News emanating from Pallinghurst on the technology emerging from its North West platinum group metals (PGMs) mine is exciting. The target date is the end of this year for the decision to go ahead with what is expected to be a paradigm shift technology that will need only a tenth of the usual electricity to mine and refine platinum in an integrated on-site process. Major detail design work has already been completed on the Kell process, which unlocks significant capital by allowing an operation to go from mining to finished refined metal in the space of only a week. Recovery of 99.9% of PGMs in refined bar form is being achieved from a scaled-up pilot plant at the JSE-listed Pallinghurst’s Sedibelo operation. “This has all the hallmarks of being a much-needed game changer for the industry,” Pallinghurst CEO Arne Frandsen tells Mining Weekly. Zimbabwe is currently planning to build a PGM smelter at a cost of $2-billion, whereas building a Kell plant for Zimbabwe’s output would cost a tenth of that at $200-million. Kell is a tenth of the cost, uses a tenth of the power, emits two-thirds less carbon dioxide and rapidly releases capital.
Many are holding thumbs that the Davis Committee on Tax will come up with a mining taxation regime that encourages foreign investment, stimulates prospecting, gets mining companies to start dealing with marginal mines and gives enough back to the fiscus for the benefit of this country’s people. Read on page 6 of this edition of Mining Weekly of the Treasury’s alarming amendment to the transfer pricing legislation, which has put another nail in the coffin of prospecting in a country that has $2.3-trillion worth of metals and minerals patrimony in the ground that requires prospecting to turn to proper account. Instead, a 3% add back sprung on prospecting companies has a real tax cash cost bite for foreign-funded prospecting companies investing in exploration in South Africa. No wonder a growing number of South Africans are once again calling for South Africa to adopt Canada’s flow-through model to encourage prospecting. In the mid-2000s, the flow-through scheme was announced but later not implemented on the grounds that it would make too much work for the South African Revenue Service. The alternative gazetted in mid-2006 was so inadequate that not a single company has taken it up. The National Development Plan’s call for a framework that removes this country’s mining opportunity loss must be heeded.
Chinese-controlled platinum development company Wesizwe has intersected the secondary upper group two (UG2) reef at the main shaft of its Bakubung project, near Rustenburg, and will be sending the UG2 samples to South Africa’s State-owned Council for Mineral Technology (Mintek) in April. Mintek already has Bakubung’s Merensky reef chips under analysis as part of a five-month bulk sampling programe. The analysis of the samples will assist in the overall set-up of the planned process at the plant site. Bakubung’s main shaft has reached a depth of 770 m and is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2016, while its ventilation shaft, now also at the same depth, is scheduled for completion by the end of the third quarter of this year.