Hajigak Iron Ore Deposit

Lead Toxicity and Nigerian Gold

Yvonne Ndege reports on severe health effects due to lead exposure among villagers in Zamfara province, northern Nigeria. Six villages have been affected according to Marcel Lagenbach of Medecins Sans Frontieres. The villagers say they will continue to mine for gold despite lead in the dust that is killing their children. Critics accuse the government officials of turning a blind eye and focusing instead on signing lucrative mining deals with China.

Pollluter Harmony


This is a hilarious take on the corrupt relations between politicians and lobbyists for the natural resources industries and other big corporations who pollute our air and water. Polluter Harmony is a "matchmaking" service through which Jeff, a lobbyist, claims to have met Lisa, a powerful senator from the state of Alaska. I laughed and laughed until I realized just how close this gets to the truth.

Dirty Gold

Anna Boiko-Weyrauch has created another fabulous radio report on extractive industries and the environment of Africa. This one is about gold mining impacts along the Subri river in Ghana. She posted it on December 18th, and I think that I may have heard it on public radio here in the United States.

Ghana used to be called the Gold Coast and today it's the second largest producer of gold in Africa. Most of the gold comes out of a number of large surface mines. They are all owned by companies from abroad such as Newmont, which stores water and waste from its gold mine behind the Subri River dam. In her report for the Common Language Project, Ms. Boiiko-Weyrauch speaks with Adusah Yakubu from a local advocacy group about health consequences of local environmental deterioration. She also mentions the Responsible Jewellery Council, which certifies gold miners who do a better job than Newmont has done here in Ghana.

More Power without Coal?

Because of "regulatory and legal uncertainties" about the future of coal, the Seminole Electric Cooperative today announced that it has canceled plans to build a new coal-fired power plant at its generation facility near Jacksonville, Florida (St. Petersburg Times, Dec 18th). Earthjustice, an non-profit public interest law firm based in Tallahassee, had threatened legal action on behalf of the Florida Wildlife Federation.

Seminole applied in 2006 for a permit to build the proposed 750 megawatt coal-fired plant, upgrading its Putnam County facility which currently generates 1300 megawatts. Power, an industry magazine, named it as "top facility" for 2009. The Seminole Electric Cooperative also received a Leadership Award from the Council for Sustainable Florida. It's webpage trumpets a "long-standing and continuing commitment to a diverse program of environmental stewardship at its generating stations." According to Earthjustice, Seminole is now proposing to build a natural gas fired plant instead along with a 1 to 5 megawatt solar energy project in southwest Florida.

Congo's Bloody Coltan

Coltan is a dull metallic ore containing both columbite and tantalite minerals. Common in the eastern Congo, the exploitation of these mineral resources is intricately connected with ethnic strife and national politics among Congolese and with their neighbors in Rwanda and Uganda.

The Rio Tinto debacle

Shares of Australian mining conglomerate Rio Tinto (RTP) sank on July 8th following the news of the arrest of their employee Stern Hu for bribery and espionage by Chinese authorities. Hu is an Australian national of Chinese ancestry. Australian blogger and economist angel80 adeptly chronicles an intricate merger war between Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton (BHP), and Chinalco (ACH) which led up to Hu's arrest. Stock prices for BHP Billiton and Chinalco do not appear to have been affected by the Rio Tinto debacle, at least on the boards in London or New York. The above chart compares RTP against the PHLX index for gold and silver (^XAU) for the past month.

Geoscientists arrested in Brazil

Three graduate students from the United States were arrested while conducting fieldwork in the Pantanal region of western Brazil. Two Brazilian students were arrested at the same time, and the entire team had studied and trained at the University of Arizona under Andy Cohen. I am still reading up on this myself, but there is a petition up for us all to sign at the Arizona Geology blog. I came across the news originally in a post by Chuck at Lounge of the Lab Lemming, one of the ten (10) blogs which I just selected to award an "Excellent Blog" award to.

P.S. An earlier post on the Arizona Geology blog indicated that the students were released but are going to have to stand trial in Brazil. According to an article in USA Today authored by Andrea Stone, the students could be stuck in Brazil for months.

Crandall Canyon Mine in EOS

I recently renewed my subscription to EOS, the weekly newsletter of the American Geophysical Union. An article on the Crandall Canyon Mine collapse appeared in the issue published back on August 21st. Staff writer Randy Showstack reports the consensus view among seismologists, which I previously summarized here in this blog, that the 3.9 magnitude event was probably caused by an underground cavity collapse rather than a tectonic earthquake.

Showstack interviewed a number of geophysicists, including Douglas Dreger of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory (BSL) at the University of California, Berkeley. Dreger emphasized that the pattern of "first motions" shown in the seismographs is not the alternating pattern that would indicate an earthquake. Instead, Dreger said, the ground moved down initially. James Pechman, research associate professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah, also argues for an underground collapse due to the fact that “all the P wave first motions in the University of Utah network for this seismic event were downward or dilatational. That is not definitive by itself, but in these areas with lots of coal mine–induced seismicity, when we see all downward first motion, we expect a collapse event in the mine.”

Showstack concludes his piece by noting that Robert E. Murray, co-owner of the Crandall Canyon Mine, was continuing to attribute the mine collapse to a natural
earthquake. Murray's interpretation, as Showstack notes, is at variance with the consensus of geophysicists who have inspected the seismological records from the event.

Crandall Canyon Coal Mine Collapse

I had my suspicions about this one from the first day of reporting, which I guess was last Monday. That would have been the day of our convocation at VSU, where I am now teaching on a one-year temporary appointment.

Geophysicists with both the University of Utah and the U.S. Geological Survey were already saying late Monday that the event recorded on seismographs was the collapse itself, rather than an earthquake which triggered it. I know of a similar collapse event which is often mistaken for an earthquake in the seismological record for the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania. A "first motion" or "moment tensor" analysis using seismographs from throughout the western United States has now been completed by a team at the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory. The source mechanism for the August 6 seismic event is most consistent with the collapse of an underground cavity.

Robert Murray, who owns part of the mine in which the six miners are now entombed, continues to question the findings of geophysicists which have been reported by the press. For an excellent analysis of the mining methods and rock properties that played a role in this disaster see the recent post at The Oil Drum.

Valco, Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah

The closing of the Valco aluminum smelter in the Ghanaian port of Tema appeared as a minor item in yesterday's financial news. I must admit to knowing absolutely nothing about this smelter or its integral role in Ghana's economic history until this tidbit of current news awakened my interest. I did have some basic knowledge of Ghana's geography and political history, following with particular interest the recent 50th anniversary of Ghanaian independence.

The smelter at Tema was part of a bold plan for rapid economic development conceived by Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah, during the 1960's. As his son, Gamal Nkrumah, relates:

Kwame Nkrumah laid the foundations for the industrialization of Ghana. He built the Akosombo Dam to generate electricity. He also built the Tema Harbour, which was a deepwater harbor, immediately after independence. So he was laying the foundation for the industrialization of Ghana.¹

The Akosombo Dam on the Volta River had been planned by British engineers prior to Ghanaian independence, but construction was not begun until Nkrumah secured financial backing from the United States in 1958. It became one of the first large projects undertaken by the World Bank, with most of the hydroelectric power that it was to produce promised to the newly created Volta Aluminum Company (VALCO) for its smelter to be constructed at the port city of Tema. As can be seen from the map below, the damming of the Volta River created an immense lake totaling over 8300 km² (3200 mi²). To administer the lake and dam, the Ghanaian Parliament established the Volta River Authority in April 1961 with Nkrumah as Chairman and six Board members.²






















As part of the deal made with the World Bank and United States corporations, Ghana gave a written promise that the Tema smelter would not be expropriated. Nkrumah and his economic advisors did envision, however, that local bauxite ore would be exploited for aluminum production in a "vertically" integrated national industry. The newly formed VALCO, on the other hand, was controlled by American investors. Particularly influential was Nkrumah's close personal friend, Edgar Kaiser, a California industrialist who built the Akosombo Dam and went on to found Kaiser Aluminum to use its power.³ Kaiser, Alcoa, and other aluminum companies making use of the smelter have found it more profitable to ship alumina from their existing mines in Jamaica and other locations than to open up new operations in Ghana. The "invisible hand" of international trade seems to have made an unsustainable mess in this case, possibly contributing to the rundown condition of the smelter which has suffered at least two disastrous fires in the past two years. In closing the smelter, Ghana apparently intends to devote the power from the Akosombo Dam to providing more stable electricity to its citizens.

¹Nkrumah, Gamel, 2007, Interview with Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, March 6th

²Moxon, James, 1984, Volta - Man's Greatest Lake. London: Andre Deutsch.

³Burnett, Nicholas, 1980, Kaiser Shortcircuits Ghanaian Development. Multinational Monitor, v. 1, no. 1.