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: African Rainbow Minerals has approved the construction of a chrome recovery plant at the Bokoni platinum mine.

Creamer: The chrome price is pretty good at the moment, the platinum prices, they are not so good. So, those that are mining UG2 reef, it is called upper group two reef, when they mine that, they also get chrome and it is at the same fixed cost, so it makes sense to recover that chrome. This is what they are going to do at Bokoni platinum mine in Limpopo, which is owned by African Rainbow Minerals headed by Dr Patrice Motsepe. They have done their sums and they’ve found this to be pretty profitable. They have started to design a plant for that and they will begin construction early next year to recover chrome from the platinum group metals and sell that with their basket of metals. In that way, they will attract more money into the basket.

Kamwendo: Ferrochrome production is beginning to edge up again, the empowered Merafe Resources reports.

Creamer: You know, ferrochrome was ‘our’ metal, because we have got so much chrome. We used to produce ferrochrome, which is needed for stainless steel and when you produce ferrochrome from chrome, you add five times the value. So, we were talking about the good price of chrome, but if you go to ferrochrome you add five times the value.

This is what is called beneficiation. This is what we should be doing whenever we can. We did it very well, we captured the world market, you could say. But, when Eskom started to charge such high prices for electricity, things turned down and all of a sudden we didn't produce anything like the ferrochrome of the past and some of our smelters had to close. The irony was that China then took that market. China bought our chrome to make the ferrochrome. They are now the biggest producers of that. But, it is good to see Merafe reporting this week that slowly we are starting to increase the level of output of ferrochrome. One hopes that it will continue.

It was only marginally up at this stage and it will depend a lot on what the electricity situation is. If they can start getting cheaper electricity we could recover what we had in the past, which is to sustain 200 000 jobs. So, it was really a good part of the business to be in. But it is nice to see, slowly, we seem to be coming back and hopefully, with lower priced electricity, we will capture more of that market again.

Kamwendo: More African countries want to add value to their metals and minerals to create jobs and generate economic growth.

Creamer: The African countries on this continent are saying they have got the metals and minerals. They don't want to continue to just send that out as raw ore, they want to add value here and this is what we have been talking about with the whole ferro-alloys situation and ferrochrome et cetera. But, the realism is that you've got to have the infrastructure, you have got to have the power, you have got to have the logistics, and that penny is beginning to drop.

But it will take some time before they can get that in place. But when they do it will be great for the continent. It will also be great for South Africa, which is also singing from that hymn sheet and has been doing it for a long time. We felt it was just lip service often, because they didn't have the infrastructure. We see value addition being tried in Richards Bay at the moment. We produce ilmenite; they want to add value to that ilmenite to turn it into titanium oxide pigment. They are finding that although they are in an industrial development zone, they don't get the same support that their competitors do in China and Europe from an infrastructure point of view, from having access to what is already on that site that will help them. So they have to build it themselves, which starts to add to the value, and it annoys the funders, so it slows things down.

But hopefully the continent will get it right, because it is very important, but we also need to know it has to have a business case. You can't force that down people's throat. It has got to have the economics behind it and sometimes that has to be incentivised and sometimes you have to all work together. But hopefully we will be adding more value at home in South Africa and on the continent, because it will mean industrial growth and it will mean jobs.

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