A much more transparent Eskom would be of benefit right now. But how could South Africa give its most important State-owned enterprise a dose of stock exchange discipline without it being privatised? A person who came up with a possible answer to that last week was none other than the commander-in-chief of the world’s biggest investment bank. Speaking at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) in Johannesburg, Goldman Sachs chairperson and CEO Lloyd Blankfein said in response to Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly that troubled South African State-owned enterprises might be able to benefit by taking a cue from China’s hybrid system, where State-owned enterprises float, say, 20% of their shares on stock exchanges while remaining State-controlled. Read on page 12 of this edition of Mining Weekly of his contention that that 20% shareholder base could care about the governance and integrity, while the State still puts up the guarantees as an 80%-majority shareholder. Blankfein had good things to say about South Africa’s Johannesburg Stock Exchange, which he described as big, liquid and valued far more highly than the gross domestic product of the country that it underpins. Goldman Sachs, which described South Africa has having enormous investor potential, values South Africa’s metals and minerals in the ground at $2.3-trillion, a trillion dollars more than second-placed Russia’s.

Consultancy firm Wood Mackenzie says China’s long-standing 'Go West' strategy is potentially a strong driver of demand for commodities. In a bullish report, the consultancy forecasts that the strategy of encouraging people and capital to go inland is likely to form a new “commodity superhighway” to Central Asia and beyond. Under way for some time now, the strategy aims to stimulate long-term inland growth at the same time as China’s economically dominant coastal regions approach maturity. The three main implications, the consultancy outlines, will be the need for 9 600 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2035 from the country’s the present 3 200 TWh capacity, which outpaces the expected growth of power capacity at the coast from 3 000 TWh now to about 6 000 TWh in the same 20-year period. Wood Mackenzie foresees coal-fired power plants in the central and western province areas generating more power to feed demand-heavy coastal centres through long-distance power transmission grids. In addition, China’s west holds most of the country’s hydropower, wind and solar renewable energy potential. Shale gas production is also expected to ramp up to 140-billion cubic metres in the same period.

The UK’s Strategically Important Metals sees strategic metal reserves as being adequate in coming decades, helped by improved technology, alternative materials and new discoveries. Read on page 10 and 11 of this edition of Mining Weekly of the different approaches of countries to the vulnerability of supply and criticality of the metals and minerals that have been declared strategic. While uranium is intrinsically strategic because of its use in nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, neither the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee nor the US Department of Defence Strategic and Critical Materials 2013 Report on Stockpile Requirements list uranium as strategic, probably because of their strong ties to Canada and Australia, the world’s biggest and second-biggest uranium producers. So while uranium is critically important, neither the US nor the UK appear to have supply concerns. The long list of minerals regarded as being strategic to aerospace, defence and electronics industries range from aluminium, antimony, chromium and cobalt to manganese, palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, titanium, vanadium and zinc. However, while these and many other metals and minerals may be essential for the defence, aerospace and other key industries, it does not necessarily follow that the defence sector is a good customer for the mining industry, as the Mining Weekly article notes.