Mining supply sales consultancy AmaranthCX has launched its most comprehensive coal minerals map yet, timed to coincide with this week’s junior mining event, the Junior Indaba, which will take place on November 3 and 4.
AmaranthCX director and owner Paul Miller says the information presented in the map is revealing, containing information that some in the industry and government may “prefer you did not know and could not see”.
AmaranthCX notes that, although mining rights holders are required to publish their social and labour plans online, most mining right holders, outside some in the organised industry, do not even have their own websites.
It further notes that meaningful detail on mining rights, prospecting rights and mining permits is also not generally available through government entities.
To address the issue, he says AmaranthCX has researched, through “practically every” public means possible, the land boundaries of 271 individual coal mining and project areas across Mpumalanga, Limpopo, KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng and the Free State.
The sourcing of this information was done through, for example consulting public environmental documents, South African Heritage Resources Agency paleontological and archaeological reports, satellite photographs, social media crowd-sourcing, and sifting through out-of-date public company disclosures.
This has been published as an interactive electronic map for use in freely available Google Maps and Google Earth applications, by non-expert users.
AmaranthCX will provide it free of charge to a limited number of civil society organisations directly active in the industry. Mining industry players can buy the maps from AmaranthCX.
"This has been a mammoth ‘lockdown’ effort, with hundreds of hours spent researching and digging out details,” says Miller.