France on Friday vowed to protect engineering jewel Alstom from a rumoured takeover bid by US giant General Electric, amid a policy switch to get flagging French businesses back on track.
Read more at: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/140425/france-says-it-works-outwit-ge-bid-alstom-energy
One of iron ore miner Vale’s big talking points is that economically developed South Korea uses around twice as much steel per GDP as China. However, India uses vastly less than even China. What Vale’s data points out is that China’s steel demand growth, which is exciting in its own right, has much less room to run than India’s. And the obvious demand for metallurgical coal mines in India shows just how notable an opportunity supplying the Indian steel industry is.
Read more at: http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/04/25/india-is-desperate-for-natural-resources.aspx
The World Bank Group’s Board of Executive Directors today approved a US$100 million grant to the Republic of Burundi for the Jiji and Mulembwe hydropower project.
In Burundi, only four percent of the ten million-large population currently has access to electricity, marking some of the lowest access rates anywhere in the world.
The development objective of the Jiji-Mulembwe hydropower project is to increase the supply of clean and low-cost hydropower electricity to Burundi’s national grid. The project will almost double the installed generation capacity in Burundi.
Read more at: http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2014/04/22/world-bank-to-finance-new-hydropower-development-in-burundi
ConocoPhillips will restart its mothballed liquefied natural gas plant near Kenai, Alaska, and will resume LNG shipment in May, a company spokeswoman said Monday.
The company will make six shipments this year, spokeswoman Amy Burnett said. The decision follows a Monday announcement that the US Department of Energy has given final approval to ConocoPhillips’ request to export up to 40 billion cubic feet of natural gas over two years from the LNG plant.
Read more at: http://www.platts.com/latest-news/shipping/anchorage/conocophillips-to-resume-lng-exports-from-kenai-21478299
A joint Iran-Indonesia consortium will be in charge of constructing the refineries, noting that the installations have a total refining capacity of 300,000 barrels per day.
Read more at: http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2014/04/13/358458/iran-to-build-6-refineries-in-indonesia/
World’s number one miner BHP Billiton under ex-CEO Marius Kloppers deserve (and take) much of the credit for dragging the iron ore market out of the financial stone age.
By pushing hard against bigger rivals Vale and Rio Tinto which favoured the old annual negotiated contract system, in 2009 BHP helped double the price of iron ore overnight.
Just for good measure, free-on-board pricing were also dropped in favour of CFR which gave Australian producers a huge advantage over South African and particularly Vale’s Brazilian ore, reaping billions for the industry.
BHP has been working hard to repeat the 2010 move in the coking coal market, but has so far met with little success.
Read more at: http://www.mining.com/bhp-cant-do-for-coking-coal-prices-what-it-did-for-iron-ore-11914/
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — The U.S. Department of Energy is soliciting for another round of research into methane hydrates, the potentially huge energy source of “frozen gas” that could step in for shortages of other fossil fuels.
The department is looking for research projects on the North Slope of Alaska that could explore how to economically extract the gas locked in ice far below the Earth’s surface.
DOE is also seeking researchers to document methane hydrate deposits in outer continental shelf waters of coastal states.
Read more at: http://www.startribune.com/nation/255078041.html
Coking coal producer Mechel has agreed to boost its annual supplies to Chinese steelmaker Baosteel by 25% year-on-year, the Russian company said on Thursday April 10.
Mechel will deliver as much as 1.2 million tonnes of coking coal to Baosteel between April this year and March next year. The agreement is a subject to annual renewal, while the price to be paid will be determined by the companies on a monthly basis.
Read more at: http://www.steelfirst.com/Article/3329678/News/Mechel-agrees-to-boost-coking-coal-supplies-to-Baosteel-by-25.html
At first glance, the LNG export boom in the United States seems to be well under way. After all, the Department of Energy has accelerated the pace of approvals for such projects, signing off on six new LNG export permits in the past year alone.
Eventually, these new projects will cover five sites and result in 8.47 billion cubic feet per day (bcfd) of LNG exports. But right now, they’re being bogged down by further bureaucratic red tape.
Read more at: http://www.wallstreetdaily.com/2014/04/10/u-s-lng/
Jones is a Glencore stalwart having first joined the company in 1990, rising to head of oil derivatives marketing in 2007 before becoming the firm’s chief risk officer prior to its London listing almost three years ago.
Several senior Glencore executives became billionaires with the firm’s 2011 IPO, including Chief Executive Ivan Glasenberg who still owns 8.3 percent of the company and global head of oil trading Alex Beard who owns over 2 percent.
Read more at: http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/04/08/us-glencore-xstrata-kelleher-idINBREA371JJ20140408
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