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

Moodley: As you were coming in the CEO of Lonmin Ben Magara was walking out. Did you have a word with him?

Creamer: Yes, I caught him on the stairs and said sort this out with your platinum business. There has got to be a breakthrough somewhere along the line. We see the share prices going up and the rand weakening.

Probably the only good news is the weak rand at the moment and, of course, that is a double-edged sword: it will hit you down the line. He seems in good form, in fact, he shook my hand so firmly he nearly broke it. I think he has been in the gym. So, he is up to AMCU.

Moodley: New technology is available to boost South Africa’s struggling platinum business sky high.

Creamer: There is new technology available to boost South Africa’s struggling platinum business and I think it could boost it sky high. We know that the future mine is on the way and that everybody is working on a new form of mining, but that is going to take a long time. In the interim there is some quick fixes and the one of them is selected blast mining.

We have been blasting in a way, which actually needs reform, because we blast what is not platinum and what is platinum and it gets mixed up. That dilution causes a lot of loss.  We know we are dealing here with a national patrimony and we should be dealing with it with more care.

They are saying introduce new blasting techniques that can be put in quite quickly because there is not a major departure. What happens is that the platinum and only the platinum is kept coherently and brought to surface then you don’t have to bring all the gangue, the non-platinum bearing rock.

Smelting wise, there is a new hydrometallurgical approach, which avoids smelting. We know smelting uses a lot of electricity and costs. In the short term a lot could be done even with gold, because this narrow reef mining that we do also applies to gold. You can use those same blasting techniques.

I know there is some bigger technologies on the way, but we are looking for some quick fixes here, new demands, new pressures and it could come in the form of selected mine blasting.

Moodley: We all like shiny things, shiny gold, metal, watches, diamonds, but there is a less attractive side to the mining industry – the industrial minerals side.

Creamer: A black-empowered company is incubating new mines in the less attractive but vital side of the business – industrial minerals. Some of these names are unpronounceable, but they are important because we are importing some of them. One of them is wollastonite and they have picked up a deposit in the Northern Cape.

We import this, it is an important industrial mineral, because it replaces asbestos. We know that asbestos can cause cancer so it has been phased out. If you can bring in a substitute it is important for the business like brake pads and also plastics and rubber. The other one is attapulgite. Near Sun City, this attapulgite is coming through from a company called Incubex.

This is wholly empowered and it funds itself and it is going out and finding these new mines, which could become big mines. Of course, silica is a big thing and they have got a big silica find outside Rustenburg and there will possibly be new glass manufacturing plants coming up.

Silica can go into glass making if it is the right quality. Certainly parts of the silica that has been found by Incubex can go into glass making.  Incubex is part of a bigger family and we know Sephaku, which is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, is linked to Incubex.

When Sephaku unbundled, all these mining possibilities where hived off into Incubex, the incubator of new standalone mining operations.

Moodley: 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.