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

Kamwendo: South Africa’s platinum group metals are poised to be boosted by China’s Five-Year Plan.

Creamer: This is the 15th Five-Year Plan of China and it is near term, because it ends in 2030. What is so remarkable is that platinum group metals are fundamentally key to China’s latest Five-Year Plan. Just looking at two aspects of it, starting off with AI, artificial intelligence, China is going to invest $300-billion in AI infrastructure expansion. Now you say, well, what is AI’s link to platinum group metals? We have thought of datacentres. Of course, that can happen, but there are so many other product lines that are linked to it. We are talking about silicon production, hard disk drives, thin film coatings on semiconductors, electronic grade sensors on printed circuit boards and you can go on and on with crucibles and other things. So, this is not expected that we would be so well linked to artificial intelligence. But then, if we look at the thing that we have always been mentioning, the hydrogen side of it, platinum group metals and hydrogen, China is moving faster on hydrogen and fuel-cells that are both directly linked to platinum group metals than anywhere else on the planet. We are the biggest supplier of platinum group metals and China is already the biggest consumer. We can only see long term good news there.

Kamwendo: Artificial intelligence is uplifting South Africa’s mines without causing any job loss, a CEO reported this week.

Creamer: It was amazing. There were two events this week. They were both mining events and you know those two letters, AI, popped up. One would expect them to be linked to job losses, but on the contrary, all that AI seems to be doing is adding jobs, because they use it in areas where they thought they would stop mining. Then, with the help of AI they suddenly find, no, they can continue mining, which means jobs are preserved and things go on. So the whole image of AI, I think, is changing, and you see it popping up a lot now.

Kamwendo: A major gold recovery project is underway on Gauteng’s West Rand.

Creamer: We have got these gold dumps and we have got the slimes dams and we always hope that they can get every bit of gold out of them. What we are seeing on the Far West Rand now is amazing. The regional tailings dam that is being built is mammoth, it is huge. It is on 800 hectares. It is going to cost R3.5-billion. It is being built at a perfect time, because the gold price is high now. You could not actually invest like this at any better time than we have ever had when it comes to the richness of the gold price. This is going to mean that you have places like the West Rand where there is also gold mining, but there are dumps. There is gold in those dumps and the way they are recovering that has been very good. They are also letting us into secrets that there is new technology coming up that will make it even better. They do not want to spell that out too clearly until they have proved it. They have had pilot plants, but they want to see it in real time and it could be a wonderful gold recovery from the West Rand.

Kamwendo: Thanks very much. Martin Creamer is publishing, editor of Engineering News & Mining Weekly.