (and this was just the little bit visible from the boat), I asked myself over and over again: what is humanity getting out of this rotten deal? Except for the few guys at the head of the pack – who have probably never even been to Peru – who is the “winner” in this lose-lose situation? The ladies back in the U.S. with their gold jewelry? Are those little flecks of yellow worth this destruction, this needless swathe of death? Could humanity survive without the “precious metal” being ripped from our precious planet? How much insult could one Mother of God take?

Of course, all these miners and their poverty-stricken families needed somewhere to call home. The small-time “pirates” tended to call home tiny little shacks that were really nothing more than overgrown tents made out of bright blue tarpaulins, clinging to the muddy riverbanks in little clearings hacked out between the waterline and the jungle. As we passed these forlorn little bivouacs, packs of curious children would stare out at us; I would stare back at them, wondering what kind of life these kids had to look forward to (clearly not a life in school, as it’s hard to run a school bus up and down a river). I asked Pablo his opinion, and he said, dismissively and unconvincingly: “These people have a lot more money than you think. They don’t have to live this way; they want to live this way.” Whatever you say, amigo…

The really high-rollers in the Peruvian gold-mining game got to move to the downright posh community of Rio Colorado, where they could upgrade from tarp-covered tent to rough plank and tin-roofed hovel. A six-block unbroken line of these depressing miners’ shacks stretched along the right riverbank; perched atop every other one of them like so many invading flying saucers were shiny new satellite dishes, so the miners could come home from a hard day of poisoning themselves with mercury to watch the governor of California blow up terrorists.

Pablo explained that the Colorado River, a major tributary of the Madre de Dios, was being invaded by the miners at an alarming rate. They were pushing deeper and deeper into the pristine million-acre wilderness of the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve, dumping their silt and their mercury into the river, to wind up in the village. When I asked him why the natives the reserve was supposed to “protect” put up with this, he explained that most of the miners in the reserve were the natives! Whatever “noble savage” myth I was still suffering from at that point floated on down the Mother of God with the gallons of mercury dumped there by the Indians who for thousands of years have depended on the river for their food and water. I mean, be real: who would be crazy enough to live in some hut in the forest when you could live in a house in town with a satellite dish on the roof?

The biggest irony in all of this is that the gold miners are opposed to Hunt Oil’s petroleum explorations because they think, for some reason I can’t fathom, that the oil company will shut down their illegal gold mines. Of course, if that does happen, the gold miners can always go to work for Hunt Oil until the oil is gone, at which time they can go back to gold mining: money is money and Planet Eating is Planet Eating, what difference could it make?

Get your copy of Peruvian Plunge here

Peru: Gold miners in Madre de Dios

The front page, above fold, of El Comercio today
(click to enlarge)

An excellent piece of journalism in Peru's El Comercio today (a reminder of the newspaper that it used to be) bylined Nelly Luna, showing the ecological disaster area created in the Amazon jungle of Peru by informal gold mining. The Madre de Dios Region is home to an estimated 30,000 miners, nearly all of whom produce gold illegally and with no regard whatsoever to environmental regulations.

Main feature page of the El Comercio page today,
complete with photos of the disaster zone
(click to enlarge)

Here follows my translation of the full report, entitled "Brutal Deforestation of Madre De Dios", and watch out right at the end for a revealing interview with the Mining Ministry Flunkey, who knows what is happening, knows it's illegal and knows that around 50 metric tonnes of mercury legally imported into Peru ends up being illegally sold in the disaster area but doesn't want to do a thing to stop it. His arguments are laughable and clearly just wants to protect the status quo, not giving a damn about the enormous damage that current policies are causing. Viva investment grade.

Who will halt this criminal attack against nature?

Brutal Deforestation of Madre de Dios

Forests are converted into deserts due to the advance of informal mining that illegally extracts gold. Regular buying and selling of mercury is demanded by locals, who use it for the extraction of the precious metal.

An overflight of the jungle between Madre de Dios and Puno offers a panoramic portrait of the devastation; thousands of tonnes of earth removed and forests disappeared or buried beneath the tailings left by years of intense and illegal exploitation of gold in the Amazon. It is possible to make out improvised mining camps, heavy machinery turning over the red soil, flows of rivers cut off and enormous pools of water that hold an un-noticed poison that keeps on accumulating: mercury.

This element is as necessary in the exploitation of gold as kerosene is in the production of cocaine. Because of this, mining engineers and environmentalists argue that if the sale of mercury is regulated, in the same way as chemical supplies are to combat narcotrafficking, a large part of the problem of illegal mining and the destruction of the forests. But this doesn't happen; mercury is sold without any sort of control among the population that is found around the mining zones of Puno and Madre de Dios.

Supply and Demand
According to Customs information, in just the last four years the importation of mercury has nearly doubled, from 75,000kg imported in 2006 to 132,000kg last year. And so far this year, only up to September, there have been legal imports of 131,876kg of mercury. The Ministry of Energy and Mines (MEM) says that all these imports are basically used in artisanal mining, where levels of informality (no mining or land titles held or environmental impact studies approved) reach 90%.

For every gram of gold produced, two or three times as much mercury is needed. A recent study by Cáritas estimated that more than 50 tonnes of mercury is used in the Madre de Dios region per year- Despite the large scale of the mining exploitation, tax evasion due to the informality of the industry is enormous; this region receives only S/15,000 (U$5,200) in mining royalties from the state.

Up to March 2009, the Institute of Geology, Mining and Metallurgy (Ingemmet) and the MEM had authorized 1,592 mining concessions in Madre de Dios and only 19 have approved environmental impact studies, with another 1,089 in process. There are also 87 mining concessions that overlap the Peru State Nature Reserve of Tambopata. According the the MEM, the control of current illegal mining is the responsibility of the regional governments.

"The mining concessions have been authorized without taking into account other existing rights such as agricultural properties, forestry concessions, conservation concessions and protected areas" according to the diagnosis of the Ministry of the Environment. With this disorder of concessions and a lack of controls, mercury is feeding into waters, lands and even in fishes. In improvised stores located around the mining zones such as Huepetuhe or Inambari, where the taxman never appears, one kilo of mercury sells for between S/150 and S/180 (U$52 to U$63) in jars with the ticket names American Mercury or El Español.

No Clear Rules
National rules establish that all companies that use mercury must have mechanisms that allow for the recapture and re-use of mercury, but nothing more. There is no rule that regulates the adequate final disposal or the metal. Experts say that the ideal situation would be to take it to safe depositories overseas (Peru does not have any). Without clear rules, each year more and more tonnages of this dangerous element arrives to stay (or evaporate) in some part of the country.

It is worth mentioning that 83% of mercury imported by Peruvian companies comes from the United States or Spain. Mercantil SA, Triveño Mercury Corporation, JH Minerals, Aldo Orlando Torres Rojas and M&M Trading S.R.L. are the main importers. The quantities that arrive are mainly destined for the mining industry, with lesser percentages for the production of chlorine and dental curation work.

But mercury is not the only element used in illegal mining in the Puno and Madre de Dios regions. Every day, front load diggers arrive that cost half a million dollars apiece along with lorries, trucks, excavators and drags. The economic investment is very large, nothing to do with small mining. The Ministry of the Environment estimates that 50 truckloads of fuel arrives to the zone every day, 175,000 gallons of diesel and gas is used and approximately 1,500 litres of oil is spilled by the machinery and boats. Who will put a stop to this situation?

Interview with Víctor Vargas Vargas, Director General of Mining, MEM
"Prohibiting sales could generate contraband"

"If the commercialization of mercury is regulated, wouldn't it reduce illegal mining?

Mercury is freely traded. There are formal companies that import and sell it in a legal manner. If it were prohibited, it may generate contraband in this material.

Imports have nearly doubled in the last four years.

This is connected with the rise in price of gold, which causes a greater demand for mercury in the marketplace. What's more, 98% of informal mining activity in the country is dedicated to gold mining and the basic ingredient is mercury. What we would like is that the technical requirements of the recovery of this element are complied with.

Therefore, mercury that arrives legally to the country finishes as being sold to illegal mining.

Indeed. Anybody can buy mercury, just like they can buy gold. There are no restrictions. What is needed is to formalize these people and teach them to correctly handle this resource. Large mining companies do not use mercury, but cyanide. Mercury is only used in artisanal mining. However, there are mines that during the exploitation process obtain mercury as a byproduct, for example in Yanacocha, that is then exported.

Is there a regulation, as there is for cyanide, that locates the final destination that the mercury must have?

There is no rule about its control, but there is perhaps thought of creating one, without aggravating the already existing problems. Blocking its comemrcialization would stimulate a black market and a rise in the price of this material.

Ecuador and Chevron: What 'clash of cultures' really means

The LA Times is running a story today entitled "Chevron, Ecuador and a clash of cultures". It's a fairly good summary of the situation in the ongoing legal dispute from the environmental crimes 'allegedly' committed by Texaco/Chevron in Ecuador, the last paragraph summing up the mood:

"When the verdict is issued in Lago Agrio, it will prompt a round of appeals and other legal procedures, possibly in Ecuador and certainly in the United States, where Chevron has assets. The plaintiffs promise they will never give up. The company has assured investors that it will never pay. And the Amazon and its people will remain unhealed."

Which is sad but true. The article even tries to explain the concept of 'pachamama' a little further than the normally scant attention paid to it by English media, so that was quite nice. However the title got me thinking that calling it all a 'clash of cultures' is pretty stupid, as the only culture clash going on here is "We crapped on your culture in a way we'd never do to our own culture". And that's all you need to know about culture in this case. Good story, bad title.

Petaquilla (PTQ.to) recommended closed by Panama's Ombudsman

The Office of the Ombudsman in Panama (Defensoría del Pueblo) today published the findings of its investigation in LatAm's worst mining company, Petaquilla Minerals (PTQ.to), currently permanently laying waste to the environment of first growth rain forest around its operations under the stewardship of its CEO, convicted drug runner Richard Fifer.

The report published by the Ombudsman can be found on this link right here (Spanish only) so link-thru and knock yourselves out, but in a nutshell it takes into account 23 (yep twenty-three) different considerations of illegal or reportedly illegal activity by PTQ.to and makes seven resolutions, the main three of which being directly significant to PTQ.to are:

1) The Ombudsman states that Petaquilla Minerals has violated Panama's constitutional right of a healthy environment by proven acts of pollution, non-compliance with laws and abuses of rights (I mean hey...why mess with breaking a piffly law or two when you can go the whole hog and violate the country's constitution, right?).

2) The Ombudsman recommends to the Ministry of Commerce (MICI) and the Ministry of the Environment (ANAM) that they take steps via some precise and existing laws to stop all activity at the mine immediately.

3) The Ombudsman recommends to the Ministry of Commerce (MICI) that it moves to rescind the contract of Petaquilla Minerals under the law of "Substantial Non-Compliance" that's part of the Pananamian statute.

The ministries now have 30 days to get their acts together and move on this. It explains why the company says it's finally commissioning its mine but the stock has done nothing despite the BS pump PRs and ridiculous cheerleading from corrupted Panamanian websites that try to part expats from their retirement lump sums (and are seemingly unwilling to run today's news on Fifer's craphole...what a surprise, Don Wanker).

The sooner this thing is shut down forever, the better it will be for the world. PTQ.to is a prime example of the kind of rancid operation that gives the whole world of mining a bad name and gets dirt thrown at the good as well as the bad. Meanwhile, the sycophantic Canadian mining scene just keeps it mouth tightly shut about the stock and the scumbags running the company; it's about time you learned how to weed out your own, boyz.

The sealions of Chimbote

Yesterday in Chimbote, Peru, eight sealions were found floating dead on the shore. After being dragged out the water by heavy machinery (those suckers are 300kg each, folks) the report run at first was that they'd been killed by fishermen, as it's quite normal (I shit thee not) for fishing crews to harpoon sealions when they attack their nets and go after the fish contained.

However, later and better reporting noted there were no signs of physical attack on the animals and the mayor of Chimbote stated that the eight had died from pollution. This should not be a surprise to anyone that's visited Chimbte recently, as the city is a veritable shithole of contamination. The main guilty party is the fishing industry itself, as Chimbote hosts large fish factories that turn the catch into very profitable fish meal (Peru is the largest producer of fish meal (aka fish flour) in the world, exporting 1.56 million tonnes of the stuff in 2008, for what it's worth). The fish meal factories in Chimbote pump chimneystacks full of crud into the air..

From this blog post on Chimbote, Spanish
language and very informative

... and deposit liquid waste back into the sea via rusting pipelines that hardly make it out further than the tideline. Your author has been witness to these and to the heavy smell of fish as he walked along the portside and beaches (somewhere between baked and rotten anchovy) that washes up on the shore when the sea is in any state bar calm. For a visual example of the fun'n'games at Chimbote, check out this short youtube...

....and if you want more, check the sidebar of the youtube page for plenty more polluted Chimbote stories. Of course the government has known about this screw-you attitude to the environment and quality of life in Chimbote for years on end, so in May 2009 they finally placed limits on the amount of waste that the fish factories could pump into the sea (yes, that really does mean there was no limit previously). And of course, the factories in question have so far simply ignored the new rules, hence eight dead sealions on the shores of Peru yesterday. But there's still no limit on that air pollution. I mean, the last thing Peru wants to do is scare off big business and ruin that investor-friendly image it wants to create, right?

Viva investment grade. Viva, viva, viva.

Argentina: Anti-mining feeling is now reaching into the most pro-mining of regions

Jujuy, up in the northern reaches of Argentina, has been mining country for generations. But even in the most traditional corner of miner-friendly communites the rejection of bad mining operations is gathering speed.

Yesterday 2,000 people (a lot for that sparsely populated neck of the woods, be in no doubt) marched to the small town of Tilcara to protest the ongoing pollution to water supply and land. Notable was the lack of protest about economic development that mining brings, as you're talking to families of generational miners here that know all the pros and cons of living around, with and for the mining industry. They're just fed up with the poisoning, folks. The arguments were dominated by complaints about land contamination (as just one example, Google "Minera El Aguilar" to find out what they're talking about) water pollution and health problems (plenty of witnesses saying that loved ones have died from classic mining-related illnesses).

So be warned, mining investment community; if you want to make a fair profit from the extraction industry, the just treatment of local peoples is not an optional extra any more, not even in the most miner-friendly parts of the world. "DYODD, dude" applies to a prospective company's environmental track record. Ignore it at your own peril.

Doe Run Peru: Public Relations Fail of the Day

Yesterday I got the following comment from a reader named 'Dremco' added to the bottom of this post about Doe Run Peru.

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Dremco has left a new comment on your post "Doe Run Peru: The truth will out": I have visited La Oroya several times over the years, since 1984, in order to visit and work at the Metallurgical plants. In the early years, of Centromin ownership, there was never any apparent environmental work done in the entire area.

However, since Doe Run bought the company there has been a very extensive cleanup of the plants, and especially in the communities. La Oroya looks entirely different, and more attractive since the Doe Run purchase.

It is probably impossible for any company to do a good enough cleanup effort to satisfy the environmentalists, but from my perspective as a visitor to the area, Doe Run has done a remarkably good job.

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Now when somebody sticks up for one of the worst polluting companies on the planet in such a sycophantic way (not joking either; the Blackstone Institute put Doe Run Peru in its top ten most polluted places on the planet), my BS meter tends do that "Geiger Counter meets U308 yellowcake" thing. So on checking the where reader Dremco was sitting when writing the comment*, it turns out to be Chandler AZ, a town just South of Phoenix. Our mystery reader arrived directly on the page by searching "Doe Run Peru" in Google and then stuck around for over 30 minutes checking out other Rennert-related articles (some of the following has been XXXd out to respect privacy):

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VISITOR ANALYSIS
Referrer	http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4WZPA_en___US258&q=Doe Run Peru
Search Engine Phrase	Doe Run Peru
Search Engine Name	www.google.com
Search Engine Host	Google
Host Name	XXXXXXXXXXXXX
IP Address	67.XXX.XXX.XXX dremco
Country	United States
Region	Arizona
City	Chandler
ISP	Sun Lakes Cable
Returning Visits	0
Visit Length	31 mins 22 secs
VISITOR SYSTEM SPECS
Browser	IE 7.0
Operating System	WinXP
Resolution	Unknown
Javascript	Enabled

Navigation Path

Date	Time	Type	WebPage
29th April 2009	17:32:08	Page View	www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4WZPA_en___US258&q=Doe Run Peru www.incakolanews.blogspot.com/2009/03/doe-run-peru-truth-will-out.html
29th April 2009	17:36:39	Exit Link	https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=507788417054293017&postID=7735749254938621153&isPopup=true
29th April 2009	17:44:42	Page View	www.incakolanews.blogspot.com/2009/03/doe-run-peru-truth-will-out.html incakolanews.blogspot.com/search/label/ira%20rennert
29th April 2009	17:58:00	Page View	incakolanews.blogspot.com/search/label/ira%20rennert incakolanews.blogspot.com/2009/03/ira-rennert-doe-run-peru-leopards-and.html
29th April 2009	18:03:21	Page View	incakolanews.blogspot.com/search/label/ira%20rennert incakolanews.blogspot.com/2009/03/ira-rennert-doe-run-peru-leopards-and.html
29th April 2009	18:03:26	Page View	www.incakolanews.blogspot.com/2009/03/doe-run-peru-truth-will-out.html incakolanews.blogspot.com/search/label/ira%20rennert
29th April 2009	18:03:30	Page View	www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4WZPA_en___US258&q=Doe Run Peru www.incakolanews.blogspot.com/2009/03/doe-run-peru-truth-will-out.html

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Bizarrely enough, if you leave Chandler and travel South 30 miles or so on I-10 you arrive at the town of Casa Grande, home of a very large lead (Pb) products plant owned by.....yes you guessed it folks...The Doe Run Company.

So let's see now: Is it just a wild coincidence that somebody sitting 30 miles from one of the few Doe Run operations in the world suddenly decides to type "Doe Run Peru" into Google and leave glowing and demonstrably false comments about just how wonderful, clean and caring Doe Run is at La Oroya, Peru? Or maybe there's a connection somewhere. Waddya think?

Therefore commenter Dremco, you win this week's coveted award. Public relations dumbassery taken to a new level. All yours, dude:

*and don't worry, I rarely do it and unless you're at a company registered IP there's very little I can find out.

Perenco's idea of community relations: Shoot the locals

In Peru there are two conflicting issues in its oil industry. One you get to hear about quite a lot, the other doesn't tend to get much press coverage:

1) Peru is about to auction a new batch of lots for oil and gas exploration in its Amazon Basin region in July and has recently agreed to deals worth $650m via PetroPeru (yep, the same oil company in the centre of all those corruption scandals just a few months ago) with international oil companies.

2) Locals in and around the regions being sold off and/or currently being explored are on the tenth day of a general strike against the oil companies. They complain of non-cooperation from the oil companies, broken promises of investments in the local regions, pollution of the rivers and waterways killing fish and animals and the forcing upon them of new laws that will strip them of the rights currently held to decide whether the oil companies can operate in their ancestral homes. A specific complaint is how oil companies refuse to engage in the legally required consultation meetings with locals and, even when they do turn up to the meetings, refuse to listen to the other point of view and simply say "we're going to do this, this and this, like it or not."

All this background explains, in a more or less way, why the local Amazin basin peoples have called their general strike. As part of that strike they have bloked several main trunk route waterways to stop the oil companeis from operating. So two days ago, the French Perenco Oil & Gas company (people with a bad rep for pollution in Ecuador, it should be noted) took it upon themselves to break their boat through the barriers set up. When local approached the boat in question they were shot at by the people on board, according to this report. Beats talking to them every time, no?

Yet another lesson in winning friends and influencing people, neoliberal style. I find it jawdropping to think of a mindset that believes you can trample all over these people and then expect to have an operating oil well further down the track. If there is one place in the world where you need to keep the locals on your side, it's the Amazon Basin. Watch Joffé's 1986 movie The Mission for insight.

Petaquilla Minerals (PTQ.to) and its total disregard for the law

On this link find today's press release from Petaquilla Mineral (PTQ.to) that tells us it has just poured its first gold (on April 7th). It has done this without having environmental approval and in total disregard to the government ANAM office that specifically ordered the company to stop all work until it met with and gained environmental approval for its operations.

• This is also the same company responsible for a toxic leak last month that killed fish and wild animals in the region.

• It's the very same company that refuses to pay a previously imposed environmental fine for its manifold breaches of regulations and disregard for local people, their land and their water supply.

• It's the same company that faces a further round of sanctions, fines and prolonging of its suspension (the one being totally ignored) due to the recent investigations by ANAM and the failure of the company to comply with environmental law, as announced last week.

• It's the company that has brought locals out to block the access road to the mine for the second time in a month (on April 6th) due to its unrelenting malpractice.

Against all this, these bastards calmly announce that they have poured gold to an unsuspecting audience. The image of Voltaire's firing squad "pour encourager les autres" once again springs to mind. If PTQ.to moves up today it will give a shorting opportunity of a lifetime to the people at Kingsford Capital (and other shortside traders). I strongly encourage them to take that chance, as this company is an embarrassment to the mining community and should be traded out of existence in the shortest possible time.

Doe Run Peru: The truth will out

Reuters knocks one straight out the park. Here's the link and below is the story.

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Doe Run Peru faces renewed environmental criticism

Thu Mar 26, 2009 3:43pm EDT

LIMA, March 26 (Reuters) - With Doe Run Peru nearly shuttered amid sliding metals prices and tight credit, a Peruvian environmental group has released a new study saying the company dragged its feet on cleaning up the town around its smelter in La Oroya.

The company halted 95 percent of work this week at its sprawling plant after banks cut its credit lines, strangling its ability to buy concentrates.

The government is weighing whether to give Doe Run a $75 million bailout to save thousands of jobs. The government is also mulling whether to grant it an extension to meet terms of an environmental cleanup plan for La Oroya, long ranked as one of the world's most polluted cities.

"It's dirtier now than it was before," said Corey Laplante, a U.S. Fulbright scholar at the Peruvian Society for Environmental Law who led the study.

"If the government is going to give this bailout, it needs to attach a number of conditions: more transparent financial reporting, stronger public-participation mechanisms and stricter air-quality standards," he told Reuters.

Doe Run says it has been lowering emissions of polluting metals since it bought the smelter in 1997 from an old state-run company.

But Laplante says official data shows pollution has risen over a longer time frame, going back to 1995.

Using information from the Sindicato station that monitors lead in the air, Doe Run has said pollution fell 77 percent between 1997 and 2008.

Laplante says using 1997 as a baseline is misleading because pollution spiked that year, making pollution in subsequent years look low. When 1995 is used as the baseline, pollution at the station actually rose 6 percent through 2008, he said.

Victor Andres Belaunde, a Doe Run official, said data collected before 1997 may not be reliable, and the company cannot use data collected before it owned the smelter in its environmental compliance program.

When Doe Run bought the smelter -- which produces copper, zinc, lead and precious metals -- it was told it would need to spend little a more than $100 million to bring La Oroya into environmental compliance and solve a public health problem.

So far, Doe Run says it has spent $307 million, and that the total cost will end up being $500 million.

The compliance program still has not been completed. Initially, it was expected to take 10 years, but in 2006, the company got a three-year extension and now the government is being asked to grant another one.

Doe Run says the clean up job has turned out to be bigger than it thought.

Critics say it is stalling and that the company's owner, New York billionaire Ira Rennert of the Renco Group, has the money to accelerate the clean up.

But Peru has prohibited Rennert from taking profits out of Doe Run until the environmental program is complete. Now that work has halted at the plant, the future of a cleanup that was being financed by cashflows hangs in the balance.

Unmissable information on Doe Run Peru

Chernobyl, anyone? This bizarre mashup photo is
actually part of DRPs promo propaganda

US citizen and Fulbright Scholar Corey Laplante has been living in Peru and studying the operations at Doe Run Peru (DRP) for around eight months. He has a blog (that I recently discovered) and last night posted this article about the operational situation at DRP.

Thus the scales fall from mine eyes. All this time I fell for the DRP line. I was wrong.

This is seriously, seriously unmissable reading. Laplante shoots down in flames the company propaganda about how the place is cleaner than before. Also, this guy is not speaking from some treehugging NGO save the planet prejudiced playbook about DRP, but has done some very solid research work on the company. What he has found has made him angry. Damn I'm angry, too.

You should be angry too, when a shit like Ira Rennert takes over a company, significantly increases poisonous pollution outputs, then uses his first year at the site for his own benchmark thus later falsely claiming reductions in pollution. Here's an excerpt from Corey's post, but I strongly recommend that you read the whole thing. Here's the link to Corey's post again, just to make sure you go.

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3) You site “dramatic reductions” in contamination levels. Over the last few years Doe Run has reduced contamination. In fact, according to a graph that they sent CNN for December’s planet in Peril piece, they have reduced lead contamination by 77%. Wow. Seems impressive right? Trust me I know—I was fooled too (see some of my earlier posts)

When we look a little more closely however, we see what is really going on here. The graph that Doe Run sent to CNN compares 2008 against 1997. That is to say, they are pointing out that lead contamination is 77% lower in 2008 than it was in 1997. I confirmed the numbers with the Ministry of Energy and Mines, the reduction does, in fact amount to 77%

BUT, 1997 is the year that Doe Run came to La Oroya and dramatically increased contamination levels. They have only reduced contamination relative to when they increased it before.

If we really want to measure the changes in La Oroya—absolute changes—we need to look at the situation as it was before Doe Run came to town. Luckily, I was able to get my hands on this information. Specifically, I have the information for the same monitoring station that DRP used to derive the 77% figure—Sindicato. And when I compared 2008 against 1995 (instead of using 1997 as the baseline), I found that lead contamination at the Sindicato monitoring station did not decrease by 77%. In fact it increased by 6%.

At another monitoring station, Hotel Inca, lead contamination increased by 255%. That is not a typo. 255%.

Continues here

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Once again, I am in debt to reader MH. Thank you. There will be more on Doe Run and the (looking like it's about to happen) government bailout soon. Watch this space.

Goldcorp at Marlin, Guatemala

The BBC is running a report today entitled "Canadian mine accused of causing skin infections". The subject is Goldcorp's (GG) Marlin mine in Guatemala and the report contains the two photos of children you can see here. The BBC report is clearly a hit-piece, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, either. Sometimes the world needs a nasty photo and a story of mining hatred to get the real story out in the open...just ask the locals around Monterrico's Majaz /Rio Blanco project.

I'm telling you now that I'm not an expert on this mine and the ongoing controversy it has caused (today's BBC note is not new news in the enviro-world). There are always two sides to these issues and there's no way I'm going to ignore my own ignorance and rush to judgment on this. For a better idea of the story for the environmental protector's point of view (and with plenty of links) I found this post dated to 2007 that sums things up pretty concisely. As counterpoint there's a wealth of information, reports etc on Marlin and its operations (as well as the social spending projects that GG has sponsored) at this link on the GG company website.

What I will say is that those are really unpleasant photos for a father of two young girls who lives in mining country.

I'd be interested in getting a view from somebody at Goldcorp on this and I'll be writing to the company with a link to this post today.

Maple Energy (MPLE.L): Rotten to the Core Values

Map of Peru with Pucallpa city marked

If you go over to the core values page at Maple Energy's (MPLE.L) website you read that.....

"We value employee and public safety and respect the environment"

.....as well as other things such as having high ethical standards and being committed to excellence. As is so often the case, this corporate babble isn't worth the pixels it's printed on. The following Youtube video came up on my radar today, thanks to the Red Ucayali blogsite that keeps a close watch on how companies in the jungle region of Peru operate.

It turns out that Maple Energy respects the environment a lot less than it claims in its corporate literature, because a local Pucallpa TV station recorded images of the Maple Energy emergency team mopping up oil pollution from a company pipeline leak. But that's just the start of things, because amongst other things in the report:

• The pipeline is over 50 (yes, fifty) years old

• It gets painted every so often by the company to make it look good, but it doesn't get infrastructure maintenance or any replacement.

• The oil leak recorded by the cameras is the fifth so far this year! Yeah seriously, in the first 10 weeks of 2009 the thing has spilled oil no less than five times.

• The pollution causes permanent environmental damage. As in permanent. Understand the word "permanent"? Good.

• The local chief engineer working for Maple Energy was very defensive when asked a few questions and really refused to give away any information about the leak or the previous spillages.
  

One of the other things that Maple Energy boasts on its website is the good relationship it enjoys with Peru government and officials. Well that one might mean something positive in good old anglosaxon North, but anyone who knows Peru can decipher that code very easily. It's also worth noting that the rich and influential Peruvian Pension Funds jointly hold around 15% of all shares outstanding. So it comes as no surprise to hear in the report that neither Peru's oil watchdog OSINERG nor the Ministry of Energy and Mines has so much as mentioned in passing the problems Maple Energy is causing to the Amazon Basin environment....so far, at least.

So maybe after reading all this you're not as impressed with Maple Energy as you could be and you'd like to complain in your own way. Well as MPLE.L obviously doesn't give much of a damn about things a letter to its IR department representative Alphonso Morante might not be the best method. However, as the IFC (International Finance Corporation), which is the financing arm of the World Bank, is a 6.2% shareholder in Maple Energy you might like to drop them a line and ask them how long they will continue sponsoring a company that uses a 50 year old permanently leaky pipeline that does far more harm than good to its host nation.

Petaquilla Minerals and Reuters; what a pair, eh?

CEO Richard Fifer bought 1.5 million PTQ shares last year in
a desperate attempt to prop his stock. He failed.

Ladies and gentlemen, IKN proudly presents Otto's all-time fave news report out of Panama. Here below is the report from Andrew Beatty of Reuters, reprinted in its entirety.

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LA PINTADA, Panama, Nov 27 (Reuters) - Canada-based Petaquilla Minerals will start production at a new Panamanian gold mine in January, a senior official at the project said on Tuesday.

The Molejon gold project will produce 120,000 ounces of gold in the first year, senior engineer Rafael Eysseric told Reuters.

The project has been criticized by some anti-mining groups but Eysseric said the protests would not delay the start-up date.

The engineer said there was "no risk" of the mine opening behind schedule. (Reporting by Andrew Beatty; Editing by Christian Wiessner)

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So why do I love this report so much? Well, I could dwell on that fact that the content is false and misleading. I could chortle a lot about that "no risk" quote. Or I could even talk about Andrew Beatty of Reuters who has a suspicious track record of pumping PTQ.to and is either lazy, incompetent or on the take (whatever way, he's a poor excuse for a journo and Reuters should be ashamed).

But the REAL REASON to adore and worship this report is the filing date, Wednesday 28th November 2007. Yep, the "no risk January" mentioned in the report refers to January 2008! Here we are over a year later and the company is still lying and cheating its shareholders and the wider investment community. And while we're at it, let's have an example of PTQ.to deeds (for that is how thou shalt know them). Here's a photo from 2005 of the Molejon site.

It was taken by Panama's environmental people ANAM to show the illegal and non-permitted logging that was going on at the site. PTQ had cleared about one hectare of jungle without asking and ANAM slapped a $10,000 fine on the company. Cut to 2008, and here's exactly the same area of jungle.

The company just kept on logging and clearing and now the exposed area is 20 to 30 times larger. Now does that look to you like a company that respects government authority and environmental rules and regulations, or does it look like a company that thinks it's above the law? And to get into context the barefaced cheek of these shits, PTQ.to is currently looking for legal loopholes and appeals to avoid paying the $1.93m fine that ANAM slapped on the company due to its continued illegal, anti-environmental activities.

That anti-mining groups hate Petaquilla Minerals is clear. However the point here is that pro-mining people should also hate PTQ.to and call the company out for what it is. It's companies like PTQ.to that give the whole industry a bad name and offer fuel to fire the illogical extremes of the anti-mining protest community. Not all miners are the same, and the majority that are socially and environmentally responsible should rise up, point their fingers at the PTQs of this world and run them out of town.

Related Post

Petaquilla Minerals: Dissecting the press release of a rogue miner