In its high-stakes trade talks with the United States, China has been trying to strike a balance in how it wields its market clout. It controls the world’s supply of rare earth metals and magnets. And it has withheld supplies of the materials — crucial ingredients in everything from cars to fighter jets — as…
China has long tapped Latin America to supply oil, iron ore, soybeans and other commodities, all drivers of growth for many Latin American countries. But also a source of frustration for those that hope to grow their economies and exports with more than mining and farm goods. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is trying to show…
There’s a tale told about a miner who found copper cans in his garbage dump in the early days of mining. Wastewater from copper mining had flowed through his land, he said, and turned steel cans into copper. The story might be apocryphal, but the process is real, and it’s called cementation. Montana Resources, the…
The bodies of 13 gold miners were found in an underground shaft at a site operated by Peru’s largest gold-mining company, President Dina Boluarte said on Monday, in a region that has seen growing conflict over access to ore in recent years. As the price of gold has climbed to record highs, small-scale mining has…
The United States and Ukraine announced on Wednesday the creation of a new reconstruction and investment fund, formalizing an economic agreement between the two countries that is intended to give the U.S. access to proceeds from Ukraine’s reserves of rare earth minerals. The agreement concludes months of fraught negotiations over whether the United States will…
Less than a week after President Trump signed an executive order to accelerate seabed mining, the U.S. government received its first permit application from the Metals Company, one of the most ardent proponents of the as yet unproven practice. On Tuesday, the company’s chief executive, Gerard Barron, was also on hand in Washington, D.C., for…
Life at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean is slow, dark and quiet. Strange creatures glitter and glow. Oxygen seeps mysteriously from lumpy, metallic rocks. There is little to disturb these deep-ocean denizens. “There’s weird life down here,” said Bethany Orcutt, a geomicrobiologist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. Research in the deep sea is…
President Trump has ordered the U.S. government to take a major step toward mining vast tracts of the ocean floor, a move that nearly every other nation in the world considers off limits to this kind of industrial activity. The executive order, signed Thursday, would circumvent a decades-old international treaty that every major coastal nation…
Hard hats are back. So is “beautiful, clean” coal. President Trump signed four executive orders on Tuesday to try to bolster the country’s declining coal industry, including the lifting of restrictions on mining and burning of the dirtiest fossil fuel. In addition to waiving air pollution limits and other regulations on coal imposed by the…
A Ukrainian geologist was shopping in his local market recently for pork belly, lard, salmon and grapes when he heard the shouts of a man who seemed drunk, complaining about President Volodymyr Zelensky. “Why didn’t Zelensky ask us before giving away our minerals to the Americans?” he yelled. A woman joined in: “The Americans are…