South Africa-focused miner Coal of Africa Limited (CoAL) believes the currently depressed prices for hard and semisoft coking coal will have eased to an acceptable level again in 2018, ahead of the company’s plans to produce 6.7-million tonnes of saleable product a year from its Vele and Makhado coal projects, which will be developed in the next 12 to 24 months.
CoAL anticipates prices bottoming in 2015 and then undergoing a slow, painful recovery. Meanwhile, CoAL CEO David Brown notes that the current oversupply is deterring investment in new capacity, inhibiting new production and weakening import demand, which is showing in the availability of coal domestically. Keys to the company’s growth are the scarcity of hard coking coal resources in South Africa as well as the company’s well-tested rail and port export routes.
The Limpopo provincial government regards CoAL’s projects as catalysts for growth, which bodes well for offtake and funding arrangements. In the immediate term, the ASX-, Aim- and JSE-listed company is targeting the completion of an equity raise, obtaining all regulatory approvals for Makhado and receiving all regulatory approvals for plant modification at Vele, where commercial production is expected to start in 2017.
Platinum-group metals (PGMs) miner Northam Platinum has awarded the basic engineering and future supply of a PGMs smelting furnace to project house Tenova Pyromet. The proposed furnace, which will tap into the existing tapping bay, will function as a submerged arc or brush arc operation, with the transformer having a wide operating band to ensure performance even under the higher electrical current requirement of brush arc operations. The roof will be able to withstand a range of heat loads acting on it, from the lower range of submerged arc operation to the very high heat loads resulting from brush arc operation.
Raiseboring and drilling services group Master Drilling will soon embark on the civil construction of a shaft collar on the first of two ventilation shafts for refined-copper producer Palabora Mining in Limpopo. Construction of the first shaft is expected to be completed during the fourth quarter of 2016, as reported on page 15 of this edition of Mining Weekly.
Master Drilling was awarded the three-year construction contract in December. Piling works will be undertaken on the circumference of the excavated area and a foundation for the shaft will be constructed during the civil construction phase of the project. The JSE-listed company designed and built the raiseboring machine specifically for the Palabora project, which entails the construction of two 6.1-m-diameter ventilation shafts, each to a 1.2 km depth. T
he new raiseborer, which operates faster, is significantly cheaper and requires only two personnel per shift to operate, from the safety of a control room on surface. The company’s remote-operated shaft support unit and inspection device, which will be used to line the shafts, either during or after the raiseboring process, can line up to a depth of 1.5 km underground.