Endako Heading Into “Suspension”
Fraser Lake, B.C. – Thompson Creek Metals, along with its partner Sojitz Moly Resources, has announced that effective December 31st of this year the company will place the Endako Mine into what it calls “temporary suspension”, and it will mean loss of jobs.
The company employees about 450 at the Endako Mine which is just outside of Fraser Lake..
The company says about 50% of the salaried workers at the Endako Mine will be terminated resulting in a severance package of about $1.7 million dollars .
The hourly employees were notified today that their employment will be “temporarily suspended in 60 days and will remain so suspended while the Mine is on temporary suspension.” It means about 300 hourly workers, members of the USW Local 1-424, will be off the job in early February.
Steelworkers Local 1-424 3rd Vice President Dan Will, says he heard the news today when he was in Tumbler Ridge “It didn’t catch us totally off guard as we knew the commodity price for Moly was down. We figure it costs about $8.80 a pound to mine the product and last summer the selling price was about $13 or $14 dollars a pound. But recently, that price has slipped to about $8.00 a pound.”
Will says he will be meeting with Thompson Creek officials tomorrow to get more details on the suspension that will see workers laid off until the mine can resume production and call workers back to the job.
Jacques Perron , President and CEO of Thompson Creek issued a release late today ” We expected that the operational improvements that were implemented in 2014 would have been sufficient to keep Endako operating profitably during this prolonged period of volatility in the Moly market, but as a result of the current and expected prices for our products, we had no other option but to place the mine on temporary suspension.”
Fraser Lake Mayor Dwayne Lindstrom, says he is devastated with the news. “There is not much we can do as a council . There will be millions of dollars in lost wages and this closing will affect everyone in the region. I have lived here all my life” said Lindstrom, “I went through the last shut down in the 70’s because of poor prices and it was not very pleasant.”
Comments
Any idea why the price of molybdenum fluctuates so widely?
I wonder how it will be before Chrissy or one of her high priced henchmen will claim it is all the NDP’s fault.
Billposer.. It’s largely to do with moly being a by product from large copper gold mines in the US and South America there is no cost for these mines to produce it. As well moly is closely linked to the iron ore and steel markets which are largely driven by economics in Asia most notably China..The moly market in has been in a surplus for a few years now mainly because of the by product factor.. Good news is that the world can’t function without it and there are only about 5 primary moly mines in the world..The moly market is also notorious for being unpredictable as well because of Molys multiple uses and it’s hard to nail down the supply and demand equation..
oops
I wonder how LONG it will be before Chrissy or one of her high priced henchmen will claim it is all the NDP’s fault.
One of moly’s main uses is to harden steel. As that production decreases, so does the need for moly.
At least it’s better than the ‘bad old days'(early 80’s?) when workers were told to enjoy the summer off; and when fall rolled around–then they found out it was shutting down.
Lived in F Lake then; remember the bad times; till they started up again.
What a disappointment, and after all the money spent there on new construction in the last couple of years. This is going to hurt a lot of people, again. It seems to me that Endako closed another time, after the one in the late seventies, early eighties.
metalman.
mactac, I wonder how long it will be before the NDP claim it’s all Christy Clark’s fault?
Banking insiders say China is in the early stages of an economic collapse that could set them back two decades. The over capacity in steel is something like 1000%. Short of a major war Endako might be down for a long while.
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