Earlier in the year, I had the pleasure to be involved in some fascinating research that is of genuine use to the mining industry. The work investigated the linkage between economic geology and mine costs in gold mining in Australian and New Zealand, i.e. what are the geological characteristics that lead to lower or higher mining costs across the industry… Read this post →
A few months ago my PhD supervisor, Allan Trench, presented a paper co-authored with myself and a colleague at CRU Group, Paul Robinson, to the AusIMM New Zealand Branch Annual Conference. Allan's presentation focused on CRU commodity price forecasts, however, the paper we submitted alongside also looked at some of the problems of commodity price forecasting and ways it can be… Read this post →
In September it was my great pleasure to give one of the plenary presentations for China Metals Week in Beijing, organised by Metal Pages. My presentation aim was to draw together the themes of the conference, which were the electronic metals, battery metals, light alloys and antimony. The presentation was entitled: "An Economic History of the Esoteric Metals Markets: Batteries, Electronics, Light Alloys,… Read this post →
In a recent in depth article we discussed “What’s hot, what’s not and why” in the commodities world, based on a presentation by CRU Group at the ITRI International Tin Conference last month. Looking at the medium term prospects for a number of commodities, the article concluded that for a commodity to be “hot” with strong positive price fundamentals it… Read this post →
At the recent ITRI International Tin Conference, metals and mining consultancy CRU Group presented an update of its "Commodity Price Climate Change" forecast. This has nothing to do with which commodities would benefit from an anthropogenically warmed planet (we'll cover that another day), but is a way of summarising their views of whether commodity price outlooks will be “hot”, “warm”,… Read this post →
