Mining Weekly Editor Martin Creamer discusses the new online South African Mining Map that was recently revealed; Copper 360's listing on the JSE; and Glencore’s advancement on the road to the circular economy.

South Africa could have 21 new mining listings if foreign mining companies that already operate in this country would also list on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, the largest stock exchange in Africa, but one that is shrinking.

The 21 companies are all listed elsewhere, with no listing in South Africa, even though they are mining, developing or exploring in South Africa.

If all 21 listed, there would be a 50% increase in the number of listed mining companies on the JSE, AmaranthCX founder and director Paul Miller calculates in a note to Mining Weekly.

Miller contends that a prompt from South Africa’s Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe would do the trick.

“The JSE has bent over backwards to make inward dual listings quick, easy and cheap. All we need is a trigger, and moral suasion by the Minister asking the CEO of each of the 21 companies to do so, would be a good place to start,” says Miller, a person of considerable mining finance experience with Nedbank and also operational mining exposure as MD of Keaton Energy.

Foreign listed mining companies that are producing in South Africa but are not secondarily listed on the JSE, include New York-listed Tronox Limited and Sydney-listed Terracom Limited.

Tronox’s Namakwa Sands operations are located in the Western Cape, where its ilmenite, natural rutile, and zircon are transported to the Namakwa Sands Saldanha Bay smelter by rail from an opencast mine and concentration plant in Brand-se-Baai. The ilmenite is processed in furnaces to produce saleable titanium dioxide slag and pig iron, while the zircon and natural rutile are stored on-site for export. Final products are dispatched globally to either Tronox’s pigment operations or third-party customers through the Port of Saldanha.

TerraCom, through its wholly owned Universal Coal, has six thermal coal assets and one coking coal asset in South Africa, and exports through Richards Bay Coal Terminal and Maputo.

Also producing in South Africa but not listed here are diamond mining companies Petra Diamonds, Diamcor and BlueRock Diamonds.

London-listed Petra operates the Cullinan and Finsch diamond mines and has the Koffiefontein diamond mine on care and maintenance. Canada-listed Diamcor has the Krone-Endora diamond mine in Limpopo province, and London Aim-listed BlueRock Diamonds mines diamonds at Kareevlei in the Northern Cape, northwest of Kimberley.

Other producers are Sylvania Platinum, Jupiter Mines, Bushveld Minerals, Mineral Commodities, Kropz, and Bisichi.

London Aim-listed Sylvania has six chrome beneficiation and platinum group metal (PGM) processing plants, located on both the eastern and western limbs of the Bushveld Igneous Complex as well as various mineral asset development projects on the northern limb of the Bushveld Complex located in South Africa, for which it has approved mining rights.

Sydney-listed Jupiter Mines’ Tshipi é Ntle operates the Tshipi Borwa opencast manganese mine in the Kalahari manganese field of the Northern Cape.

London Aim-listed Bushveld Minerals is a vertically integrated primary vanadium producer with the Vametco mine, Brits Resource and Mokopane Project and Bushveld Energy, with vanadium redox flow battery technology.

Sydney-listed Mineral Commodities has the Tormin mineral sands operation on the West Coast of South Africa and the Xolobeni mineral sands project in the Eastern Cape.

London Aim-listed Kropz has the Elandsfontein phosphate project in the Western Cape and London-listed Bisichi has the Black Wattle coal mining and coal washing operation in Middelburg, Mpumalanga.

Explorers listed in foreign countries but not on the JSE are Ivanhoe Mines, Marula Mining and Botswana Diamonds, along with Taung Gold International, Vanadium Resources, Theta Gold, West Wits Mining, ZEB Nickel Corp, URA Holdings, and Platinum Group Metals.

“It has been my view for some time that the delistings versus listings crisis on SA public markets needs a far more thorough analysis than ‘it is al...

AmaranthCX and its technology partner 1Map have collaborated to publish a comprehensive, online South African Mining Map, with electronic, all commodity depiction.

Other mining jurisdictions, including neighbouring African States, provide this information to attract valuable mining investment – but not so South Africa, which is still taking steps to procure a cadastre.

AmaranthCX founder and director Paul Miller displayed South Africa’s sizeable remaining mining opportunities – plus the huge opportunity loss suffered by this country – in a Zoom interview with Mining Weekly. (Also watch attached Creamer Media video, in which Miller displays his layered map and reveals mining opportunities second to none.)

His map goes a long way towards filling the hugely unfortunate information vacuum that has been in place since the introduction of South Africa’s mining and prospecting rights legislative framework in 2004.

The denial of transparency has cut off vitally needed economic growth and jobs – and cries out for immediate reform.

“We don't nearly have enough publicly available information. We live in a constitutional state that requires transparency from our government, but we get the exact opposite,” said Miller, who has painstakingly had to determine who has what, where, for what commodity and for how long.

The map shows farms underlaying prospecting rights or mining rights, and all the basic functionality that one would expect in a competently regulated mining jurisdiction to be provided free through a portal by the State itself.

“We don't have that. So we've come up with the best solution we can. It has a lot of prospecting rights, a lot of mining rights, and by no means do we guarantee that it's complete because we were dependent on obscure sources of data, but we think it's the best we can do under the circumstances,” said Miller.

Mining Weekly: Looking at the map points to South Africa suffering a huge opportunity loss. Just how substantial is this loss?

Miller: It's dramatic. No self-respecting mining jurisdiction that is serious about attracting mining capital fails to make information available to potential investors. We have to go and find where mining companies have done specialist studies as part of their environmental impact assessments, or environmental impact assessments, for fossils, and for historical relics. We have to get those reports and back solve from that where these mining rights are. It's bizarre that that is how we have to find this information.

If the use-it-or-lose-it principle applies, why are so many rights lying dormant?

It’s certainly not use-it-or-lose-it, and the reason appears to be that if you've got a prospecting right that’s coming up for expiry after five years, and you put in your renewal application, it just sits at the department. The way the regulations are specified is that if you have applied for renewal, you can continue to prospect. When you eventually get your renewal, it might be for a limited three-year period. There are prospecting rights held for an excess of 18 years when the legal maximum is eight, so explain that to me. Without any public information being made available, nobody can check up on these things. It’s the oldest trick in the book – you have a prospecting right, you know you have to renew it, you submit your renewal application, and you know full well that you'll get no attention from the department, because they’ve got such a major backlog. Unless you push for renewal, it won't happen and then you can continue prospecting on the never-never.

Our economy has been largely built on mining, and what I see here is that development in mining is absolutely been stifled. Even though there are many possibilities, they're not being pursued.

One of the reasons we've made this available for journalists like yourself is in the hope that you will actually have a look at the map, see things and be reminded. For example, we have the mega mine gold prospecting right that was being...

Glencore has taken another step on the road to achieving the world’s circular economy imperative.

The London- and Johannesburg-listed diversified mining and marketing company, headed by CEO Gary Nagle, intends to provide lithium-ion battery recycling solutions at scale for Spain and Portugal, in partnership with FCC Ámbito and Iberdrola.

FCC Ámbito manages industrial and commercial waste in Spain and Portugal, and Iberdrola is a globally spread renewable energy group that aims to facilitate access to the technologies of the future with a focus on sustainability through its Perseo Venture Builder programme.

The aim of the partnership is to recycle lithium-ion batteries through the establishment of a purpose-built recycling facility, which will include second-life repurposing and end-of-life recycling solutions.

Already a producer, recycler and marketer of battery metals, Glencore has a strategic goal of accelerating circularity of critical minerals needed for the transition to a low carbon economy.

Battery recycling capabilities and feed availability in the region have already been accessed in collaboration with the Iberian Energy Storage Research Centre, or CIIAE.

Work towards identifying the location of the recycling facility, which will be supported by sector-leading technology, is under way.

The recycling facility will be operated by FCC Ámbito, which will pre-process lithium-ion batteries and battery scrap, and separate this feed into distinct streams for further downstream refining and recovery of battery metals.

The volume of recycled battery materials, including production scrap, is expected to reach 35 000 t/y in Spain by 2035.

Glencore has been operating one of the world’s largest zinc smelters in Spain since 1960.

“We view production scrap as well as post-consumer materials as a valuable resource that will help supply the increasing demand for critical metals in support of the energy transition and the world’s net-zero ambition,” Glencore global recycling head Kunal Sinha stated in a release to Mining Weekly.

“This is one step forward in our efforts to recover the resources contained in the waste and to minimise the dependence on raw materials,” said FCC Ámbito circular economy head María J Kaifer.

Iberdrola’s Perseo Venture Builder global head Álvaro Portellano added: “We regard this new cooperation as a valuable opportunity to continue closing the loop in the circularity of the energy transition we are helping to shape, while expanding our successful collaboration with FCC that is already addressing wind blade recycling.”

Mining Weekly Editor Martin Creamer unpacks the H2 Green Steel/Anglo American memorandum of understanding; the ENSafrica webinar, which heard that new trackless mobile machinery regulations published five months ago are one of mining’s burning issues; and Australian advancements in smelterless low-energy platinum processing.

Coal ash, acid mine drainage and other mine waste – materials substantially available in South Africa – are being spotlighted as potential sources of rare earth elements, critical raw materials that are vital for many clean technologies being implemented globally.

As reported by Mining Weekly last year, the information derived from a study published on the mineralogy and distribution of rare-earth elements in the high-ash coals of South Africa’s Waterberg coalfield could assist with a new concept of logging coal seams.

This logging takes into account the rare earth elemental composition of coal, rather than only thermal coal’s energy characteristics related to the use of it in power generation.

This potentially far-reaching study was conducted by the Clean Coal Technology research group at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, as part of the Department of Science and Innovation- and National Research Foundation-funded South African Research Chairs Initiative.

Owing to a rapid depletion of traditional rare earths ore deposits, governments and the research communities the world over are investigating alternative or non-traditional sources of the minerals.

This was brought home this week by the news that the US Department of Energy, through the Inflation Reduction Act, is making $16-million available to the University of North Dakota and West Virginia University to complete design studies on refineries that will extract and separate rare earth elements and other critical minerals from coal ash, acid mine drainage, and other mine waste.

Rare earths needed for high-demand products like batteries and solar panels make up a group of 17 elements bearing exotic names and the variety of solid waste by-products that contain rare earth elements are now being highlighted globally.

Demand for rare earth elements is predicted to increase sixfold by 2040 according to a Harvard Review report, which Wits School of Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering associate professor Samson Bada emphasised in the Mining Weekly report of last year.

Although the focus of the Wits research group was on Waterberg coal samples, coal remnants in South Africa’s Mpumalanga coal province has the potential to add considerable volume to any positive developmental outcomes.

Analysis revealed that the total rare earths content in the coal discard and run-of-mine Waterberg coal was above 225 parts per million (ppm), well above the cut-off grade of 130 ppm for extracting REEs in coal.

Heavy rare earths were more enriched in the run-of-mine sample and light rare earths were more dominant in the high-ash, high mineral-content discard coal sample. In addition, the coal discard from the tailings dump provides what was described as an economically viable secondary rare earths resource as it requires no mining.

Meanwhile, the advancement of new technologies, such as liquid membrane separation, molecular recognition technology and supercritical carbon-dioxide extraction, have been investigated to a degree of success and could play a role in extracting rare earths from coal and coal by-products in the future, was highlighted by both Bada and Wits School of Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering graduate student Hamza Harrar.

As the gap between global demand and supply increases, the search for alternative resources rare earths becomes increasingly important and the opportunity for South Africa to play a role in rare earths extraction elevated.

Reuters reported this week that Sweden, South Africa and Australia are at the forefront of a push to transform piles of mine waste and by-products into rare earths vital for the green energy revolution.

Prices of the minerals used in products from electric cars to wind turbines have been strong, and a rush to meet net-zero carbon targets is expected to further boost demand, the news agency stated.

Australia's RMIT University estimates there are 16.2-million tonnes of unexploited rare earths in 325 mineral sands deposits ...

Mitigating climate change, the biggest challenge of our time, requires a new, clean industrial revolution, says H2 Green Steel of Sweden, which on Tuesday announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Anglo American to advance green steelmaking.

The London- and Johannesburg-listed Anglo has also signed MoUs with huge steel producers such as Thyssenkrupp Steel Europe AG, Salzgitter Flachstahl and Nippon Steel of Japan to collaborate on the development of new pathways for the decarbonisation of steelmaking.

The agreements include trialling the use of premium quality iron-ore products from Anglo’s Kumba Iron Ore mines in South Africa as feedstock for direct reduced iron (DRI) production.

“We are impressed by Anglo’s efforts to bring high-quality iron-ore products to customers which focus on low-carbon iron and steelmaking, and we look forward to continue working with them, not only for our first green hydrogen integrated steel plant in Sweden but for other future locations globally,” H2 Green Steel chief procurement officer Luisa Orre stated in a release to Mining Weekly.

Stockholm-headquartered H2 Green Steel, launched in 2021 to accelerate the decarbonisation of the steel industry by using green hydrogen, is developing an integrated, digitalised, and circular DRI plant in Boden, in northern Sweden, which will produce green steel, reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by up to 95% when compared with traditional steelmaking. The founder and largest shareholder of H2 Green Steel is investment company Vargas.

Interestingly, Anglo was itself a DRI producer in the days when it owned Scaw Metals, east of Johannesburg. Steel production by DRI is a technically proven production method estimated to be significantly less carbon intensive than the traditional blast furnace and basic oxygen furnace integrated steelmaking process. When using green hydrogen as a reducing agent, the process can be made largely CO2-free.

“Collaboration with industry leaders who share a vision for decarbonised steelmaking is central to our commitment to reduce emissions in our value chains. Our work with H2 Green Steel will focus on exploring ways for premium, responsibly produced iron-ore from our operations to be used as feedstock in the Boden plant’s low-carbon production process, paving the way to a cleaner, greener way to produce steel – one of the backbone materials for the rollout of energy transition infrastructure and for ongoing global socio-economic development,” Anglo American marketing business CEO Peter Whitcutt highlighted.

Climate science has set an imperative to decarbonise the global economy as quickly as possible.

Anglo is taking steps to halve its Scope 3 emissions by 2040, building on a pre-existing commitment to reach operational Scope 1 and 2 carbon neutrality by the same year.

Owing to steel production accounting for a large percentage of CO2 emissions, its decarbonisation is seen as a must and giga electrolysis infrastrucutre to produce green hydrogen is envisaged as integrated plant in future steel works.

South Africa’s new trackless mobile machinery (TMM) regulations published five months ago are mining’s new burning issue and an undeclared state of national disaster for some, ENSafrica webinar attendees heard on Monday.

TMM is defined as any self-propelled mobile machine used at a mine for mining, transport or associated operations underground or on surface, which is mobile by virtue of its movement on wheels, skids, tracks, mechanical shoes or any other device fitted to the machine. (Also watch attached Creamer Media video.)

Excluded are rail bound equipment, scraper winches, monorail installations, static winches, draglines, winding machinery installations and track-mounted conveyors.

“On Wednesday, 21 December 2022, whilst we were all still doing Christmas shopping, these sub regulations were published for commencement,” ENSafrica mine and occupational health and safety executive Warren Henricks recalled during the webinar covered by Mining Weekly. The 2015 regulations governing trackless machines were uplifted, and the Mine Health and Safety Act Trackless Mobile Machinery Regulations for collision avoidance systems promulgated.

In a nutshell, these require mines to provide for anti-collision systems and devices to automatically retard or stop diesel-powered TMM from colliding with pedestrians and other TMMs.

The regulations commenced on gazetting with no transitional provision amid South African mines reporting 17 TMM-related fatalities last year and 16 the year before.

Immediate compliance created a precarious position for some employers, exacerbated by the degrees of regulatory enforcement from region to region.

In certain regions, employers have been required to submit implementation plans, with employers having to rely on collaborative efforts between multiple and respective original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

In response to a question, Henricks said the onus is on the employer to determine the risk of collisions and to providing the systems to eliminate that risk with no onus on the OEM to provide TMMs with the required technology.

Applications for exception should be made to the Minister in terms of Section 79 of the Mine Health and Safety Act, who is able to delegate such power to the Chief Inspector of Mines in terms of Section 96. Copied on the exemption application should be the Principal Inspector if response is referred to in the exemption application.

“It’s only been five months so far, so it’ll be interesting once decisions are made on exemption applications, and how employers deal with the implementation going forward,” Hendricks added.

Speaking to journalists in this year’s Investing in African Mining Indaba in February, Minerals Council South Africa chairperson Zero Harm Forum Japie Fullard said of concerning TMM-related fatalities: “We’re going to do whatever we can to bring those down.”

COVID OBLIGATIONS

ENSafrica mine and occupational health and safety executive consultant Willem le Roux and ENSafrica mine and occupational health and safety executive Celeste Coles dealt with Covid 19 and ongoing compliance requirements of the disease.

Le Roux drew attention to the fact that on February 3 this year, in the same regulation in which monkey pox was declared a notifiable disease, the other notifiable diseases listed did not include Covid 19.

“I don’t think that one can argue that by scrapping the reference to Covid 19 in the latest notification that one can conclude that reporting is no longer required, and, in any event, the Minister can’t just leave out things. The Minister can declare regulations by imposing certain requirements or by changing them or deleting them.

“This hasn’t been followed. Perhaps something unknowingly or unintentionally was done, as we know nowadays happens very often. So, my advice is report Covid. When it is diagnosed by the health care provider, report it straight away by telephone and you will find the telephone number on the website of the National Institute of Communic...

Chemicals company BASF global precious metal services senior VP Timothy Ingle told delegates attending the Platinum Group Metals Day, in Johannesburg, earlier this week, that it would be extremely challenging from a raw material perspective to meet the expected global uptake of ten-million electric vehicles (EVs) this year and the goal of reaching 40-million EVs on the road by 2030.

Ingle pointed to challenges faced globally with securing base metal supply and, in particular, lithium and class one nickel.

He said that, overall, the different nuances present in various countries would dictate EV uptake rates – particularly in developing countries such as South Africa, Brazil or India, where insufficient infrastructure existed to support a wholesale EV transition.

“I would expect that internal combustion engines (ICEs) will continue to be prevalent in countries like these in the future,” he said.

Anecdotally, Ingle shared that Uber drivers in northern Europe were trending towards buying ICE vehicles again, given the extraordinarily high cost of electricity in the region, making it cheaper to refuel a car with petrol or diesel than to recharge it from the grid.

Umicore precious metals management senior VP Bernhard Fuchs agreed with Ingle’s sentiments, adding that, if the ICE era was reaching its end, it was only true for Europe.

“I don't see any other area in the world which is following that thought at all, and Europe is by far not where the most cars are bought. There's certainly a big future still for ICE cars in the world,” Fuchs said.

Volkswagen Group South Africa volume planning manager and product marketing head Gina Handley added that high living standards measure (LSM) groups were now moving increasingly towards solar as an alternative power source. Therefore, to charge an EV at home is expected to be more affordable than relying on the grid for those in that bracket.

“The journey to EVs is going to happen in South Africa, but it’s not happening at the rate we’ve seen in other international markets. We’ve also seen a lot of other international markets introduce quite stringent strategies towards introducing Evs, which in the South Africa context we haven’t done so yet.

“So we'll see EVs coming in but it will definitely be in the higher LSM groups,” Handley said, noting that EVs were not cheap – a problem in a country where affordable motoring was high in demand.

She said Volkswagen expects most households who can afford EVs to buy them as second cars used for short-range day-to-day commuting, while a regular ICE vehicle will be used for longer trips.

“For original-equipment manufacturers, it is very tough right now. They have to keep investing money for where ICE is right now and they have to also invest massively into battery EVs,” Fuchs added.

A processing pathway away from high-energy pyrometallurgical smelting to low-energy hydrometallurgical platinum group metals (PGM) recoveries has been further advanced by Australian PGMs pioneer Podium Minerals.

Podium is reporting a breakthrough in platinum recoveries through a smelterless technology at its Park Reef Platinum Group Metals PGM Project in Western Australia.

The Parks Reef PGM deposit hosts platinum, palladium, rhodium, gold, copper, nickel and cobalt. A mining licence has been approved, native title granted, environmental survey completed, and scoping study advanced.

Podium is making significant progress on a low carbon, lower energy intensive total lifecycle of PGMS.

“For us, it's about a low energy, low carbon footprint for PGMs. It's about meeting some of the supply deficits which are forecast and looking to improve the PGM industry overall,” Podium Minerals MD and CEO Sam Rodda told Mining Weekly in a Zoom interview. (Also watch attached Creamer Media video.)

“We're looking at an opportunity to open up a PGM market and the PGM commodity sector in Australia. We're really making strong advances around a technology that allows us to look at a high-grade product which is suitable for some of the major refineries in Europe,” Rodda added.

When Mining Weekly spoke to Podium in November last year, intensive hydrometallurgical testing was under way, which pointed to smelterless technology ultimately producing material suitable for refinery feed.

The ASX-listed development company has since completed 21 leach optimisation tests, which point to an unlocking of further value at laboratory scale., with continued studies being required before a mineral processing performance can be measured that represents the expected performance of a full-scale operation.

Meanwhile, processing under certain atmospheric leach conditions has achieved platinum recoveries of greater than 90%.

Platinum and iridium recoveries are under the spotlight given that these two PGMs are used in proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolysers to produce green hydrogen, and PEM fuel cells required to generate electricity from hydrogen for mobile and stationary offtake.

Parks Reef has an oxide zone to 45 m and a sulphide zone from 45 m to the base of the resource.

“Since November, after our really strong, heavily informed baseline, we've been able to focus on how we optimise and look to optimise value at our Parks Reef project.

“Our focus has been on how we optimise our metal recoveries through our atmospheric leach test, but also continue to consider how to minimise waste through our processing stream and reduce energy through that processing stream.

“The 21 tests focused on all three of those aspects, but particularly around what are the levers required to increase recoveries of metals such as platinum, but also around iridium and rhodium and some of the base metal products we have within our orebody,” said Rodda.

Parks Reef has an oxide zone to 45 m and a sulphide zone from 45 m to the base of the resource.

Mining Weekly: Iridium is a very scarce PGM that is needed to generate green hydrogen and catalyse hydrogen fuel cell technology. Are there indications of significant improvement when it comes to the recovery of iridium?

Rodda: We're seeing the uptake of a iridium along with platinum as critical ingredients to those PEM electrolysers you speak of. It's absolutely important for us to focus on how to optimise recoveries of iridium. Through these last 21 tests, we've seen strong increases around oxide recovery of iridium, and we've seen and started to understand some of those drivers around increasing Iridium recovery in our sulphide. We continue to look to extract as much metal as we can out of our orebody, iridium in particular.

Smelterless technology is very appealing in a South Africa short of electricity, but what has motivated Podium’s focus on hydrometallurgical processing in Western Australia, which has none of South Africa’s power constrain...