https://www.miningweekly.com

On-The-Air (28/04/2017)

On-The-Air (28/04/2017)

28th April 2017

By: Martin Creamer

Creamer Media Editor

     

Font size: - +

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

Kamwendo: South Africa is about to stage a major coup with the takeover by Sibanye of America’s biggest Platinum mines

Creamer: This is a business coup, and it’s in the field of platinum and palladium, and it’s been a remarkably smooth transition towards acquisition by Sibanye in South Africa, of Stillwaters of Montana, in America.

Here, we have always dominated in platinum, but there has been this big player in North America that is being acquired by  Sibanye, and it’s with the blessing of all South African shareholders or an overwhelming number of South African shareholders, which includes the big Public Investment Corporation. 

The Public Investment Corporation is a big shareholder in Sibanye and that is the custodian of all the civil servants’ pension funds etc., but also giving this a big nod, are also the American shareholders. So shareholders on both sides have done it and the South African Reserve Bank has said, yes, go ahead, and the authorities of the United States, even under Donald Trump have said, go ahead.

At one stage they thought this might not go ahead because Sibanye has quite a big Chinese shareholding, and that was a potential sticking point under Trump, but everything has gone so smoothly and the way the deal has gone through. Normally, there is a lot of anxiety by shareholders, but you can see that Neal Froneman has gone about it well. He’s gone to America, he’s got management behind him and the directors said to the shareholders, we recommend that you go ahead with this. 

The shareholders are doing that, but where does it put South Africa? It puts South Africa in a much firmer position, particularly with palladium.  This is the biggest primary producer of palladium, besides the platinum and then it also gives it fantastic insight into recycling. 

We haven’t been recycling, we’ve been mining, but recycling has become a huge “mine” equivalent, because platinum is not consumed.  It is used in these catalytic converters, it’s used to clean the air of the world and then when those exhausts are expended and the car is scrapped, people are recycling that and that is having an effect on the price, so, we need to get that big insight into that and Neal Froneman from Sibanye will now have that insight, because these Americans are the biggest recyclers in the world. 

It will also mean that they will go from mine to market, because they’ve got big metallurgical plants.  A newcomer is Sibanye, and wow, isn’t it moving fast, and, of course, Neal Froneman comes from the background of being a motor car racer, so he likes to do things fast, and what I say is that he is also doing things smoothly, because this should be all the way through by May. May the fourth, that’s the next big date.

Kamwendo: Job Losses and liquidations are also looming at platinum mines here, especially those hit by the low platinum price.

Creamer: Yes, you are starting to see that the smaller platinum mines are being hit, and we look now at a report that has just come through from Implats. It’s smallest mine, Marula out on the eastern side of the big Bushveld Complex. They say that they could be cutting their staff numbers by a quarter which will mean a loss of about a thousand jobs.

That is not the picture of the whole of Implats, Implats is a very big company, but they are saying that not only the low platinum price, but there has been a lot of community problems at Marula.  They brought the community into the chrome mining aspect, and this seems to have created a lot of angst, and even the burning of cars, the destruction of homes, because people are feeling that this money from chrome, and the price is good now for chrome, is not coming into the community as they anticipated. 

This has now put them against those who are operating this, and, of course, Implats is a fifty percent of that, the community holds the other fifty percent, and we note that also on the eastern limb at Modikwe, there were similar problems with the community around this chrome business, people getting their hands on chrome. They are getting anxious that what they expected to get is not coming through and so that is one aspect at Eastern Platinum, we find a deeper thing now, where there’s an application filed for the total winding up of Eastern Platinum.

Eastern Platinum is listed in Toronto, and it’s listed in Johannesburg and a British Virgin Islands company, AlfaGlobal Capital, has applied to the Gauteng division of the High Court in Pretoria for the liquidation of Eastern Platinum. It says in filed court papers that this company is unable to pay its debts.

We see at many levels now a lot of tension building up around platinum, on the one side we have the good news of acquisitions in Montana, but on the eastern wing of the platinum Bushveld Complex particularly, there seem to be problems and the sentiments are down.

Kamwendo: Anglo American this week commiting themselves fully to the introduction of new innovative mining methods.

Creamer: This was good by Anglo American. It was a real blow that eleven people died in the year 2016 that they were reporting on.  We get this constant lament from management, just unable to deal with the fatalities.  They are continually reporting fatalities. Even though they hope for zero harm, it just isn’t arriving.

So what Mark Cutifani from Anglo American said, we are now ready to turn conventional mining thinking on its head. We’ve got to keep doing things that will keep people out of harm’s way, once and for all, and we’ve also got to extract more precious ore and less rock.  We see the wasteful way we are mining. 

There are methods to get only the ore out, continually we use these old blasting methods that blast the precious metal all over the place.  When it gets to the actual smelting and the processing of this, we are wasting so much electricity, because instead of just having the ore there, you’ve also got this waste and you are heating the waste.  Why do you want to do that?

They are saying once and for all, let’s do something much different and innovative and they have got a big team working on it in Anglo American, but they are also saying, what about water? Water is scarce, and the way the mines use water is not the way it should be done.

Get your recycling going, the water you require, you must recycle over and over again. And then we know that there was that big horrible tragedy in Brazil when their slimes dam burst, and we can also think of what happened here in the nineties when our Merrriespruit slimes dam burst, people waking up, drowning in slime around the mines and they are saying no, in future we must not have these slimes dams.

We have to have dry tailings, dry slimes dams, and that will also save on the water, so now steps are being taken by the big guns and Anglo American saying, let’s do something innovative to change the whole face of mining, keep people out of harm’s way, stop all this wasteful mining, make sure we don’t waste fresh water and have dry slimes dams in the future, because the technology is there to do that.

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

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

Comments

Showroom

Flameblock
Flameblock

FlameBlock is a proudly South African company that engineers, manufactures and supplies fire intumescent and retardant products to the fire...

VISIT SHOWROOM 
Rio-Carb
Rio-Carb

Our Easy Access Chute concept was developed to reduce the risks related to liner maintenance. Currently, replacing wear liners require that...

VISIT SHOWROOM 

Latest Multimedia

sponsored by

Hyphen, Eva mine, ferrochrome price make headlines
Hyphen, Eva mine, ferrochrome price make headlines
27th March 2024
Resources Watch
Resources Watch
27th March 2024

Option 1 (equivalent of R125 a month):

Receive a weekly copy of Creamer Media's Engineering News & Mining Weekly magazine
(print copy for those in South Africa and e-magazine for those outside of South Africa)
Receive daily email newsletters
Access to full search results
Access archive of magazine back copies
Access to Projects in Progress
Access to ONE Research Report of your choice in PDF format

Option 2 (equivalent of R375 a month):

All benefits from Option 1
PLUS
Access to Creamer Media's Research Channel Africa for ALL Research Reports, in PDF format, on various industrial and mining sectors including Electricity; Water; Energy Transition; Hydrogen; Roads, Rail and Ports; Coal; Gold; Platinum; Battery Metals; etc.

Already a subscriber?

Forgotten your password?

MAGAZINE & ONLINE

SUBSCRIBE

RESEARCH CHANNEL AFRICA

SUBSCRIBE

CORPORATE PACKAGES

CLICK FOR A QUOTATION







sq:0.122 0.157s - 98pq - 2rq
Subscribe Now