Mining

The Nigerian government said Tuesday it will revoke the licences of mining companies over failure to sign Community Development Agreements (CDA). The Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dele Alake, disclosed this while speaking at the BusinessDay Media Solid Minerals Conference, held in Abuja. “This year I am using this opportunity to sound a note of warning. Any company that fails to sign their community development agreement stands the risk of having its licences revoked,” Mr Alake said. The Ministry of…

Since generative AI exploded into global consciousness in 2023, an unprecedented demand for computing power has emerged alongside the demand for apps utilising the technology.Tool’s like OpenAI’s ChatGPT require thousands of Nvidia GPUs (graphics processing units) to smoothly process all the information being fed in and output. Nvidia last week compared GPUs to rare earth metals for AI, saying they’re “foundational” for the operation of generative AI today.The energy required to power all this hardware is the equivalent…

Even in an early access state, Palworld boasts a massive world map you can explore either solo or with a group of friends. While there are tons of sights to see and Pals to capture and put to work at your base, a major portion of your time will be spent on gathering crafting materials. Unlike Paldium, which can be found all over, other resources like coal can’t be found in any region of the map. If you were thinking you might be able to cheat the system a bit and simply buy some, guess again, because no vendor has…

A new report by the U.S. branch of the non-profit Environmental Investigation Agency says that investment interest and government tax incentives are fuelling intense mining exploration in remote northern B.C. — raising concerns about the environmental impacts of the work and its financial implications.The report focuses on the transboundary region, which falls along the border between the Alaska panhandle and the province of B.C. Much of this exploration is focused on the so-called Golden Triangle, which in many areas is…

For the first time in the company’s 40-year history, Liebherr have converted one of their R 9400 excavators from a conventional diesel to an electric powertrain. The re-powered mining machine was commissioned at Fortescue’s Christmas Creek mine site in Western Australia – but what’s more significant is that the conversion was done during the standard service life of the machine. “The modular design of Liebherr equipment makes it possible to repower existing diesel excavators to new zero emission…

This week, Caterpillar successfully demonstrated a prototype of an all-new battery electric underground mining truck at its Australian proving grounds, making it the latest addition to a rapidly-growing portfolio of battery electric and semi-autonomous mining machines. Cat has been on something of a roll lately, announcing new OEM-level collaborations and showing off more additions to its electric equipment ecosystem almost continuously since the launch of its 793 above-ground electric mining truck…

On a pine farm north of the tiny town of Tamarack, Minnesota, Talon Metals has uncovered one of America’s densest nickel deposits—and now it wants to begin tunneling deep into the rock to extract hundreds of thousands of metric tons of mineral-rich ore a year.If regulators approve the mine, it could mark the starting point in what this mining exploration company claims would become the country’s first complete domestic nickel supply chain, running from the bedrock beneath the Minnesota earth to the batteries in electric…

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. The world is building solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and other crucial climate technologies faster than ever. As the pace picks up, though, a challenge is looming: we need a whole lot of materials to build it all. From cement and steel to nickel and lithium, the ingredient list for the clean energy transition is a long one. And in some cases, getting our…

RMI, a nonprofit research group focused on clean energy, projects that all the EV provisions within the IRA, which also include subsidies for new charging stations, will spur the sales of an additional 37 million electric cars and trucks by 2032. That would propel EV sales to around 80% of new passenger-automobile purchases. Those vehicles, in turn, could eliminate 2.4 billion tons of transportation emissions by 2040.  In a preliminary economic analysis, Talon said it hoped to dig up more than 140,000 tons of nickel.…

Data centers could gobble up twice as much electricity by 2026 thanks in large part to cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).We rely on data centers to store all our emails, photos, cat videos, and everything else floating around in the cloud. More and more, data centers are cropping up to mine Bitcoin and train AI. That’s already triggered backlash over the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies and AI tools like ChatGPT, since all those data…