State utility Eskom could well have passed up a golden opportunity in not taking up previously exported coal from Optimum colliery, in Mpumalanga – and helped to save the jobs of up to 700 people in the process. Optimum produces 10-million tons of saleable coal a year from opencast and underground mines, half of it already bought domestically by Eskom for burning at its Hendrina power station and the other half exported. On offer was the exported portion.

Optimum has more than enough coal infrastructure to process the raw, run-of-mine coal previously washed as export coal, to the lower specifications required by Eskom – at a much cheaper price. But Eskom has opted not to do so, despite power stations receiving the optimal coal quality having the potential to operate with less downtime and at higher load factors. But that is not to be, as can be read on page 14 of this edition of Mining Weekly, which reports that the colliery is proceeding with the placing of some of its operations on care and maintenance and being forced to enter into retrenchment.

The Glencore subsidiary, which will consider reopening the operations if the economic conditions improve, will, in the meantime, retain sufficient mining operations and processing capacity to ensure the continued supply of coal to Hendrina while Glencore provides funding to Optimum to enable it to pay the full retrenchment costs, as well as offer assistance to affected employees through retraining programmes to enable them to plan for the future.

After listening to what was proposed to provide a mine water solution at the Groovlei gold mine on Gauteng’s East Rand several years ago, one wonders why such a good-sounding scheme was rejected by the powers that be in the Department of Water Affairs and Sanitation. The still-workable proposal that veteran researcher Dr RE (Robbie) Robinson outlines on page 8 of this edition of Mining Weekly not only deprived 7 000 squatter camp dwellers of employment and set the mine on its downward trajectory, but also prevented an economically viable trail from being blazed as early as the mid-1990s that could have provided a model for treating acid mine drainage (AMD) at zero cost to the mines through the recovery of metals and minerals from the AMD with saleable value.

Robinson’s technology can also be deployed to detoxify mine slimes dams across the Witwatersrand basin and turn them into drip-irrigated agricultural sites within job-generating mining clusters. To watch a video on his approach to AMD eradication, scan the barcode attached to the story on page 8 with your phone’s QR reader, or go to Video Reports on the www.miningweekly.com website.

Former Xstrata Alloys executive and Eskom adviser Mike Rossouw made a strong call last week for mining companies to help government to simplify South Africa’s mining policy and to collaborate with the State to achieve less regulation and greater implementation. Read on page 14 of this edition of Mining Weekly on the need for business to be far more proactive in expressing its views on policy that is workable and policy that is not. He also drew attention to South Africa only having a medium-term plan in the National Development Plan, which extends to 2030, and called for the creation of a far longer-term plan driven by transformational economic growth, predictable political transformation and social transformation.