NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Bank of America announced Wednesday that it will restructure its investment banking unit, starting with that unit’s president.

The bank said that, Gene Taylor, president of the bank’s Global Corporate and Investment Banking unit and will retire and be replaced by, Brian Moynihan, current head of the bank’s Global Wealth and Investment Management unit.

The bank also said it will eliminate about 3,000 jobs, most of which will be in the Global Corporate and Investment Banking unit, however other units will be effected by the layoffs also.

The changes come after losses in the unit’s account totaled more than $1.45 billion, triggering a 32% decline in net income for the bank, compared to the same quarter a year earlier.

“While some of these changes are a direct result of our underperformance, others have been contemplated for a number of months as we looked at how we could operate more effectively.” Bank of America’s CEO Kenneth Lewis in a prepared statement. Read more

BILLINGS, Mont., Oct. 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Stillwater Mining Company released today preliminary third quarter and year-to-date production results for its two operating mines and volumes processed in its platinum-group metal (PGM) recycling activities. As anticipated, the results indicate that third quarter production at the Stillwater Mine was heavily affected by the labor issues there early in the quarter.

Mine production for the third quarter and first nine months of 2007 overall was weaker than in the corresponding periods of 2006, particularly at the Stillwater Mine. Issues affecting third quarter 2007 output included a seven-day strike and associated labor disruption during July, and lower average productivity as the percentage of new miners in the workforce has increased. In addition to these third-quarter issues, the nine-month year-to-date results during 2007 also have included challenges with the performance of some new LHD equipment and lower productivity at the Stillwater Mine during the labor negotiations that led up to the strike. East Boulder Mine production during the quarter, which was unaffected by the labor issues, increased slightly from the year earlier results. Read more

Platinum Group Metals Ltd. (TSX: PTM)(AMEX: PLG) (“Platinum Group”) announces that it has added Peter Busse, an experienced mine developer and operator as Chief Operating Officer, COO, of the Company.

Peter Busse has North American and African precious metal mine development and operations experience. During his extensive career of some 30 years he has been manager and leader at 8 operations including union and non-union mines.

His experience includes 7 years as director of mining and Vice President of Mining, just to the north of South Africa, in Zimbabwe, for Falconbridge, Kinross and Trillion.

Peter has a total of 11 years experience during his career as manager of several of the gold mines in the Red Lake, Ontario, Canada area where the vertical shaft and underground mining is conducted at similar depths to that in the mine plan at Platinum Group’s WBJV Project 1. Read more

China — By next autumn, a muddy construction site here in a rural part of eastern China will give way to a small power plant that burns corn stalks and cotton stalks to generate electricity for nearby villages and steam for a neighboring industrial complex.

The plant would be ready sooner, but only four companies in China make the specialized precision boilers that the biomass plant requires. And all those companies are plagued by backed-up orders and delivery delays. Similar problems bedevil the wind turbine industry in China.

The same big utility company building the green plant in Boxing, CLP, has just opened a coal-fired plant in southernmost China. On schedule and built for half what it would cost in the West, that plant will generate 1,200 megawatts of electricity — compared with 6 megawatts from the Boxing biomass plant. CLP is so impressed that it is bidding to build coal-fired plants in India with Chinese technology.

These are the realities faced by companies seeking to make themselves more environmentally friendly in China, where coal is king. Coal-fired plants are quick and cheap to build and easy to run. While the Chinese government has set goals for increasing the use of a long list of alternative energies — including wind, biomass, hydroelectric, solar and nuclear — they all face obstacles, from bureaucracy to bottlenecks in manufacturing. CLP’s differing energy choices are a case study in how one company grapples with the need to provide electricity to hundreds of millions of impoverished Asians even as it is under a self-imposed goal of trying to limit emissions of global warming gases.

Controlled by the Kadoorie family — one of Hong Kong’s wealthiest, with a long history of supporting environmental causes — CLP’s board began considering a plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions on Tuesday.

While the details are still being worked out, the company plans to commit itself to “material and dramatic reductions” in such emissions in industrialized countries like Australia, while seeking to control growth in emissions in developing countries, like China, said Andrew Brandler, CLP’s chief executive.

“We think the world has to address the issue of climate change as a matter of urgency,” Mr. Brandler said.

Yet CLP’s operations are growing so quickly in China, India and other developing countries in response to soaring electricity demand that Mr. Brandler said the company’s total emissions of global warming gases may actually increase in the short term.

The problem is particularly acute because governments across Asia, from China and India to Indonesia and the Philippines, are turning mainly to coal to meet their soaring electricity needs and prevent blackouts, even though coal produces more global warming gases than any other major source of electricity.

China’s increase has been the most substantial. The country built 114,000 megawatts of fossil-fuel-based generating capacity last year alone, almost all coal-fired, and is on course to complete 95,000 megawatts more this year.

For comparison, Britain has 75,000 megawatts in operation, built over a span of decades.

The most talked-about alternative to coal in China involves plans to quadruple the country’s share of power from nuclear energy by 2020. But the plan, which contemplates dozens of reactors, still amounts to just 31,000 megawatts of nuclear power over the next dozen years.

“That’s minuscule,” said Jonathan Sinton, a China expert at the International Energy Agency. China builds more coal-fired capacity than that every four months.

Two big questions linger over even those modest goals: can equipment be manufactured for dozens of nuclear reactors, and can China train enough workers to run them?

At CLP’s Daya Bay nuclear plant in Shenzhen, a house-sized dome of specially hardened steel sat next to an immense crane one recent morning, waiting to be swung and bolted into position as part of the site’s sixth reactor.

But at least Daya Bay’s dome is here — reactors elsewhere in China wait up to several years. Only a handful of steel mills around the world can cast the thick domes, and only now are the first two mills in China taking delivery of equipment to make them.

The plant’s 1,750 employees, meanwhile, are training 500 interns at a time, according to Stephen Lau, the first deputy general manager of the plant; the government-owned nuclear power company asked that 1,000 be trained at a time, but the joint venture running the plant could not handle that many.

By contrast, there is no shortage of workers to run coal-fired power plants. China is dotted with decrepit state-owned coal-fired plants that each employ 900 to 1,000 people to produce just 50 to 100 megawatts. The government frequently asks companies to close one of these inefficient, heavily polluting operations and provide jobs or money to the workers before allowing the construction of a new coal-fired plant.

TransAlta Corp., Canada’s biggest publicly owned power producer, said third-quarter profit jumped 87 percent on gains in output and Alberta electricity prices.

Net income climbed to C$65.9 million ($68.4 million), or 33 cents a share, from C$35.3 million, or 18 cents, a year earlier, the Calgary-based company said today in a statement. Revenue rose 8.5 percent to C$711.6 million.

Higher output from a coal-fueled power plant in Centralia, Washington, contributed to the gains, TransAlta said. An equipment breakdown reduced the plant’s production for 44 days in 2006′s third quarter. TransAlta said overall power production rose 2.7 percent from a year earlier, and higher prices at its Centralia and Alberta Hydro operations widened profit margins.

Residential and industrial power demand is rising in Alberta, partly on oil-sands development Read more

Proposed rules designed to increase the effectiveness of mine-rescue teams will be the subject of two hearings today at Little America Hotel, 500 S. Main St., in Salt Lake City.

From 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) will hold a hearing on a proposal that would require coal-mine operators to have two certified mine-rescue teams.

Team members would have to live within an hour of their meeting point to respond to an emergency and would be required to have practical experience underground and knowledge of their mine’s operations and ventilation systems.

Mandatory training for rescue-team members also would increase from 40 to 64 hours annually. Teams also would be required to participate in two mine-rescue contests each year.
A second hearing will be held from 2 to 6 p.m. on MSHA’s proposed rule that requires Read more

The primary challenges facing India’s energy sectors are:

* Coal depletion and pollution. Coal accounts for more than half of the country’s energy consumption. The poor quality of Indian coal, coupled with a lack of infrastructure to clean it, poses a major environmental threat. Corruption and poor productivity dog the industry. Although it is the world’s third biggest coal producer after the United States and China, India’s coal reserves could run out in forty years, according to the Brookings report by Madan.

* Rising oil imports. Oil consumption, which accounts for roughly a third of India’s energy use, has increased sixfold (PDF) in the past twenty-five years. India now imports about 65 percent of its petroleum. With energy demands rising, the figure could be as high as 90 percent by 2025, according to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The oil demand has pushed India to make deals with countries—such as Sudan, Syria, and Iran—that raise supply concerns. Read more