Energy, Mining & Utilities

Baotou Iron & Steel Group in China’s Inner Mongolia province is planning to spend 2 billion yuan (US$280 million) to expand a huge manmade lake near Baotou city that contains toxic historical “tailings” (waste left behind after processing ore) from the world’s largest rare earth mine and refinery. Read More

The Western Australia Environmental Protection Authority has agreed to conduct a full environmental assessment of Talison Lithium’s plans for a major expansion of the Greenbushes lithium mine, the largest in the world, after 95 percent of the 364 comments submitted to the agency demanded action. Read More

Dateline Resources has been granted U.S. government approval to mine for gold and rare earths at the Colosseum project inside the Mojave National Preserve in California, despite the fact that major questions about the project being raised by the agency that manages U.S. national parks and monuments. Read More

Indigenous communities in Chile are trying to strike a deal with Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile (SQM), based in Santiago, Chile, and Albemarle, which is based in Charlotte, North Carolina, to reduce the environmental impact of the world’s largest lithium mines. Read More

Indigenous communities in Suriname have sued their government to withdraw an agreement with Chinalco (Aluminum Corporation of China Limited), to dig for bauxite near the village of Bakhuis in the central region of the country. Read More

Over 400 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle in the Krasnoyarsk Krai region of Siberia is the town of Norilsk, population 170,000. Developed in the 1930s by the then-Soviet Union, it is one of the coldest as well as one of most most polluted places in the world. Read More

A U.S. federal court ruled in favor of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma after it sued Enel Group for violating its tribal sovereignty. Enel was ordered to remove a massive 84-turbine wind farm that it built without obtaining mining permission, in order to profit from the renewable energy boom.  Read More

When black rain poured down around the Tata Steel plant in IJmuiden, a shipping town in the Netherlands, residents were told that they had no need to worry so long as they kept their windows closed, peeled their vegetables, and washed their hands more frequently. That was in 2018. Read More

Some three quarters of the word’s supply of cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where children as young as 10 years old help extract the metal from hand dug shafts in the Tilwezembe mine in Katanga province. Read More

Spills from Petroperú’s oil drilling have devastated the Marañón river in Peru for some 50 years. In order to tackle the pollution, a group of Kukama Indigenous women sued the government and Petroperú asserting that the river is a living entity with rights that should be protected. In March 2024, a court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered the company to clean up the river.   Read More