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By Samantha James AUSTRALIAN iron ore prices crossed the $50/t threshold in February, a price not seen for more than three months. Prices were sub $40/t across December and January but a rally in Chinese steel demand in February was attributed to the end of China’s lunar holiday and the restart of steel production. However, Argonaut Securities analyst Helen Lau said it was a seasonal uptick, and that an upsurge in demand for construction steel products would be hampered by excess supply. “Low steel inventory, seasonal demand rebound after Chinese New Year and increasing utilization rate at blast furnaces has resulted in a rebound in steel and iron ore price,” she said. “We believe this rebound in steel prices and…

By Samantha James ON the back of a multi-billion net loss for the second half of 2015, BHP Billiton will implement a new operating model to “create a more agile company”. BHP Billiton chief executive officer Andrew Mackenzie said changes to executive ranks and operating units, including the restructure of BHP’s minerals production operations, would be a continuation of the company’s “simplification journey”. “ are made possible by the recent demerger of South32 and well-timed asset divestments, and reflect our continued commitment to improve productivity,” he said. “At the core of the new model will be assets dedicated to safety, volume and cost enabled by functions integrated globally and largely co-located with the assets. “Both assets and functions will…

By Samantha James THE collapse of a tailings dam at the Vale-BHP Billiton owned Samarco operation in Brazil has resulted in flooding across more than 600km in one of the worst environmental disasters in the country’s mining history. On November 5 2015, one of the three dams at the Samarco iron ore mine in Minas Gerais failed, affecting the downstream Santarem dam and causing a “significant release” of mine tailings to flood the nearby community of Bento Rodrigues and others downstream, according to BHP. Four days later BHP advised that although it did not know the causes of the tailings release, it was assisting rescue efforts at the nearby communities where at least one fatality and 13 people had been…

MINING tycoon Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest and his wife Nicola have made one of the biggest-ever single philanthropic donations in Australian history, giving $65 million in cash to WA’s five tertiary institutions. According to The Australian Financial Review, $50 million of the gift would go towards setting up the Forrest Foundation: an organisation to fund 25 international PhD students and six post-graduate scholarships per year, in a “modern Australian version of the Rhodes scholarships to Oxford”. Scholarship recipients will be called Forrest scholars and fellows. The gift was a particular boon for the University of WA, with the remaining $15 million to be used to construct a new accommodation block adjacent to the university, to be named Forrest Hall. Mr Forrest,…