U.S. Metals & Minerals Industry Digs Up More than $12 Billion in Construction Starts for Second Half of 2015

Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--The U.S. Metals & Minerals Industry is looking at $12.14 billion in projects currently slated to begin construction in the second half of 2015, according to Industrial Info's project database. Half of the total comes from the industry's two biggest regions: the Rocky Mountains and the U.S. Southwest.

Click on the image at right for a graph detailing construction kickoffs in the U.S. Metals & Minerals Industry in the second half of 2015, by region.

Although the Rocky Mountains region has the strongest total investment value (TIV) of any region at $3.19 billion, it is the U.S. Southwest that boasts the single largest project: American Specialty Alloys Incorporated's (Columbus, Mississippi) $2.4 billion construction of a flat-rolled aluminum minimill in Pineville, Louisiana. The 1.4 million-square-foot mill, which is being built at a site formerly run by International Paper (NYSE:IP) (Memphis, Tennessee), is expected to supply more than 1.3 million pounds per year of aluminum to the domestic automotive industry. W G Yates & Sons Construction Company (Birmingham, Alabama) is performing engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) services for the project, which is set to be completed in the fourth quarter of 2018.

The $2.4 billion Pineville minimill accounts for almost all of the Southwest's $2.95 billion in Metals & Minerals project kickoffs in second-half 2015.

The Rocky Mountains region always has been a prosperous place for the mining industry, and one of the largest projects set to begin construction is IC Potash Corporation's (TSX:ICP) (Toronto, Ontario) $1.02 billion construction of an polyhalite potash mine and mill in Jal, New Mexico. The 3.7 million-ton-per-year underground room and pillar mine will employ a mechanical vapor-recompression crystallizer to produce 714,000 tons per year of potassium sulfate. Novopro Projects Incorporated (Montreal, Quebec), SNC-Lavalin Incorporated (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan), Intera Geosciences & Engineering Incorporated (Albuquerque, New Mexico) and Agapito Associates Incorporated (Grand Junction, Colorado) are serving as consultants on the project, which is set to be completed in third-quarter 2017.

The Rocky Mountains region includes Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. The Southwest region includes Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.

Among the remaining regions, two of the highest-value projects can be found in Minnesota and Kentucky. PolyMet Mining Corporation (Toronto, Ontario) is spending $705 million to revamp and restart an aboveground polymetallic mine and mill in Hoyt Lakes, Minnesota. At the open-pit mine, the company plans to build a 32,000-ton-per-day flotation processing plant to extract 36,000 tons per year of copper, 7,500 tons per year of nickel, and 106,000 ounces per year of precious metal concentrate over a 20-year mine life. The project is set to be completed in fourth-quarter 2016.

In Kentucky, SunCoke Energy (NYSE:SXC) (Lisle, Illinois) is investing $400 million to construct a long-awaited metallurgical coke-manufacturing plant in the city of South Shore. The facility is expected to employ SunCoke's heat-recovery process technology on 1.2 million tons per year of coal to produce 800,000 tons per year of metallurgical coke. URS Corporation (Cincinnati, Ohio) is serving as consultant on the project, which is set to be completed in fourth-quarter 2017.

Nearly 85% of the industry's TIV--about $4.74 billion--is related to 97 projects that are now in the planning stages, where plenty of factors could increase, decrease or eliminate the expected spending. The Metals & Minerals Industry also has 34 projects worth about $1.36 billion in the engineering stages, while 109 projects worth $299 million already have kicked off the first stage of construction and will kick off the next in the second half of the year.

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