JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – South Africa has extensively tested highly convincing home-grown smelting technology that has the potential to re-establish this country as a global ferroalloys hub by enabling it to produce quality, low-cost ferromanganese and ferrochrome – and even some forms of steel to boot, African Rainbow Minerals (ARM) Ferrous CE Andre Joubert highlighted very explicitly in an interview with Mining Weekly. (Also watch attached Creamer Media video.)

Joubert’s firm stand follows the comment of Glencore Operations South Africa CEO Japie Fullard during question time at Merafe Resources’ presentation of 2024 financial results on Monday, March 10, that the results of the pilot testing of the new Proudly South African SmeltDirect technology are “looking great”.

The Glencore team spent the whole of last week at the operation where chemical reactions rather than large electricity volumes smelt ore.

“I must say that the partnership that we've got is really working well,” Fullard enthused.

Very importantly, the partnership involves ARM and Glencore commercialising SmeltDirect, which when retrofitted to existing smelters lowers the electricity requirement substantially, reduces costs to a level that could invite the competitive recommissioning of many of South Africa’s idled ferroalloy smelters, and opens the way for considerably greater environmental protection by driving down carbon emission.

“We’ve made fantastic progress,” said Joubert, who is exceedingly bullish about the prospect of the new technology creating a platform for South Africa’s return, in significantly competitive fashion, to the ferroalloy renown this country once enjoyed – and some.

“This is something that can revitalise all the dormant plants that we've closed down over many years in South Africa,” he noted.

Capital cost hinges largely on the production volume required, with work done putting capital at about $175-million to $180-million per 200 000 tons a year (t/y), a fraction of what it would cost to establish a new greenfield plant from scratch.

“We can revive existing plants in the exact area where they are. Infrastructure is already there, licensing and all those things are already in place, so if we really want to, we can accelerate this quite hard,” Joubert outlined.

Every detailed due diligence undertaken has concluded that the technology will work.

“We've been doing detailed work with Glencore for the past month, and I think we’ll be able to give you some news by the end of May to say whether we’re going to advance this project to a commercial state or not,” Joubert forecast.

Mining Weekly: Will ARM be reviving its own Machadodorp smelting complex in Mpumalanga?

Joubert: That's what we’re planning and that's the engagement we’re having with Glencore right now, that both companies develop this together.

Is this partnership approach open to others?

We haven't gone to that level yet, and I guess once we've done this preliminary work, we’ll make those announcements.

To what extent is this technology more environment-friendly than conventional technology?

This is one of those almost unintended benefits of this whole process. Obviously, our initial focus was to get the electricity improvement, but through this process, we now find, just on the chrome side, that by just using anthracite, we’ll be 35% less carbon-emitting than conventional processes, and we can take a further step using charcoal as a reductant agent, which will bring us down by 65%. Because a big whack of energy is no longer required, you can then apply green electricity to that, so you can almost come down to carbon zero, or at least be carbon neutral. But I'm not putting out today that next week it will be carbon neutral. We’re going to take this first process sort of conventionally and then bring it down by 35%. We've already done the testwork on the next step of using biocarbons to bring it down by 65% and then ultimately the renewable electricity can be introduced to bring it down to zero.

Is it correct to say that ARM is going to do this under the umbrella of a new division within African Rainbow Minerals?

Yes, so what we've decided to do is similar to ARM’s platinum division and to ARM ferrous division, we’re going to now form a new division called African Rainbow Metal Technologies, or ARMeT. We don't only have the SmeltDirect there. We've also developed great technology to extract vanadium, and we've also developed a technology to extract manganese sulphate from the dumps of ferromanganese production. In other words, you can take a waste product and turn that into a valuable high purity manganese sulphate, which will then be used in electric vehicles and so forth. You take a waste product out of the way and the final waste product is going to be gypsum, which is useful as a cement filler, even a filler in your ceilings, etc. The key theme here is that we're going to go for green, we're going to go for low-value products and through the process, could generate zero waste. So, there are three big themes that we have here. One is the energy efficient smelting; two is to extract vanadium out of our titaniferous vanadium bearing magnetite ore and produce a product that can be used for grid scale electrical storage, and then out of the slag of tailings, manganese sulphate production as the third theme. You can see clearly that we're moving in the areas of energy efficiency, lower carbon emissions, and the metals of the future in terms of energy storage, grid scale and electrical storage in passenger vehicles or backup systems in offices and homes, et cetera.

Is there also potential to produce rail for our railway lines?

Yes, that's also one of the benefits of going further because, if you make pig iron, you can blend the mix that you put into the pig iron with a high manganese content, and in one process, you can produce a high manganese pig iron that you can feed into a basic oxygen furnace, and then make strong quality steel that is good enough for rail production.

VALUE-ADD POTENTIAL RETURNS

South Africa is still the largest host of manganese ore and chrome ore, with more than 75% of each of these ores.

For decades South Africa added value to these ores but then lost global market share because of Eskom’s colossal electricity price surge.

Now there’s a chance to return to being a substantial value-added exporter of good quality, low-cost ferrochrome and ferromanganese, and even some forms of steel. This opportunity needs to be seized with the utmost vigour.