On-The-Air (01/11/2024)

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 Anglo American is helping South America to go green as it applies for rights to mine copper.

Creamer: Yes, these days if you want rights to mine anything, you have got to do the best environmental work. You have got to do the best social work with communities and you have got to have good governance. This is what we are seeing with Anglo now, which is a different Anglo. Anglo is really focusing a lot on copper and its copper opportunities are in South America. It has really done well in Peru already and it has been doing quite well in Chile for a long time. But, what Chile wants is Anglo to assist with green hydrogen, because Chile believes it will have the cheapest green hydrogen the world has ever known, because it has got such a lot of access to wind energy in addition to sun energy. So, we are seeing an extension of the experience of Anglo in Limpopo province in South Africa, where it started setting up a structure for green hydrogen, which uses platinum group metals, which are very important to South Africa. We know that Anglo in the future won't be in platinum, but the platinum will be taken over by Anglo American Platinum, which will remain in South Africa, whereas Anglo will only have iron-ore in South Africa. That is how different the world is at the moment. In order to get its licence to operate, the word sustainability is huge and Anglo had a sustainability update this week. They told us what they were doing to protect Mother Earth and to make sure they use less water and all the activities, which are largely centred on South America, where they are anxious to get going the big way in copper and get to a million tonnes of copper a year pretty soon.

Kamwendo: South Africa’s Impala Platinum has commissioned solar power and a new smelter in Zimbabwe.

Creamer: That is fantastic at this stage in the platinum group metals world, because the prices aren't good at the moment, but it’s excellent that Impala has seen fit to go ahead with the projects that it set in motion earlier. It has got this solar power, 35 megawatts now, at Zimplats in Zimbabwe and it has also enlarged the furnace complex there. So, it shows that it believes in the future, that the demand situation, the pricing situation for platinum group metals, will improve in the future. Management is intense at the moment in all the platinum group companies, because of the low pricing and the change of the pricing regularly. They have got a basket of prices, because they have got many platinum group metals, but it hasn't reached the collective price point where they can take their eye off the cost ball and they are watching that very carefully. They do predict that this year they will have met all the targets with not spending too much money and bringing costs down and making sure that environmentally they do a better job as well.

Kamwendo: Diamond company De Beers this week called on South Africa’s entrepreneurs to enter the diamond business.

Creamer: You know, diamonds, are being produced in too big a quantity at the moment, with market demand on the weak side. The disruption in the world at the moment has resulted in sales of diamonds lowering. We see that big diamond supplier Botswana had sales that were 52% less in the first nine months of this year. But, what De Beers is still believing in is making sure that you do marketing and that’s why they invited entrepreneurs in South Africa to come forward this week and to do three years of mentoring about diamonds, so that they get to know that diamonds are forever and diamonds are a girl's best friend. Those were the big adverts that built up the diamond industry, but it is a changed diamond industry now. You can see Anglo American is getting out of diamonds and De Beers will be on its own, just like Anglo American Platinum here. But, at the same time, De Beers is making sure that they are inclusive and that they also bringing in people that can give them new ideas about diamonds, because many of the old attitudes to diamonds possibly don't apply in the world today. So, they are looking for a batch of new entrepreneurs and the applications went out this week for South Africans to come forward and look to becoming diamantaires.

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