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01/11/2013 (On-The-Air)

01/11/2013 (On-The-Air)

safm1november2013

1st November 2013

By: Martin Creamer

Creamer Media Editor

  

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Every Friday morning, SAfm’s AMLive’s radio anchor Tsepiso Makwetla speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly.  Reported here is this Friday’s At the Coalface transcript:

Makwetla: I’m throwing you a curved ball, Martin, Chiefs or Pirates?

Creamer: I’m a Pirates fan, all the way, up the Bucs.

Makwetla: Zimbabwe is popping up as the next king of platinum as South Africa begins losing its once mighty grip.

Creamer: We have thrown away our gold leadership, and we are talking about we, South Africans as a nation. We have lost our gold leadership, we are now below Peru in 5th position. The same is now being predicted for our platinum leadership.

We had such an almighty grasp on platinum, but exasperated world end users coming in to Joburg this week at our big mining conference were saying they’ve had enough. They now see that there is more potential in Zimbabwe.

If you look at the cost structure Zimbabwe’s productivity is better their costs are lower, their by-product credits are better and they have got that Great Dyke.

The feeling is that if South Africans play around and fail to deliver and provide uncertainty, end users say they will look to a new king of platinum and they see it in our neighbour, despite Robert Mugabe and all the problems. 

They need platinum. Also, what South Africans have done because of our dilly-dallying and the way that they cannot supply and create uncertainty, they have generated a huge new scrap market. The platinum scrap market is coming into play and is bigger than mines collectively.

The world over US, Japan are now bringing through scrap platinum metals to the level of two-million ounces a year, which is a huge thing from the 500 000 ounces there used to be. So South Africa is letting down future generations by being fast and lose with a national patrimony like platinum and gold, given to us as endowments and we are squandering them.

People need to take this issue and they need to deal with it firmly and see that we get back into leadership positions.

Makwetla: Yet another new mining method is being advocated for gold and platinum by one of South Africa’s most experienced research coordinators.

Creamer: It is called selected blast mining, but what annoys me again is that this has been around for a long time. It is the same as this new South African technology that AngloGold Ashanti is wanting to bring in and probably will bring in in the first quarter, but that has been on the shelves since the Seventies.

We now see that selected blast mining, they believe could be brought in tomorrow. Again I’m talking about national patrimony. Here we have these precious metals and minerals and this is a better way of mining them and it can be implemented very quickly, according to research coordinators, some of the most experienced and highly experienced like Dr RE (Robbie) Robinson.

He is saying that we are not getting all our precious metals out of the ground because of the way we mine. We blast and we send these precious metals scattering into smithereens because of the way we tackle our mining. Robinson says that they don't need to do that. We are only bringing up 70% of the gold into the gold bar.

So here we have gold in the ground 100%, but the time it gets to the gold bar we have lost 30%, that is a huge percentage. With platinum we lose 35%. He is saying why don’t we change the blast method?

Computer systems are now available that will enable us to avoid blasting the precious metal into pieces, scattered all over the place, but to separate the waste. We have this problem where we have got about 10 cm to 20 cm of precious metal, covered by waste rock. What we do is we blast it all together and we get low grades.

He is saying you can blast the waste away separately and allow the precious metal to fall to the ground and take that through the system. He says don’t smelt it either because Eskom prices are so high. Go for the hydrometallurgical solution. I think that from a point of view of doing things well South Africans have got to really come to the party.

Makwetla: The Department of Energy has approved another 17 new renewable energy projects for South Africa.

Creamer: Here we are doing things well. You have got to give credit to the Department of Energy. South Africa’s Department of Energy has really done well with renewable energy and people the world over speak highly.

You can see they vote with their bids. In the latest window, the formal announcement will come on Monday, but ahead of time, we know that 17 new renewable energy developers have been selected.

But, there were 93 bids, 93 entities coming through from all over the world. Seventeen selected and again the predominance, with 15 of them in wind and sun energy and sun divided into photovoltaic and concentrated solar. Now you have 18 that have been told, ‘we don't want you, you haven’t made the cut’, but 58 other bids with good potential.

They are saying that they might open this up a bit and on November the 20th perhaps the department will announce that it can accept more of these bids.

Again, we have got 64 bids already that have been successful, because this is the third window of opportunity that has come through. 64 already successful, 47 projects on the way. That is quite a remarkable achievement, as everyone is saying.

Makwetla: Thanks very much. Martin Creamer is publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly, he’ll be back with us at the same time next week.

 

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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