JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – On day one of the Joburg Indaba, Anglo American CEO Duncan Wanblad revealed commitment to invest R600-million in South Africa’s junior exploration fund as part of the Anglo Tech deal.

Wanblad disclosed this to audience applause during his opening discussion with indaba chairperson Bernard Swanepoel.

“We've made a commitment to invest another R600-million in the junior exploration fund because we believe in exploration,” said Wanblad, who also expressed very firm attachment to what is to become Anglo’s sole mining asset in South Africa – Kumba Iron Ore, headed by CEO Nompumelelo (Mpumi) Zikalala.

Besides having a very high ferrous content that lessens CO₂ emissions, Kumba is now also dispensing a waste-derived ultrahigh dense media separation (UHDMS) premium product. (Also watch attached Creamer Media video.)

“Kumba’s a great business. It has a very unique type of iron-ore in the world today and I’m a big believer that the world will ultimately transition to a cleaner type of economy … and the role that Kumba will play in that transition in the next couple of decades is a really important one.

“What Kumba produces is a differentiated product in the market today and the work that Mpumi’s doing on UHDMS will make Kumba even more differentiated and therefore more sought-after. There’s lots of longer life extensions at Kumba,” Wanblad pointed out.

With much of Africa still to be explored and mined, Anglo’s focus on Africa is poised to intensify significantly.

“So, part of our strategy here is not only South Africa itself but also using South Africa as a mining window into the balance of Africa, which is one of the most under-explored, highly valued continents as far as minerals generally are concerned, before we even start talking about what critical minerals are. Anglo is a company that likes South Africa and the region.

“For strategic reasons, it was the right thing to demerge Valterra and it is absolutely the right thing to divest of De Beers but that creates other opportunities for us and those opportunities could very well be in South Africa.

“South Africa is under-explored today because it had unsupportive policy for exploration in the last 20-odd years, and that’s a very important part of a mining life cycle. The data will show you that it takes about 17 years from the time you find the deposits to the time you get it permitted and ramped up into full production,” Wanblad added.

Although a generation of mines had been foregone, it was not too late for South Africa to be transformative by growing the country through enabling exploration and building new mines.

But the country was behind the curve and needed very strong leadership and supportive policy. Without supportive policy, South Africa would find it exceedingly difficult to attract capital to what is a very capital-intensive industry in which investors had to wait a long time for payback.

“That's part of the challenge that we’re working quite hard on and that’s slowly starting to change, so I am optimistic but I have a very healthy dose of realism around this optimism too.

“We have challenges here in South Africa. I think we know what they are. I think there’s a strong coalition of the willing that's working very, very hard to overcome those challenges.

“Nothing’s telling me that these things are going to be overcome tomorrow, but nothing's telling me that they can't be overcome with this amount of effort, and that includes infrastructure, rail, logistics, electricity, and we don't have a cadastral system just yet, but we're talking about one.

“It feels to me that might be the last hurdle to open up investment again in exploration in South Africa, and as part of the Anglo Tech deal, we've made a commitment to invest another R600-million in the junior exploration fund, because we believe in exploration,” said Wanblad to applause.