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Coal from Ffos-y-Fran opencast mine transported on Welsh Government rail lines

Coal from a controversial opencast mine is being transported along rail track belonging to the Welsh Government, ITV News Wales has learned.

Work was supposed to have ended at Ffos-y-Fran last September when its planning permission expired but the company has continued to extract coal while it fights the decision.

Research by ITV News Wales has established that the railway line track used to take the coal from near where it’s extracted belongs to the Welsh Government body Transport for Wales.

Campaigners and politicians that we’ve spoken to for this report are calling for the Welsh Government to step in to prevent the line being used.

Work continuing at Ffos-y-Fran this week despite previous orders to ceaseCredit: ITV Cymru Wales

The Welsh Government said it was unable to comment because doing so may jeopardise any future decisions it has to make.

The Ffos-y-Fran opencast coal mine is the biggest of its kind in the UK.

It opened in 2007 with a 15-year licence to extract coal from the site, just outside Merthyr Tydfil. It’s a major employer in the area, with around 180 members of staff.

It is currently run by Merthyr (South Wales) Ltd whose extraction licence for the site expired in September 2022.

Despite that, digging has continued at the site while the firm challenged orders to cease from both the local authority and the Coal Authority which issues mining licences.

Merthyr (South Wales) was approached for comment.

Most of the coal mined at Ffos-y-fran is removed by rail. It’s separated and washed at the mine’s privately owned washing facility at Cwmbargoed.

Coal leaving Ffos-y-Fran by railCredit: ITV Cymru Wales

It then leaves the site and is switched onto the Cwmbargoed branch, which is the only freight-only line in use on the Core Valley Lines (CVL).

While most rail track here in Wales is controlled by Network Rail, the Core Valley Lines are now the responsibility of ministers in Cardiff Bay after the infrastructure was transferred in 2020 from Network Rail to Transport for Wales (TfW) which is wholly owned by the Welsh Government.

The track is operated by Amey Infrastructure Ltd. on behalf of TfW.

Amey is bound both by a contract it has with Merthyr (South Wales) Ltd and a general requirement to grant access to freight operators.

Once the coal leaves private land it travels along the Cwmbargoed branch line to Ystrad Mynach and then the Rhymney Valley line until it leaves the CVL after Queen Street Station in Cardiff where it joins the Network Rail line.

The train company’s not doing anything wrong – just fulfilling a contract. It’s the use of the track in the first place that’s being questioned by those that we’ve been speaking to.

Alyson and Chris Austin have campaigned against the mine since 2004Credit: ITV Cymru Wales

Alyson and Chris Austins live near the mine and have been campaigning against it since it was first announced in 2004.

But they say they weren’t aware of who owned the track until we spoke to them.

Chris Austin said: “It’s a shocker to be honest with you. I mean, it’s obvious when you say it, but we never thought of it for for a minute, that they [the Welsh Government] would have any powers over the rail side of things. We thought it was a private rail track.”

Alyson Austin said: “This is another area where they could choose to act. They’re choosing not to do.

“They could choose to stop this at any point. If they are serious about tackling climate change, they need to put everything they’ve got into dealing with this and they’re doing nothing.”

Anthony Slaughter is the leader of the Wales Green Party

Anthony Slaughter, leader of the Welsh Green Party acknowledged that “The legalities would be quite complex” but he said the Welsh Government should step in.

“It’s another lever that could be used and it’s almost as if there’s this desire to get as much coal out of the ground as possible before it really does have to stop.”

The Plaid Cymru MS, Llŷr Gruffydd, is the Chair of the Senedd’s Climate Change Committee who recently wrote to the Welsh Government asking what it was doing to resolve the Ffos-y-Fran situation.

In response to the information that we’ve established, he said that “By allowing the company to use the rail infrastructure I’m sure some people will feel that the Welsh Government is effectively facilitating the continued extraction of coal from Ffos-y-Fran and that of course is happening beyond the original planning permission.

“So, this again raises further questions for me and for the committee about the whole situation. It once again underlines the need for greater transparency and greater agency in dealing with what is clearly a fraught legal situation, but it’s a situation that also has environmental consequences and has a continued impact on the local community.

Chair of the Climate Change Comittee, Llyr Gruffydd, has written to the Climate Change Minister with a number of questions about the mine.Credit: ITV Wales/Sharp End

“We’ve written to the Minister. We’re expecting a response within the next few weeks, but obviously this now adds another element again.”

Welsh ministers including Mark Drakeford have previously welcomed the decision to stop mining at Ffos-y-Fran.

The First Minister told BBC Wales that “We should not be extracting finite resources from the globe in an era of climate change.”

The Welsh Government has previously stated: “Our position is clear – we want to bring a managed end to the extraction and use of coal. We are in a climate and nature emergency and the response must be swift and serious so we can pass on a Wales we are proud of to future generations.”

Points raised in this article were put to the Welsh Government but it didn’t respond to them directly.

A spokesperson said: “We are unable to comment at this stage, as to do so may jeopardise any future decision Welsh Ministers may have to make on the matter.”

Conservative MS, Janet Finch-Saunders

The Welsh Conservatives say that the company should be allowed to continue to use the rail link and should be allowed to continue mining.

Shadow Climate Change minister Janet Finch-Saunders says that “Ffos-y-Fran is being caught up in the wider question for all of Wales: ‘Does coal still have an important role to play in our community and economy?’ The answer today must be yes.

And she added that “It is all well and good Mark Drakeford stating that we should not be extracting finite resources from the globe in an era of climate change, but the reality of Wales today is that we cannot simply stop using coal now.

“Between January and March 2023 66,357 tonnes was produced in Merthyr Tydfil. That’s the highest volume of any mine in the UK. I am genuinely concerned that should the supply from Ffos-y-Fran be lost, we will simply become even more reliant on imports.

“Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru need to recognise that it is completely irresponsible to pursue policies that offshore carbon footprints to other, usually far poorer and less developed nations, than ours.

“The reality is that our economy and country currently needs coal, so that which we use should be sourced from our land, support our communities, and our workforce, not line the pockets of foreign nations. Welsh Government should continue to let the company use the train tracks, and look to support coal extraction in Wales.”

August 10, 2023
UK is losing a crucial race with China for minerals used in electric cars and green energy, mining boss warns

Britain must rapidly reverse its culture of “non-existent” investment in exploration for key green energy metals on home soil or face a future of Chinese dominance in an area vital to future economic security, a mining company boss has warned.

Galantas Gold Corporation, a Canadian company which holds exploration licences for some of the UK’s most promising geological deposits, is understood to have found a potential source of graphite, increasingly one of the world’s most sought-after materials for manufacturing electric vehicles, at a site it operates in Omagh, Northern Ireland.

But the firm’s chief executive has fired a shot across the bows of ministers and British industry by warning that the UK and other European countries are under-investing and can no longer rely on the exploitation of resources in the developing world to deliver the critical raw materials needed for the transition to clean energy.

The ability of the UK and allied countries to obtain their own longterm supplies of materials such as lithium or more obscure metals such as germanium, used in semiconductors, is at the core of a geo-political tussle with China in areas from electric vehicles to consumer electronics to wind power.

Beijing is already expected to have a substantial lead in providing electric cars in the UK when a ban on new petrol and diesel cars comes into force in 2030, causing some within the Government to raise concerns about the use of those vehicles to harvest vast amounts of data about the movements of ordinary Britons.

Galantas CEO, Mario Stifano, whose company is in the early stages of exploring metal deposits in a 217 square kilometre area of the Scottish Highlands, told that Britain was at risk of failing to understand and successfully exploit its own resources because of a lack of interest in funding the groundwork needed to establish the exact location and quantity of what are believed to be sizable deposits of materials such as copper, vanadium, zinc and gold.

In contrast to mining superpowers such as Australia and Canada, where large sums are spent to gain as full a picture as possible of unexploited deposits prior to mining, he said investors in the UK and other European countries tend to be interested only in mining projects which are close to going into production and otherwise tend to prioritise “buying shares in a Unilever or a Glaxo”.

Mr Stifano said: “The amount of exploration that has occurred in Canada and the US looking for minerals is hundreds if not thousands of multiples more than what has been spent in the UK.

“What is lacking is support for exploration companies in order to build knowledge about these kinds of deposits so they can get into production. We need zinc, copper, cobalt, lithium, graphite and so on. It’s all over Europe [and] a lot of it is in the United Kingdom and we think we know where a lot of that is.

“Really what’s lacking is the ability to raise the funds to go and look for it. Funding for exploration in Europe is next to non-existent and yet it has some of the best geology in the world.”

A number of companies in Cornwall have advanced projects aimed at extracting lithium from the region’s granite and clay beds with the aim of meeting demand from manufacturers including Tata Group’s new £4bn battery “giga factory” to be built in Somerset. But despite the release earlier this year of a study by the British Geological Survey pinpointing eight areas of the UK which have the right geology to yield 17 of the 18 metals identified by the Government as critical to economic stability, industry sources say there is a dearth of exploration activity.

Mr Stifano pointed to the existence of tax-deductible exploration investment schemes in Canada as a potential way to kickstart projects in Britain, adding that public funding may be needed to spark wider interest in a sector where China, which recently announced export restrictions on germanium, is taking an increasingly muscular stance.

He said: “In the early days, you may need something like [public funding] because the culture is lacking. In Canada, people talk about discoveries and opportunities and mining. You go to Europe or the UK and it’s not part of the natural culture – people would much rather invest in a Unilever or a Glaxo or any of the big companies.

“China is slowly going to be putting more and more export restrictions on critical metals and it is going to put a lot of pressure on the Western world because we stopped looking for those same metals.”

The mining executive highlighted the fact that it has taken Galantas two years to obtain permission to drill one-inch diametre core samples at its Omagh site – a permitting process that would generally take a month in Canada or Australia – as an example of the logistical and procedural difficulties facing the exploration industry in the UK. Environmental groups have previously raised concerns about the impact of drilling near water sources and aquifers.

Mr Stifano said he recognised the need for any mining company to act sustainably and responsibly but added he believes it is “no longer fair” for Western countries to source their materials from “poor countries with no regulation” and they should instead focus strongly on building homegrown industries.

He said: “What I am trying to push at is the minerals industry needs support in the early stages. If we are going to move to electric vehicles and clean energies we have to find these critical metals, or they are all going to come from China.”

The Government said it was supporting Britain’s critical minerals industry following the unveiling last year of a national strategy to grow domestic capabilities and announcement this week of a £24m investment in Cornish Lithium. In a statement, the Department of Business and Trade said: “Government continues to work with industry and finance communities to support private sector investment in critical mineral projects along the value chain.”

August 9, 2023
Explained: The EU’s handicap in the global race for critical raw materials

The EU is highly dependent on third countries for the raw materials needed to engineer its energy transition and digital transformation.

Russia’s war in Ukraine and the need to wean itself off fossil fuels in order to reach climate targets have prompted the EU to accelerate its green transition in recent months but also forced it to acknowledge its dependencies over access to critical raw materials.

In the global race for raw materials, the EU faces multiple challenges.

The first one is China, which recently started restricting exports of gallium and germanium, two metals essential for the production of semiconductors, in response to Western curbs on Beijing’s access to micro-processing technology.

The EU considers both materials of high strategic importance. As well as semiconductors and other electronic devices, they are used for military applications such as missile defence and radar systems.

Beijing’s restrictions come as a stark warning as the EU attempts to diversify and boost domestic supply of raw materials to reduce dependency on third countries.

Reliance on ‘low-governance’ countries

But diversifying supply chains could mean the EU has to source these materials from countries that don’t adhere to the same standards.

Recent data suggests the EU’s supply is highly dependent on countries that have a low governance level, based on indicators including political stability, rule of law and corruption control.

The EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA), adopted in March this year, stipulates that EU strategic projects to scale up supply must be assessed taking into account all aspects of sustainability, including environmental protection, socially responsible practices and respect for human rights such as the rights of women.

But many countries feeding EU supply are not aligned with European values. This raises concerns about the impact on the local communities where materials are mined, as well as the potential exploitation of natural resources.

For example, the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose governance indicators are among the lowest in the world, supplies 63% of the EU’s cobalt, which is essential for manufacturing batteries for electrical vehicles.

Diversifying supply a challenge

The EU is also highly dependent on single countries for key materials such as Magnesium (China, 97%), Lithium (Chile, 97%), Iridium (South Africa, 93%) and Niobium (Brazil, 92%). These dependencies make supply chains vulnerable.

The Critical Raw Materials Act aims to ensure no third country provides more than 65% of the Union’s annual consumption of any raw material.

But diversifying supply is complex when refineries of many essential materials are monopolised by one or more global powers. China dominates the refining market for many critical raw materials.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing energy crisis has shown the acute dangers of over-reliance for supplies of raw materials. China’s increasingly antagonistic stance and the political instability in many African countries have also served as reminders of the fragility of the EU’s trading relationships.

A spiralling global demand

The demand for raw materials is growing steeply, as developed countries race to digitalise and decarbonise their economies. This can only happen with sufficient supply of raw materials, meaning countries must scale up extracting, refining and recycling operations.

The global demand for lithium, for example, is set to increase a staggering 89-fold by 2050, according to the European Commission. Demand for gallium will multiply 17-fold during the same time.

The Critical Raw Materials Act sets targets for the Union to extract 10%, process 40% and recycle 15% of its annual consumption of raw materials by 2030.

To meet these targets and compete on the global stage, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has said the EU needs to speed up investments in research and development, recognising that the bloc’s global share of R&D expenditure has fallen 10% in the last 20 years.

August 9, 2023
Dive deep for Istria’s latest tourist attraction: Raša mine

After a year and a half of intensive renovation, the former coal mine at Raša in eastern Istria has been reopened, repurposed as a tourist attraction. The local municipality has invested €870,000 into this authentic mining museum, 1.5 kilometres of accessible tunnel that welcomed its first visitors this July.

Along with the museum, a miner’s lodging was also built, an authentic evocation of the miner’s everyday life, both inside and outside the mine.

The Kova Experience tour lasts 2.5 hours and shows every aspect of the miner’s hard and dangerous work. Currently tours are only given in Croatian, with English-friendly ones available through Arsiana (Croatian-only) or email info@arsiana.hr.

This tourist project, in addition to reviving the history and industrial heritage of Raša, highlights the importance of mining activity in the area, which dates back to the Venetians. After World War I, and Italy taking power in Istria, in 1935 Mussolini approved a loan of five million lire to construct the Raša settlement from scratch. The entire town was built in just 547 days and is an architectural and industrial curiosity in its own right. From 1928 to 1966, more than 10,000 miners worked here.

Paula Bosančić

August 9, 2023
Coal Miners Discover Ancient Roman Boat in Serbia

For the second time since 2020, coal miners in Serbia have stumbled upon an ancient Roman boat.

The boat’s exact age is still unknown—but based on previous finds, researchers think it could date to around the third or fourth century C.E., lead archaeologist Miomir Korac tells Aleksandar Vasovic of Reuters.

Back then, a bustling Roman city called Viminacium sat not far from the Danube River, some 45 miles east of Belgrade. Today, the surrounding area is a rich archaeological site: Researchers have been working there since the first excavations began in the 1880s, according to the Viminacium archaeological park’s website. Once the ship is fully excavated, researchers hope to display it alongside other artifacts found at Viminacium.

Removing it, however, will take some doing.

“Our engineer friends … will prepare a special structure that will be lifted by a crane, and … the entire process of gradual conservation will follow,” Mladen Jovicic, a member of the archaeological team working on the ship, tells Reuters.

Miners uncovered the first traces of the ship last month. They alerted archaeologists, who began careful excavations. Moisture in the wood and surrounding sand had helped preserve the remains, which measure nearly 43 feet long (though the ship was likely longer in its day). “A great danger was the strong sun that threatened to dry out the ship too quickly,” a spokesperson tells Maja Miljević-Đajić of the Serbian publication Sve o arheologiji, per Google Translate. Keeping the wood wet during the dig became a priority.

At the height of its dominance, the vast Roman Empire was divided into provinces with capitals and governors. The ancient city of Viminacium was the capital of the Moesia Superior province. The archaeological team theorizes that the boat once sailed on a tributary that connected the Danube River to Viminacium, which had a population of some 45,000 residents.

A similar incident took place in 2020, when Serbian miners accidentally unearthed the remains of three ships in the area. In that case, mining equipment caused extensive damage to the discovery.

“Approximately 35 percent to 40 percent of the ship was damaged,” Korac told Kiona N. Smith of Ars Technica at the time. “But the archaeological team collected all the parts, and we should be able to reconstruct it almost in full.”

Those vessels showed no damage from battle or fire, leaving archaeologists with many unanswered questions about what happened to them. One possibility is that they “were either abandoned or evacuated. They did not sink suddenly with cargo,” Korac added. “If these happened during the barbarian invasion and withdrawal of Roman troops, the ship could be abandoned and sunken in order not to fall into the hands of the enemy.”

Many more discoveries await researchers in coming years. According to Reuters, archaeologists estimate they have only combed through 5 percent of Viminacium so far.

August 9, 2023
Cornish Lithium secures £53.6m to open first mine for the metal in Britain

The startup opening Britain’s first lithium mine in Cornwall has secured $67m (£53.6m) of investment led by the UK Infrastructure Bank, in a much-needed boost to efforts to extract the metal that is used for making vehicle batteries.

Cornish Lithium is to receive the funds from the Treasury-funded bank and other investors as part of a larger funding package of up to $210m (£168m).

The funding package is expected to speed up progress towards British mining of battery-grade lithium compounds, which are key to production of batteries for electric vehicles and renewable energy storage.

The investment is part of a push to boost financing for climate crisis-related infrastructure projects, and to create a hub for supplies of lithium to Europe from Cornwall.

The initial investment is led by the UKIB alongside the Energy & Minerals Group (EMG), a US private investment firm focused on energy and minerals, and TechMet, which invests in clean energy and electric vehicle technologies and counts the US government’s development finance corporation among its backers.

The UKIB and EMG will each put in £24m while TechMet, Cornish Lithium’s largest shareholder, is investing a further £5.6m, bringing its total investment in the business to £30m.

Core samples from Cornish Lithium’s exploratory drilling at its research site, August 2022. Photograph: Jim Wileman/The Guardian

Cornish Lithium aims to increase its 70-strong workforce to more than 300 people once it is in commercial production. It had warned in its annual accounts in June that there would be material uncertainty over its future if it did not raise bridge funding by July to buy it time before its next fundraising round. The company plans to raise a further £6.9m by selling shares to small shareholders through Crowdcube, with a focus on existing investors.

Lithium is a vital ingredient in the current generation of batteries used in portable devices ranging from mobile phones to electric toothbrushes. But vastly more lithium will be needed for electric vehicles as combustion engines are phased out around the world.

Cornish Lithium is one of several projects that seek to revive Cornwall’s 4,000-year-old mining heritage. Another company, British Lithium, has teamed with the French mining firm Imerys to start a mine in Cornwall and to extract enough lithium to power 500,000 electric cars a year by the end of the decade.

Jeremy Wrathall, founder and chief executive of Cornish Lithium, said it was “essential to secure funding from institutional investors with the financial muscle to bring our projects into commercial production”.

He said the funds would enable the company to advance its project at Trelavour, near St Austell, to “construction-ready status” and allow it to “complete the engineering design work required to build a demonstration-scale geothermal waters extraction facility”.

John Flint, chief executive of the UKIB, said: “Globally the supply of lithium is far outpaced by demand, and yet in the UK it remains a nascent market.”

He said the investment would “greatly accelerate domestic production of a mineral which is critical to the future of electric vehicle battery production and decarbonisation of the transport sector”.

Andrew Griffith, economic secretary to the Treasury, who visited Cornish Lithium on Tuesday, said the investment would improve the domestic supply of lithium, helping “the UK’s transition towards net zero whilst also boosting local and regional economic growth”.

Kemi Badenoch, business and trade secretary, said that, coupled with Tata Group’s recent pledge to build a £4bn electric car battery gigafactory in Somerset last month, the investment would ensure the UK automotive sector is “well set for the future”.

August 9, 2023
China goes for the jugular on strategic minerals

Gallium tops the list of 50 critical minerals deemed vital for American national security and hi-tech production, and deemed most vulnerable to supply-risk by the US Geological Survey. It is equally vital to Europe and the UK.

There is no US national stockpile. The Pentagon has confessed that it has no military reserves. It seems that the bureaucratic system has only just woken up to the irreplaceable properties of this silvery trace metal in advanced weaponry and in the race for global dominance of electric vehicles, 5G & 6G wireless and power electronics.

“Gallium nitride (GaN) is foundational to nearly all the cutting-edge defence technology that we produce,” said Colin Whelan, head of advanced military projects at Raytheon.

The Chinese today produce 98pc of the world supply of primary gallium. The figure falls to 80pc for purified gallium used in industry, but you cannot reach that stage without access to the raw material. This is the metal that China has chosen to target along with its sister germanium, 31 and 32 respectively on Mendeleev’s periodic table. It won’t be the last.

The British government has been insouciant. The UK let its last gallium processor wither on the vine in 2018.

“It is quite scary because this is time-critical,” said Olimpia Pilch, founder of the Critical Minerals International Alliance.

“There has been this ideology that the free market will take care of everything, but that will leave us completely out of the race. Governments have to step in with incentives to get production going,” she said.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington says China’s stranglehold is not a fluke or the outcome of normal market forces. The Communist Party compelled Chinese smelting companies to develop gallium refining capacity as a side-product of aluminium processing from bauxite.

Chinese production rose 20-fold from 2005 to 2015, enabled by mercantilist subsidies through state-controlled banks and by a suppressed currency. This flooded the world market and wiped out competitors. China has since acquired near total control over the gallium supply chain and processing industry.

It has now begun to close the trap. Restrictions on exports of gallium kicked in this month. This is the precursor to an embargo of unfriendly countries but not yet an actual embargo. “The export restrictions are quite clever. They are mapping out the supply-chain so they know exactly where it is going and where the vulnerabilities lie,” said Ms Pilch.

What we don’t know is whether this is merely a shot across the bow, retaliation for US restrictions on the sale of advanced semiconductors and the Dutch decision last month to restrict ASML sales of deep-ultraviolet lithography systems, or whether this has long been part of Xi Jinping’s game-plan for tech supremacy – laid out in Made in China 2025 and his strategy of “military-civil fusion”.

A string of industrial espionage cases targeting gallium technology in the US and allied states suggests that China has put sustained effort into this campaign, including the theft of classified material from the US semiconductor company Wolfspeed by the People’s Liberation Army.

Gallium nitride has a uniquely-high “bandgap” of 3.4eV compared to 1.2eV for silicon transistors and fast electron mobility. This allows it to operate at lightning speed and at high voltage. This is gold dust in hi-tech warfare.

“Gallium nitride is revolutionising modern radar, allowing new radar modules to track smaller, faster and more numerous threats from nearly double the distance,” said CSIS. It keeps the West a step ahead of Russian hypersonic missiles and Chinese stealth fighters.

The larger economic prize is in electronics and clean tech. Gallium nitride pushes the limits of power density, lowering the power loss in converters by 80pc.

Professor Umesh Mishra, dean of engineering at UC Santa Barbara and co-founder of the US semiconductor company Transphorm, said GaN has already delivered the “fastest technology shift in human history” by conquering half of the world’s lighting market in just two decades with LED light-emitting diodes. It is now going to do the same for power electronics.

“This revolution is nowhere near done. It is about to jump to a higher level,” he said.

Gallium technology makes it much cheaper to switch back and forth from DC to AC power, with sweeping implications for the efficiency of electric vehicles, solar panels, data centres or smart grids.

Navitas Semiconductor in the US is betting that it can slash the home charging time for EVs by two-thirds and cut energy use by 70pc, with products on the market by 2025. It aims to cut energy loss from solar inverters by 40pc.

Claims that the world will need a massive and costly increase in electricity generation to replace fossil fuel energy invariably ignore how much is wasted today and how much can be saved by the magic of power electronics.

Gallium can be replaced by other minerals for some functions, usually at lower efficiency. Silicon carbide is a rival for the next wave of EV electronics. But a Western economy without gallium would be at a serious disadvantage.

China has locked up much of the bauxite supply from Indonesia and in the West African state of Guinea, another military dictatorship slipping into the Sino-Russian orbit. But ultimately there is no shortage of aluminium ore in the world, and gallium can be extracted from zinc ores.

The imperative is time. It takes several years to develop an alternative supply chain from dependable allies such as Australia, or from Sweden, or from zinc mines in Alaska; by then China might have stolen a decisive march in the escalating clean-tech war.

It is already two years since the Biden administration published a review warning that US reliance on gallium from China poses “far-reaching” risks. Little has changed so far.

China must be careful not to overplay its hand, as it has done repeatedly since the wolf warriors gained ascendancy.

It weaponised its 97pc monopoly over the supply of rare earth minerals in order to coerce Japan over the Senkaku Islands in 2010, and later issued periodic embargo threats against the West as political leverage.

It still has a commanding position, with 92pc control over minerals used for advanced magnets, but its overall share of processing for rare earths has dropped to 85pc, and its share of mine supply has dropped to 63pc. These minerals are not in fact rare and the liberal world is slowly responding.

Lisa Tobin, former China director at the US National Security Council, accuses the Communist Party of “brute force economics”.

It does not operate from the principle of comparative advantage, which regulates the normal rivalries of global competition: it pursues the zero-sum goal of absolute advantage, and it engages in a systematic state policy of coercion, predatory dumping and technology theft to achieve this aim.

One can overdo such Cold War hawkishness. At the end of the day, China itself depends on maritime imports of energy, raw materials and food, a vulnerability that eclipses its advantage over critical minerals.

The gallium and germanium curbs nevertheless show intent. We should assume that Xi Jinping will exploit this chokehold and extend it to other scarce metals when the moment is ripe.

Reducing reliance on Chinese supply is too urgent a matter to leave to the free market alone.

August 9, 2023
Adriatic Metals proposes $30 million placing to fund exploration

Adriatic Metals PLC on Monday announced it intends to conduct a placing to raise $30.0 million to fund an expanded exploration programme at the Rupice and Rupice Northwest deposits in Bosnia & Herzegovina.

Adriatic Metals is a precious and base metals explorer and developer that owns the Vares silver project in Bosnia & Herzegovina and the Raska zinc deposit in Serbia. Shares in the firm closed down 1.7% at 169.40 pence on Monday in London.

Monday’s placing price of £1.70 per share – or A$3.30 per CHESS depositary interest, representing such shares – represents a discount of 5.1% to the company’s average price share in the last 10 days on the Australian Securities Exchange.

The total number of placing securities is expected to represent approximately 5.0% of the company’s existing share capital.

Adriatic Metals said the proceeds of the placing will fund an expanded and accelerated exploration programme at Rupice and Rupice Northwest, including an additional 40,000 metres of drilling, and associated facilities and equipment. It will also contribute to the general working capital associated with exploration, as well as growth opportunities, general corporate purposes and fees.

‘Rupice and Rupice Northwest remain open and there are numerous regional targets such as Droskovac, SP1 and SP2 that have exciting prospects. We believe this exploration programme will deliver impactful results by more aggressively testing priority targets across our emerging high-grade polymetallic district,’ said Chief Executive Paul Cronin.

August 8, 2023
Poland’s Turów Coal Mine: Symbol of Defiance Against EU Interventionism

Poland’s Turów mine has become a source of political pride for the country’s right-wing government, despite being viewed by its EU neighbors as evidence of Warsaw’s refusal to abandon polluting coal. The mine, located in the south-west of the country between Germany and the Czech Republic, is an open pit mine that fuels an adjacent power plant, producing about 7% of Poland’s electricity. However, Turów has become a symbol of the ruling Law and Justice party’s (PiS) defiance against EU interventionism.

The mine’s importance to Warsaw is evident as Poland has been paying the EU to keep it open. When the Czech Republic sued Poland in the EU Court of Justice, Warsaw defied the court’s order to stop mining and refused to pay the resulting daily fine. The European Commission responded by deducting the fine from EU funds earmarked for Poland. As a result, Warsaw paid compensation to the Czech Republic for environmental damage, and the region around Turów was excluded from EU subsidies for transitioning away from fossil fuel production.

The legal battle over the mine has extended from Luxembourg to national courts in Warsaw. Environmentalists have raised concerns about pollution and the depletion of underground water in the surrounding countryside. However, miners at Turów and the local municipality of Bogatynia, which receives a third of its budget from taxes paid by the power plant’s operator, support the mine and its preservation of jobs.

While Poland has made strides in renewable energy production, including a record quarter of electricity production coming from renewables in May, the country still heavily relies on coal, which accounts for 65% of its electricity generation. Some opponents see the defense of coal as a step backward, while others view the mine as a national treasure that should be defended out of love for Poland.

The battle over Turów is not just about the mine itself but is part of broader tensions between Poland and the EU, as well as between Poland and Germany. The mine has become entangled with disputes over sovereignty, money, and the rule of law. Warsaw has accused Germany of strengthening Russian President Vladimir Putin by embracing him as an economic partner until his invasion of Ukraine. The fight over Turów has become another point of contention between the two countries.

As Poland prepares for a tight general election, Turów remains a significant symbol for the ruling party and a key issue for the electorate. The future of the mine and Poland’s energy transition will continue to be debated, balancing the need for jobs, national sovereignty, and environmental concerns.

August 8, 2023
Poland nears coal glut prompting powerful union to raise alarm

Poland’s hard-coal reserves have almost doubled since last year, prompting a powerful union to warn about the consequences for the country’s own miners just months before a tightly contested parliamentary election.

“We hear that state companies import large amounts of coal, while coal extracted from Polish mines is not being collected,” Boguslaw Hutek, the head of the powerful Solidarity miners’ union, said in a statement. “State-owned companies should not act against the interest of each other.”

Coal stockpiles jumped 83% to 10.8-million tons in May from a year earlier, according to energy think tank Instrat. The government in Warsaw, which banned Russian coal imports in March 2022, prompted state-run energy producers to import heavily from countries like Colombia, Kazakhstan and South Africa to avoid shortages.

Coal has long been politically important in Poland, where 75 000 are employed as miners and millions of households depend on the fuel for heating. Aging coal plants provide about 70% of the nation’s electricity.

Poland is poised to hold its parliamentary election in October. Opinion polls have shown the two main parties short of the support needed to rule independently, putting smaller parties in the position of potential kingmakers after the election.

August 8, 2023