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

Gericke: Steps are being taken to reopen South Africa’s world-beating ferromanganese business.

Creamer: We were the leaders in the world. We produce a lot of manganese. We mine manganese here. We always use the beneficiation word, but seldom do we actually beneficiate. However, we were beneficiating raw manganese ore into ferromanganese on a very large scale for decades. We had 70% of the world market and then along came Eskom and started pushing up the price of electricity horrifically, but also making supply insecure. So, they shut one of the biggest ferromanganese plants. If you go along to Meyerton and look on the right when you go off to Vereeniging you will see it there. They are still cutting the grass, but they are not producing ferromanganese. Now along has come a private investor. This is Menar and it is headed by Vuslat Bayoglu. He is now just awaiting Competition Authority to take this over. What he plans to do next year is possibly start the first two of the furnaces. There are four furnaces there, and he will start the first two. That is 500 000 tons. I mean, that is a massive market share. Why can we do it? Because we have got the manganese and that is why we did it in the past and we can earn a lot more. Hopefully you will see next year that we back in ferromanganese at Metalloys, which is here in Gauteng.

Gericke: Strong demand is continuing for South Africa’s platinum group metals, the World Platinum Investment Council reported this week.

Creamer: Platinum demand is there. This week the World Platinum Investment Council once again reported very strong existing demand and even described the long-term demand outlook as being robust. But when it comes to supply, the words shortage and deficits are emphasised. In any other mining context that would mean high prices, but in the context of platinum group metals, it doesn't. Platinum prices are flat, and that then restricts mining. If you restrict supply, you will eventually reach a situation where there is a price spike and that doesn't do anybody any good. What we are saying is that they need to look into this. There is too much pricing and metals exchanging outside the country and people have been calling for a long time for more transparency on that. We are not getting it, but we going to have to do something to make sure of just how much above ground supply there is, because this is a very important commodity for us, but we don't have enough insight into pricing and metal exchanging. It would be better to have exchange taking place much closer to home, for example in the JSE or an exchange with far greater visibility.

Gericke: South Africa has the potential to become a leading player in the hydrogen and fuel cell industry.

Creamer: We had the Mapungubwe Institute round table this week and we heard during all the presentations that South Africa has an opportunity to play an almost indispensable role in the hydrogen and fuel cell sector. Once again, this is linked to platinum group metals, because hydrogen goes hand-in-hand with platinum group metals. Fuel cells go hand-in-hand with platinum group metals. We have done so much early development work on hydrogen fuel cells. We’ve got a huge platinum-based fuel cell mine truck that runs on hydrogen. We’ve got forklifts that run on hydrogen. We got the Mitochondria company, very active in Vereeniging doing hydrogen work. We’ve got a big hydrogen project in the Eastern Cape, an official hydrogen roadmap. We’ve got the Boegoebaai hydrogen export project. We’ve got a military hospital powered by a fuel cell. We’ve got a hydrogen agreement with Japan. We’ve got Toyota, BMW and Anglo American working together on hydrogen powered mobility, plus a Hydrogen Valley project that we are supposed to be developing, but what we don't have are final investment decisions and we need transparency around that along with proper communication.

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