SAfm radio anchor Bongiwe Zwane on Friday spoke to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News & Mining Weekly. Reported here is this Friday’s At the Coalface transcript:

Zwane: The Johannesburg Stock Exchange this week celebrated the high-spirited listing of a new mining company.

Creamer: What is happening more frequent now, is you get a company that is a mining company listed on the London Stock Exchange and they want a dual listing in Johannesburg to get access to our trillion dollar market. This happened this week in great high spirits. We had Shuka coming through and, of course, when you say Shuka, you immediately think of the red of the Maasai people, their garments. 

This is accurate, because this company has been active in East Africa, the land of the Maasai. Shuka is also intent on being active in Zambia. They want to be active in South Africa and Southern Africa. So, they have now successfully listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, so people are aware of them and hopefully we will have some sort of opportunity for them also to be investing in our mining in South Africa, which they are eyeing quite carefully

Zwane: Sound is being used very innovatively to recover platinum from scrap.

Creamer: Platinum is associated with being clean and green. When you use platinum in your vehicles, you know you have zero emission. If you are using it for electricity, there is no emission. So, it is pollution free. What people have been concerned about is those fuel cells and the fuel cell stacks. When you scrap them you have got to recycle them and in the past they have been using chemicals. Now they want to go off that totally. So, they have gone for ultrasound. 

You wouldn't associate ultrasound with recycling and breaking down metals back into platinum, but this has been done by Johnson Matthey and very successfully. This will be a great benefit to the platinum market, because the whole circularity, the recycling will also be clean and green.

Zwane: Great news for South Africa is that China is investing very strongly in platinum.

Creamer: China has gone up just on the investment into platinum the last quarter, 140%, and the South Africa-linked World Platinum Investment Council is delighted. This is because they see a huge store of value in platinum, because it is so much lower priced than gold at the moment. What they have done is they have introduced a smaller platinum bar and the people have just been flocking to get this bar of platinum. It has also been advertised on TikTok. What is happening is that there has also been a surge for platinum jewellery, because, again, the gold price is very high, the platinum price is not. 

They see platinum as a store of value and what is happening now with massive, big jewellery stores in China is that when you get in there, they not only got jewellery to offer, but they can also offer you the investment bar. Looking at that investment bar they have always got in the back of their mind that if you really need this you can melt it down, because we saw that this big rise in green hydrogen has been over 150% in the quarter. Chinese are going for this use of platinum to create green hydrogen, which is again, clean and green can drive your cars, can give you power.

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