Diversified major Anglo American is pulling out all the stops to improve the productivity of its coal business in South Africa, which is 50% below that of its Australian counterparts. Read on page 13 of this edition of Mining Weekly of the company having gone through the process of benchmarking the productivity of its South African mines against its Australian ones, which has raised some serious alarms. Anglo American CEO Mark Cutifani believes the company can half-close the gap with a new operating model and skills development, but will need a combined South African industry effort to remove the other constraints that include the far fewer days worked in South Africa and fewer coal export terminals. Anglo has three virtually equidistant ports to choose from in Australia, compared with one in South Africa and this puts a brake on the upside potential of its longest-life best-margin coal mines in South Africa, where continuous mining equipment is also unable to match the longwall mining method of the company’s mines in Australia.

While diversified major Rio Tinto has been shedding its coal assets in Mozambique, Brazilian mining major Vale has reported a stronger performance at Moatize, in Tete province, in the west central part of the African country. Read on page 22 of this edition of Mining Weekly of Vale coming up 1 309 000 t of metallurgical coal and thermal coal in the first half of 2014, a 3.4% increase over the 1 265 000 t for the same period last year. The Vale mine’s second quarter thermal coal production of 457 000 t was up 10.4%. Vale is also active in copper in neighbouring Zambia. Vale has formed a 50:50 joint venture with South Africa’s black-controlled African Rainbow Minerals to pursue copper projects in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Meanwhile, Rio Tinto is selling its 65% share in the Benga coal operation and its wholly owned coal projects in Mozambique to India’s State- owned International Coal Ventures Limited.

Botswana- and Mauritius-listed junior Shumba Coal Resources has raised $2.2-million for a coal mining and energy project in Botswana. Read on page 23 of this edition of Mining Weekly of the intention to export coal to India and China and to generate electricity to South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia. At this stage it envisages export levels exceeding one-million tons of coal a year through South Africa, Namibia or Mozambique and up to 300 MW of electricity being generated. The plan is to build the power station at Palapye and feed the electricity into Botswana Power Corpo- ration’s transmission grid at Morupule for “wheeling” to South Africa, Zimbabwe and Namibia.