Iron ore markets won’t quickly recover from Vale disaster, says Black Iron’s Simpson

In the following interview excerpt, iron ore expert Matt Simpson, co-founder and CEO of junior Black Iron (TSX: BKI; US-OTC: BKIRF), explains the new landscape for iron ore markets worldwide in the wake of Vale’s horrific tailings dam disaster near Brumadinho in Brazil, which has resulted in 10% of the world’s iron ore pellet production being removed from the market. Before heading up Black Iron, Simpson was mining manager at Rio Tinto’s Iron Ore Co. of Canada operations in Labrador – the largest iron ore mine in North America. For the full interview listen to The Northern Miner Podcast – episode 134: Iron ore markets post-Vale disaster, Ukraine update featuring Black Iron’s Matt Simpson, where Simpson gets into more detail on the mining scene in Ukraine and his firm’s new offtake financing deal with Glencore (LON: GLEN) at the junior’s high quality Shymanivske iron ore deposit in Ukraine. The Northern Miner: There has been a tremendous change in the iron ore markets with the Vale disaster in late January. There are so many things going on with the iron ore markets. Where do you want to start? Matt Simpson: I am happy to talk about what happened in Brazil and how that impacts the general markets. So on January 25, there was a horrific tailings dam failure at one of Vale’s iron ore operations in Brazil. And because of that failure, which is the second in about three years’ time – the first being the Samarco tailings dam failure – the Brazilian government required Vale to shut down about 11 of their operations, taking about 70 million tonnes of product of about 1.6 billion tonnes globally off-stream. Continue reading at The Northern Miner.