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On-The-Air (23/05/2014)

safm23may2014

23rd May 2014

By: Martin Creamer

Creamer Media Editor

  

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

Kamwendo: New technology is promising to propel South Africa’s struggling gold mines into an exciting new era.

Creamer: I am so thrilled about this technological advance because you can use the word automated, continuous and blast-free and that is just what mines need. This has been worked on by the AngloGold Ashanti group which has produced now 1 600 ounces of gold from this.

The wonderful thing about it is that it has technology that mines all the gold, only the gold, all the time, safely. So, what more can you ask? It can be migrated to the platinum industry, so this is going to safe our hard-rock narrow-reef, deep dark and dangerous situation, in mines.

What it does is that it will continue now to allow the existing way of mining to carry on, so you are not going to retrench anybody, but where you are unable to mine, because it is too dangerous to mine, but where there are riches second to none, this can now go in and it raisebores and does things in a way that mother nature doesn't even know you have taken the gold out, because it backfills.

It backfills with high-strength backfill, which means that even if you’ve got these very rich pillars with gold in them you can mine the pillar that was holding up the roof and because you backfill you then keep the roof up. So it is safe to do this, but at the same time you extract this very rich area. We have about 100-million ounces just AngloGold Ashanti alone just waiting to be mined if you can have this new technology, which is now prooving itself, it is commercial.

It has been done in such a big-hearted way that they are saying this is South African technology that if the platinum industry wants it, then it can take it.

This is going to be the saviour of our industry and it will kill many birds with one stone, because it will get away from this drill and blast, which is manual, and at the same time enabling you to have enough cash to phase out the migrant labour situation, which is a curse. Then upskill the people and put them into a new era of automated continuous blast-free mining. It can be done on a seven day a week basis, 365 days a year, which we have been looking to do.

Kamwendo: South Africa has failed to make a success of antimony mining and the Australians are now rushing in to take control of our antimony patrimony.

Creamer: South Africa has failed dismally to make a success of its antimony mining, which we do in Limpopo. The Australians are rushing in because they want to take control of our antimony patrimony. They see a big business in antimony, which is used to harden metals. It is used in bullets, batteries and all the other fire retardant applications. So, Village Main, which is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, had a miserable quarter with this. It is now selling off for R150-million to the Australian company Stibiun. They are going to come in here, because they have got antimony in Australia and East Europe. They are excited now to get into our operation and take that over. But, it means that South Africans have shown failure in this particular industry.

Kamwendo: Probably because we don’t know what it is.

Creamer: We know, we have been mining this for decades and it started with Johannesburg Consolidated Investment, then Metorex and then it went to Village Main Reef. They have now passed it on to the Australians, who believe they can make a fantastic job of it.

Kamwendo: South Africa is squandering its cobalt wealth at a time when the rest of the world is frantically hunting it down.

Creamer: The world is running around for cobalt at the moment and it is all about another South African in America, Tesla Motors, headed by Elon Musk. He went to school in Pretoria Boys High. He is now going to build this gargantuan lithium battery factory and he is looking around for cobalt. We waste our cobalt.

The gold mines squander it, they put it out on the slimes dams and it gets into acid-mine drainage. What I am pleading for is a new approach to zero waste mining. Lets have zero waste mining, we need 6-million jobs here. Let’s get this cobalt, stop squandering it. It is also in the platinum. The world is now looking for cobalt, you see the Australians and Canadians are doing it. It is suddenly a very important undersupplied metal, because in microelectronics it is also being grown.

This point was made by our veteran research commentator Dr RE (Robbie) Robinson, who says we’ve got these gold reefs with cobalt in it, recover it by blasting differently and doing things differently. He also pleads for more openness in research, because the new legislation closes research and we don't know what is going on with research anymore.

Kamwendo: 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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