More foreign investment. Know why we can't use our own gasoline and pay less for it? Foreign ownership. THIS IS CANADA'S COAL...piss off china. piss off Bell.

From www.chinamining.org :
A total of 2,433 people died in coal mine accidents in China last year, a senior work safety official said Friday, vowing to beef up safety in the nation's notoriously dangerous collieries.

The death toll last year was 198 lower than in 2009, Huang Yi, chief engineer and spokesman for the State Administration of Work Safety, told reporters -- but the total still means more than six people are killed in mines each day on average.

China's mines are known for being among the deadliest in the world because of lax regulation, corruption and inefficiency.

Labour rights groups have long maintained the actual death toll is likely much higher than shown in official data, partly because of the under-reporting of accidents as mine bosses seek to limit their economic losses.

Want jobs with chinese run coal mines? sure....then start digging graves too.

I am pretty sure they are taking the coal to China not the mines. WorkSafe BC would deal with safety not the Chinese government.

Lol. Today's winner for dumbest post is..............................

exactly doofus..canadas resources should stay here.

Why not use the coal here? What a thought.

worksafe bc hahahah...what good will be worksafe bc after people die because the chinese owners do as they see fit? They will make all sorts of promises then safety will take a back seat to profits..that is what its all about. You'll see...if you dont think big business and chinese interests wont sway worksafe bc you are morons, they think they can get away with anything.

I'm sure Pat Bell and the Chinese are deeply concerned about your issues, lmorge. Why don't you write them a nasty letter?

hood rich seems to think the chinese government is involved...its chinese buisness interests not the government. They own the government anyways.

using the coal here is great idea. But the Liberals banned its use in this province years ago.

wow

Exactly hood rich! The mines are in Canada. Canadian rules govern on Canadian soil.

BTW, SOme of the Canadian owned mines in Africa and South America are not exactly the best liked either.

I am not too sure how many realize this is metallurgical coal. It is used to make steel. We were going to use it back in the mid 1970s for a reduction mill in the Salmon Valley area, but it ended up nowhere fast. So they starting selling it to others who knew how to use it.

Let us face it, we are not very good in producing high end products for the world market. There are a few key exceptions, but in BC, it is mainlky our lot to continue being "hewers of wood and drawers of water" ..... with a few minerals thrown in now and then.

Hopefully the cycle wikl stop before we run out of those resources and we realize, as other countries have, that our real resources are our people.

Oh, we have one more overlooked resource ... space ... room to grow a population that will need those resources that we gave away for comparatively little benefit to us.

Sorry ... one more thing ..... Families = Jobs = access to resources = access to education = security of lifestyle.

So how did a few new mines opening which will bring lots of jobs and goverment revenue become a bad thing. All mines are subject to the same workplace rules regardless if your a Chinese company or Canadian. Get over your China-phobia. I swear if a article was posted stating world peace had broke out and cancer was cured people here would be angry about it.

"a project that likely wouldn’t have been developed in the Canadian system because of a lack of experience in underground mining"

Isn't Grande Cache Coal an underground mine? And on Vancouver Island as well. I think there are underground mines on Cape Breton as well.

Pat may be referring to coal mines.

Apparently 90% of the coal mined in Canada comes from strip mines. According to the internet version of the Canadian Encyclopedia, which may be a bit dated, there are only 4 underground coal mines in Canada, two in Nova Scotia, one in Alberta and one in BC. The Cape Breton mines apparently go down a kilometer and extend under the ocean. The average Chinese mines about 400 metres deep.

Today, in addition to the 2 underground mines, there are 23 surface coal mines in the West.

The story is different, on the other hand, for other mines such as diamonds and gold.
Here is a story from the Vancouver Sun of the Black Fox underground gold mine east of Timmins, Ontario. http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Brigus+Gold+Completes+Construction+Underground+Infrastructure/4517539/story.html

Here is a list of some underground mines in Canada, including inactive ones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Underground_mines_in_Canada

Underground coal mines are probably the unsafest mines in the world due to the nature of the ore.

As has already been stated, Chinese underground coal mining technology is certainly not one we should be emulating. They are well known to be the world’s deadliest coal mines if not mines, period.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2010/10/07/china-mine-bosses-safety.html
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/regional/2010-05/28/content_9906140.htm

The excuse is that they have lots of old, smaller mines. However, some of the larger state owned mines have not been doing as well as expected either.

I am pro business, and even I would say. Nah, lets not do that.

Kill progress!!
Let's go back to the stone age.
What's wrong with you left wingers?

Maybe it would pay us to watch for how many OTHER coal mines OTHER job hungry governments announce the Chinese are going to develop in OTHER coal producing countries of the world around about now, too.

They could well be playing the same stunt the Japanese have played, over and over again with a wide variety of commodities, on us.

The one we never seem to learn from, as a whole host of new resource development projects that initially look wonderful in terms of job creation and prosperity all come on line at once. And the price of the product plummets everywhere below the costs of production.

Are our collective memories so short that we don't recall what happened when the renewed interest in coal mining in the Crow's Nest Pass and the new development at Tumbler Ridge both started pumping coal on the market at once? Along with similar new 'metallurgical' coal mines in Australia, South Africa, and the USA, all directing their production towards the 'insatiable' Japanese steel industry?

Better we get an iron clad agreement on pricing first, before we start spending taxpayer dollars for 'infrastructure', only to be left holding the bag. Again.

I think there are underground mines on Cape Breton as well.
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And some of the big ones were shut down because of many deaths from underground explosions. .Was it a lack of safety could be.? There were also problems in the Crows Nest with explosions underground.

Are coal mines regulated by WorkSafeBC or under Federal jurisdiction. The Chinese however would not be making the safety regulations for the mines.

I guess we will pay the carbon tax for their reductions in carbon too? Seems to me its all about government revenue selling our resources and then taxing us for the carbon output.

Maybe part of looking at projects like this should be the increased taxation for those exporters producing the carbon?

"Kill progress!!"

And you define progress how? Sending raw resources overseas? The USA does not and did not do that in any significant way. In fact, they had a revolution against England because of it. They figured out a long time ago that they would keep their people working by creating something from their natural resources and then strated scouring the globe for more the same as other countries have done before her.

Probably the only people who are getting something reasonable for their natural resources are those who are supplying oil to the world.

Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Germany, China are all countries that use natural resources from the rest of the world to create finished products to sell back to the world.

If it were not for the Auto pact and a few high profile companies such as Bombardier, Canada would not even be a blip on the world map of higher order manufacturing. Selling coal to China is not going to help unless there is a reciprocal agreement.
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"Let's go back to the stone age."

If we did not get as much money as we are out of the oil sands, we would be relatively in the stone age. We have a petro dollar. Just watch the TSX and the influence that the price of oil has on it. How the Auto industry fares does influence it, but not to the same extent. Bombardier? Minor player.
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"What's wrong with you left wingers?"

This is not a left wing thing. This is a corporation against the people thing. If right wingers are so stupid as to sell the raw materials with which they can produce something and make some money with, then they are no better than the salespeople who sell cars made in Ontario, or worse still in Japan, Korea, Germany and soon China.

Up to the end of World War Two the USA exported a lot of oil to Europe. Most of England's oil during that War came from Texas and Oklahoma and Louisiana.

The Americans have long exported coal, and still do.

There are considerable American exports of hardwood lumber still, even to Canada. And in more recent times, hardwood logs, as many mills and furniture factories in States like North Carolina now find it 'financially cheaper' to outsource lumber and furniture manufacture to China than do the same job in America. Even at the notorious low wage rates prevailing in those 'Bible-belt' southeastern States ~ where "Salvation through works" is enshrined in the religious upbringing of their citizens.

Unrestricted softwood log exports from the Pacific Northwest did in much of the lumber industry in that region, before the dry-up of US National Forest timber sales as a result of the spotted owl habitat fiasco did in most of the rest of it.

To blame 'Corporations' as many are wont to do is to largely misplace blame. Fundamentally, any 'corporation' is simply an association of individuals formed for a clearly stated purpose, or purposes. Its 'constitution' is referred to, in BC and most other modern jurisdictions, as its Memorandum and Articles of Association.

Corporations are formed generally to produce or provide some type of good or service needed or desired by the general public. Any profit or loss a Corporation makes in achieving its purpose is primarily an indication of the correctness or incorrectness of its entrepreneurial endeavours.

The problem is NOT with 'corporations' or the corporate structure, per se. It is that NO country that is industrialised currently has a financial system that is fully 'self-liquidating'.

NO country can 'buy' and fully pay for ALL its own production solely from the total amount of wages, salaries and dividends DISTRIBUTED to its citizens in the course of generating that production.

The more we automate and mechanise ~ the greater we 'lengthen and broaden' the whole structure of production through increasing amounts of the division of labour ~ the greater this problem becomes. We are FORCED to try to get rid of our un-purchaseable surpluses abroad, NOT in 'trade' for some other country's alternate surpluses ~ though we do do that, too~ but for international CREDITS convertible to Canadian currency. It is truly a 'race to the bottom'. For rather than having a financial system that SERVES us properly, and properly reflects numerically the realities of production and consumption, we have establised a monster, a financial system that DEMANDS WE SERVE IT.

Under such a system 'elections' such as we're having now are a complete farce. No matter who gets in, their first duty will be to those who control our 'money', not to those who elected them.

Lets not get carried away with this story.

Firstly the Bullmoose mine and Quintette mine in Tumbler Ridge were open pit mines and in their best years the most tonnes they shipped to Japan in a year was 5 Million tonnes. So how would you expect three underground mines to ship 8 Million tonnes.

One of the reasons for Quintette and Bullmoose shutting down was the high cost of operations and low price for coal. Whats changed????

8 Million tonnes of coal a year converts to about 2-100 car coal trains per day, presumeably to Prince Rupert. Didnt we just hear that Prince Rupert is over capacity for coal shipments. Wasnt there an American company that contracted for 40% of the capacity at Pr Rupert.

At present we have Western Coal and Peace River Coal producing and shipping metalurgical coal from the Tumber Ridge area.

If we dont have the capacity to ship this coal through Pr Rupert, where is it going to go?? Vancouver?? Who knows.

Sounds to me like another Pat Bell good news story, not backed up by any facts.

Reading up on carbon trading lately and they plan to have the market in place by 2012 where Western companies will have to pay around $30 per ton of carbon towards carbon offsets... some signing on early are getting off sets for the $10 range... With Kyoto the idea is we have our carbon emissions capped as a nation with any increase in carbon output (ie meteorological coal)... with any increase in carbon output raising the aggregate cost across the nation of carbon offsets to bring the nation within mandated levels of output.

Therefore as we increase our carbon output with oil sands exports and coal exports... we as a county will have to sacrifice to pay the carbon offsets... currently pegged at $30 a ton we are looking at a $240 million dollar a year cost to the Canadian economy to sell this coal to the Chinese who will be having no part in a carbon offsetting program as they increase exponentially their carbon output with no regard to global reduction schemes making completely meaningless the carbon reductions forced on western, and in particular Canadian, economic movers... our economy pays big dollars for carbon offsets to fund the increase in carbon output for export to an economy that will use the economic advantage of cheep resources to make the tanks, and planes, and ships that one day will threaten our very freedoms.

Its all a twisted logic, but the important thing to remember is that carbon offsetting and Kyoto type limiting of carbon output are a reality in the not to distant future, and as long as that is not factored into this kind of equation I question whether a project like this is harmful to our future economy or down right catastrophic.

At very minimum I think above and beyond the normal royalties any coal or oil sands for export should have to pay the going rate for carbon offset programs. Ideally these offset programs would be geared towards increasing our biofuels export markets and sustainable forestry practices. Then and maybe only then would this be a net positive development for Canada.

Time will tell I guess...