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17th March 2003
March 2003
Newsletter
Features
Mineral
Exploration trends in Australia, a wake up call.
We comment on a recent ABARE report. The decline in mineral exploration
activity has been so dramatic that the economic consequences will
be more severe than most Australians realize. Expenditure on mineral
exploration (excluding oil) has hit a 25 year low, declining nearly
50% over the last five years to A$ 623 million. However, because
mine output has not yet fallen as sharply, the economic consequences
of reduced exploration have largely gone unnoticed. Potentially
30% of all exports are affected or 9% of Australia's GDP. This should
be a wake up call.
In science
publishing who is making big money online --
who
would have guessed that Reed Elsevier, yes that publisher of all
things geological and owner of Science Direct on line, now found
in most universities, is also more profitable than Amazon.com.
Forbes magazine comments."If
you are not a scientist or a lawyer, you might never guess which
company is one of the world's biggest in online revenue. Ebay will
haul in only $1 billion this year. Amazon has $3.5 billion in revenue
but is still, famously, losing money. Outperforming them both is
Reed Elsevier, the London-based publishing company. Of its $8 billion
in likely sales this year, $1.5 billion will come from online delivery
of data, and its operating margin on the internet is a fabulous
22%."
In geoscience
generally -
Environmental Record from Ocean Depths Spans 250,000 Years -
Australian and French scientists voyaging across the Great Australian
Bight have retrieved a core sample from the Murray Canyons that
contains information on Australia's climate over the last 250,000
years. "Dinosaur-Killer"
Asteroid Crater Imaged for First Time. A high-resolution
map from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), has provided
the most telling visible evidence to date of a 112-mile (180-kilometer)
wide, 3,000-foot (900-meter) deep impact crater, the result of a
collision with a giant comet or asteroid on one of Earth's all-time
worst days. But
not everyone agrees that is how the Dinosaurs died. Dinosaurs
were more likely to have been killed off by geological upheaval
than, as popularly believed, a meteorite strike, according to Monash
University geologists.
In minerals
- Record revenues and contracts for Canadian
Major
Drilling and Australia's Leighton
Holdings are encouraging signs. The latest ABARE
commodity price forcast also predicts modest price
increases, back to year 2000 levels, for nickel, copper and aluminium.
However Zinc
reserves are still too high. The
buzz in gold remains " more talk than money,"
at the Prospectors and Developers association in Toronto last week.
Experts say bullion prices, while heading in the right direction,
remains too low to bring new mines on stream in time to make up
for a looming supply shortfall, as established mining companies
work through reserves in coming years. The
ABARE gold price forcast offers little hope of sustaining
the current record prices significantly over US$300 into 2004.
In oil -
China dug deeper into Kazakhstan's oil market
with a big investment, but it is unclear that the move will speed
plans for a 3,200-kilometer pipeline to the east. More
background on this item. China is not alone in wishing
to reduce dependency on middle east oil. The
Shah Daniz project, gas pipeline to Turkey approved
March 10, 2003 - is another development to exploit the Caspian Sea
reserves. A grab for Artic
National Wildlife Refuge oil is on again with last
weeks US senate budget commitee move. Word
wide, forcast of ofshore drilling expenditure is US$170 billion
in over the next 5 years. In 2002 the expenditure was US$ 33.5 billion.
In other
news -we offer two recent quotes by the worlds most sucessful
invester, Warren
Buffett. "With short-term money returning less than
1% after-tax, sitting it out is no fun" and "Despite three
years of falling prices, which have significantly improved the attractiveness
of common stocks, we still find very few that even mildly interest
us". For
top financial news today from Bloomberg, click here.
Job Watch
by SkilledGeoscience
Next month we will publish the SkilledGeoscience review of
current geoscience employment vacancy trends world wide. This will
assit educators in strategic planning.
Industrial
Minerals watch by www.indmins.com.au
For a recent summary of all Australian industrial mineral news click
here and browse. Note
how production of light weight magnesium alloys in Australia is
slowly becoming a reality.
This service
is courtesy of Aert Driessen from Indmins.
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Future
issues will always feature:
- www - geoscience
round up
- links to
commodity and regional specialists
- our review
of top mineral & oil stories
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