Rio Tinto approves bauxite plan, Balfour wins Norfolk road contract

Stocks to watch

Mining giant Rio Tinto has approved the $1.9bn expansion of its high-quality Amrun bauxite project in Queensland's Cape York Peninsula. The initial output should be 22.8m tonnes a year of bauxite, which is used to make aluminuium, increasing annual bauxite exports from Cape York by around 10m tonnes annually to help meet growing bauxite demand from China.

Infrastructure group Balfour Beatty has been awarded a £104m contract by Norfolk County Council for the Norwich Northern Distributor Road (NNDR). The FTSE 250 company announced it will construct the new 19.6km dual carriageway, including nine new roundabouts, seven new bridges, an underpass and a more complex two level junction. Construction will begin this winter and will be completed in late 2017.

Newspaper round-up

A wave of company failures is “inevitable” in Britain’s oil and gas industry, with businesses supporting the wider energy sector the first to fail, according to advisory firm FRP. The prediction comes in the wake of the Autumn Statement, which set out a bleak prediction for future of the North Sea industry with an expected collapse in tax receipts, but offered no relief for the sector. – Telegraph

The government has been forced to deny claims that George Osborne’s spending review is a continued assault on Britain’s poorest families, after two respected thinktanks warned future benefit cuts would leave some families more than a thousand pounds worse off. Both the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Resolution Foundation said they believe millions of working families would be worse off by 2020 because of welfare changes than they would have been under the current system, despite Osborne having reversed his planned cuts to tax credits. – Guardian

Unilever, the consumer goods giant, has pledged to eliminate coal from its energy usage within five years, and derive all of its energy worldwide solely from renewable sources by 2030. The company will become “carbon positive” by 2030, through its own use of renewables, and by investing in generating more renewable energy than it needs, selling the surplus on the markets and making it available to local communities in areas where it operates. About 40% of the company’s energy use currently comes from green sources. – Guardian

US close

The US stock markets were closed on Thursday for the Thanksgiving holiday. Wall Street will open for a curtailed session on Friday, with the closing bell at 1800 GMT.