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 needs to re-win investor trust to rebuild lost ground in the mining industry we once dominated.

Creamer: We were really big in mining. We were the world's biggest mining country, but we have reached a stage now where investors are not coming forward. One of the reasons they are not coming forward is that they don't really trust us anymore. Once you lose investor trust, it is really bad for an industry and we can see mining starting to shrink. 

There is no new greenfield-type of investment anymore. It is stay-in-business investment in an industry that has a finite horizon, because eventually those mines will have no more material to mine. So, what a leading luminary, Paul Miller, has said this week is that our government mining department must not only admit to having made mistakes. They must not only cut the red tape, but they must roll out a red carpet. 

They must restore the trust and they must have transparency. They must have a cadastre system that is open and transparent, because if we don't do that, the suspicion about how we do things here will persist, and top investors will not come forward. They will go elsewhere.

Kamwendo: A new sun-tracking system has the capacity to boost our mirror-heated concentrated solar power plants.

Creamer: We have solar panels, the photovoltaic type of solar system, but we also have concentrated solar power plants. Those actually direct the sunlight using mirrors and they are generally much bigger. We have got three big ones and they are now in the hands of foreign investors. 

Foreign investors have taken a look at them and they have felt they can really upgrade the power, the efficiency of these CSPs, as we call them, the concentrated solar power plants. So, what has happened now is a German company has come in with new sun tracking technology and it is patented. They did a quick demo down in one of the plants at Bokpoort and they are showing that they can uplift the output of these CSPs that actually need a bit of a boost to be competitive, anyway. They need to be more efficient. This, of course, if it goes through, will add a lot to our capacity to produce clean, green sun energy.

Kamwendo: A leading US green hydrogen producer this week gave huge acclaim to South Africa’s platinum metals.

Creamer: The US company Plug Power has been doing wonders in the United States in green hydrogen. They move a third of the food around with the help of green hydrogen. They are active in fuel cell development, active in expanding what we, as South Africans, need to expand. 

The beauty of it is that they are totally committed to the use of platinum group metal-based technology. They are saying, whatever Plug Power does in the green hydrogen field will always be what they call PEM-based, which is platinum- and iridium-based, for the electrolysers to generate the green hydrogen, then to use the fuel cells to turn that back into electricity. They have made a big footprint in the US, and of course, with Liberation Day on Wednesday, there was a bit of a reverberation and we got a bit worried. 

But we see now that there will be no tariffs imposed by the United States on incoming platinum group metals. So, that is not going to be a metal that they restrict or put a tariff on or tax in any way. That is a great result for our platinum group metals. Our mines really have to grow here and the Plug Power is predicting that it is just a matter of time before the world realises that the green hydrogen fuel cell route is the only way to go to have genuinely credible clean and green world. The US company Plug has set up in Europe as well. 

They set up in Australia and they were saying they would love to come into Africa in a much greater way, because they feel that there is not a huge spread of fossil fuel electrification in South Africa. Africa still has a lot of electrification to do and if they could come in now with a clean, green alternative, it would be fantastic for the continent.

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