Every Friday morning, SAfm’s AMLive’s radio anchor Sakina Kamwendo speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly.  Reported here is this Friday’s At the Coalface transcript:

Kamwendo: World Bank warns of a potential shortage of South African metals that are needed to fight climate change.

Creamer: I think the world is seeing us on the brink of another energy revolution, a mirror of the industrial revolution of two centuries ago. They are seeing a lot of changes and the World Bank now has been doing calculations, as others in the US did a couple of weeks ago, and asking where are we going to get the metals and minerals.

These are going to be in great demand when we have all these electric vehicles and we have our laptops and all the other things just flying through the market. They have come up and said look out for a whole string of metals and minerals starting with aluminum, but also what is good for South Africa is that they mentioned specifically platinum, manganese and chrome. They did leave out vanadium, which I think was an omission on their part, because there is a lot of battery development going around vanadium at the moment.

Their whole ethos is around how do we have a low-carbon tech for a low-carbon future. That is what they are looking at to stop the global average temperature from rising more than 2^oC above the pre-industrial levels. That is the whole target and that will put the demand also on metals that we don’t often talk about, indium; gallium and a few others.

Around the world they are saying that there needs to be more cooperation and we mentioned this last week as well, coming through from the University of Delaware. Perhaps there should be on the geotechnical side, people should know where these metals and minerals are, whether they are accessible, whether those governments are amenable to extraction and what the risks are, going forward, involving the supply of metals and minerals so that we will be able to enter this new age of clean energy in particular.

Kamwendo: The small country of Luxembourg has passed a space mining law that allows its citizens to mine metals beyond the earth’s atmosphere.

Creamer:  In a week from now, 1 August 2017, it will be law that people of Luxembourg can in a private sector way send up satellites and actually go up and try and mine these asteroids.

I am a bit upset about this, because a lot of these asteroids contain platinum and other metals and minerals that are really our preserve and a little country like Luxembourg, not worried about the fact that they haven’t got any metals and minerals in the ground, they are looking to the heavens.

They have teamed up with the biggest because we know that in America the law was passed, as we mentioned on this programme two years ago, signed into law by Barack Obama, when he was President. That also seems to conflict with the United Nations agreement of 1967 which said the space belongs to no one and everyone.

They were speaking to governments and saying we own all of this don't think that you can take part of it. What is happening now is that they are coming in with private sector initiatives and we saw the Google luminary Larry Page come up with Planetary Resources.  

Now Planetary Resources and Deep Space have linked up with Luxembourg. Luxembourg has been playing a major role and I think South Africa should do something like that. We are in the metals and minerals, why not even follow Mexico, which is MxSpace to try and make sure that they can also have access to some of these metals and minerals that are in these asteroids, near earth bodies running around the sun.

They want to get hold of them, because they know there are many metals and minerals that we are needing in this new age that are in these and they are wanting to extract them for use on earth and in space.

Kamwendo: South African mining investors are pressing ahead with two major mining projects.

Creamer: I am glad to be able to report that R1.7-billion project is going ahead in Gauteng. When last have we built a mine in Gauteng? This is at Rust de Winter north of Pretoria.

They are planning a fairly sizable fluorspar mine. It is SepFluor which is leading this effort to extract fluorspar. They have already got 40% of it presold so that is quite a nice deal to have when you are already preselling before you have even started mining. The first of that will come through in January 2019, so it is pretty quick. A 21-month project and interestingly one of the equity investors is Explora of Luxembourg.

These Luxembourg people are looking pretty tightly at mining as we can see. There is also another project coming through in Mpumalanga, that is a gold project.

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