A Blog for Browsing Mining, Mineral Processing, and Metals Info

BRUSSELS, Feb 23 (Reuters) – General Electric’s 12.4 billion euro ($14.1 billion) bid for Alstom’s power equipment business could lead to price rises, EU antitrust regulators said on Monday as they opened a full-scale investigation into the deal, increasing pressure on the U.S. conglomerate to offer concessions.

GE has had its acquisition ambitions quashed by European regulators before. In 2001 the European Commission blocked its $42 billion purchase of rival Honeywell International Inc despite U.S. regulatory approval, though GE says it has cleared more than 50 transactions in the region since then.

Read more at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/23/alstom-ma-general-electric-eu-idUSL5N0VX3IY20150223

The Additive Manufacturing Consortium (AMC) held its 2015 Winter Meeting February 3-4, at the Department of Energy’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Knoxville, TN. The event was jointly hosted by ORNL and University of Tennessee – Knoxville. More than 70 consortium members attended.

Read more at: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/02/prweb12520616.htm

The Indonesian government plans to broaden the underlying assets used for its Islamic debt papers (sukuk) as it seeks improve liquidity in the sharia-compliant bonds market in the world’s most Muslim-populated nation.The government is studying using state-owned goods and services as underlying assets for sukuk issuances, which have normally used infrastructure projects as collateral, says Robert Pakpahan, the head of the Finance Ministry’s financing and risk management office –

See more at: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2015/02/23/indonesia-considers-new-collateral-sukuk.html#sthash.6DQfWlzH.dpuf

An almost perfect storm of factors is boosting American manufacturing. The shale revolution has lowered energy costs and made the US look competitive again.

Rising wages in emerging markets like China is another reason. Black & Decker says it now costs the same to produce in America as it does in China once logistics and transport costs are taken into account. Plus, the US has maintained its position as the technology leader, so productivity is high.

President Obama came to Tennessee last month. The state is leading the revival of manufacturing in America. The home of country music and southern barbecue is now surprisingly being called the new Detroit. Read more at: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-31509223

Vale took the crown for the world’s biggest producer of nickel from Russia’s Norilsk Nickel, reaching 275,000 tonnes of the ingredient used to make stainless steel in 2014.

Read more at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/19/vale-production-idUSL1N0VT0LL20150219

Scientists at BASF are exploring the possibilities of an older type of battery, nickel-metal hydride, now used in hybrids. They recently doubled the amount of energy that these batteries can store, making them comparable to lithium-ion batteries. And they have a plan to improve them far more, potentially increasing energy storage by an additional eight times.+ 

Read more at: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/535251/old-battery-type-gets-an-energy-boost/

JAKARTA, Feb 18 (Reuters) – Indonesia could push back a ban on exports of copper and other mineral concentrates due to come into effect in January 2017 if miners have not built new domestic smelters in time, a mining ministry official said on Wednesday.

Read more at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/18/indonesia-copper-exports-idUSL4N0VS27N20150218

Nano particles can be exploited for drug, DNA, and vaccine delivery in cells, diagnosis, and tissue engineering, Subbu S. Venkatraman of the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, said at the international conference on Nanotoxicology.

He pointed out that being smaller, the nanoparticles could distribute and reach the specific target easily besides enhancing the effect of drugs. The Department of Chemistry and Biosciences of the Srinivasa Ramanujan Centre of the SASTRA University hosted the two-day conference that concluded on Saturday.

Read more at: http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/nano-particles-can-transmit-drugs-to-cells-easily-says-professor/article6897627.ece

Advanced Materials/Esther García-Tuñon et al.

Super-strong, super-light, durable-yet-flexible two-dimensional material graphene is often hailed as the wonder material of the future. Able to conduct both heat and electricity with great efficiency, its potential for use in electronics manufacturing is enormous — OLEDs, batteries, transistors and photovoltaic cells are just a few in a long list of ways in which the material may be used

Graphene structures created with 3D printing.

Indonesia stands a chance of becoming a major manufacturing center in the region provided that it sticks to its planned agenda on taxes and other reforms, according to a scholar.According to Mark Crosby, an associate professor at the Melbourne Business School, China has now become a relatively expensive place because of its growing manufacturing costs.“Today China is already expensive in most industries. It’s not a cheap manufacturing center anymore. The questions is where businesses are going to move to,” he said during The Economist’s “Indonesia Summit 2015: New Light or False Dawn?”.

See more at: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2015/02/12/indonesia-can-be-a-major-manufacturing-center-scholar.html#sthash.hVdcTa31.dpuf