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

Modise: South Africa needs a railway line from the water backed Mpumalanga to ensure future energy security according to the mining company Exxaro. Tell me why.

Creamer: We have the situation now where we have the Witbank coal-field being depleted and we have the Waterberg coal-field which is emerging. We have always heard the news from Exxaro and other coal miners that they also want to export coal from the Waterberg so they would need a railway to the port of Richards Bay.

This is a new angle on the story that the Mpumalanga power stations are going to outlast the coalfields of Witbank. So, therefore they are saying that the railway line can form a dual purpose, because not only are we going to have the benefit of the line to export from Richards Bay from the Waterberg coalfield.

Waterberg is also going to have to supply the power station in Mpumalanga from an energy security point of view, not only from an export point of view. They are saying that in time to come they could be looking at 30-million tons of coal coming along that line.

It is going to be substantial and we find that a lot of the power stations are being returned to service and refurbished. They are going to be available when there is also no coal nearby and the plan is that they build railway line from the Waterberg, the emerging coalfield, to supply the power stations of Mpumalanga.

Modise: Still staying with railways, looks like South Africa, according to BHP Billiton, that South Africa needs a lower cost and higher capacity rail route for the export of its manganese, or otherwise it will loose market share.

Creamer: That's right. We know we have got this fantastic high-quality manganese resource in the Kalahari. But, one of its problems it that it is 1 000 km from the coast and you need good logistics. Not only is BHP Billiton active there with Anglo and Samancor, but there are a lot of new entrants there.

We have Russian-linked companies as well as India-linked companies and a lot of people going for the manganese in that area. It is going to be worthless unless you can really get it down to the ports for export if you are going to compete on the business front.

What happens now is that you move from the Hotazel in Northern Cape and you go along the general freight line to Port Elizabeth, the primary manganese export port. What they are saying is that the logistics along there are pretty costly and they need to have a better solution, a new route with a higher capacity, if they are going to take market share from others, which we could do.

So they have their eye on the Sishen-Saldanha rail line with additional loops. It is going to take a lot of investment, but that new investment will create a lot of new opportunity. So, that is their plea, give us a new route to export our manganese, which has higher capacity and less cost.

Modise: The private sector lead idea of building the Trans-Kalahari coal line to Walvis Bay, the Southern African governments are responding positively to that.

Creamer: It is very interesting, the coal miners are saying that they are getting a positive response to the idea of not only going east with the monopoly line, the coal line going to Richards Bay, but they can now look west. There the private sector is awakening and getting to government and saying lets build our own Trans-Kalahari line.

If you go via Walvis Bay and you coming from the Waterberg or Mamabula field in Botswana, where there is a lot of new activities going on there, we could clip a week off the time that it takes to export to Europe. So, there is even an advantage from a time point of view.

It is going to be interesting to see how the private sector on the west coast and the State-run rail on the east coast how they could possibly compete. I'm sure it will be very good for all of them, but, of course, it is going to take a lot of investment and they will need the World Bank International Monetary Fund also to try and contribute to this line, but it could unlock huge value in Southern Africa.

Modise: 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.