【ferro-alloys.com】

  Mining consultancy AmaranthCX has published an electronic South African Platinum Group Metals (PGM) Map, which includes the boundaries of 53 mining and prospecting rights areas across the western, eastern and northern limbs of the Bushveld Complex.

  The platinum-rich Bushveld Complex has 23 producing mining areas, eight mines on care and maintenance, two mines in development, five mining rights granted but unused and 15 exploration projects.

  The map includes 11 assorted smelters and refineries; 115 shafts; 46 concentrator plants, including four that are on care and maintenance and one that is a proposed development; 20 chrome recovery plants and 56 tailings storage facilities.

  These facilities and rights areas are overlain on an illustrative geological map of the important zones of the Bushveld Complex and the postulated outcrop and sub-outcrops of the main PGM and chromite seams.

  AmaranthCX director Paul Miller tells Mining Weekly that there has been a dramatic change between the promulgation of the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act in 2002 and the financial crises in late 2008, followed by further deal-making in the mid-2010s, mainly asset sales by Anglo American Platinum and consolidation activity undertaken by Sibanye-Stillwater in recent years.

  “After 20 years of accelerated change, the map now shows the Bushveld Complex as a remarkably more settled place, at least as it relates to PGM miners, with the ground largely tied up by long-term mining right holders,” he says.

  Miller adds that all the known shallow resources – with the possible exception of the area south of Mokopane and East of the Pilanesberg – are now subject to granted mining rights.

  Future mines are likely to be deeper, down dip or on resources yet to be discovered.

  He explains that economic resources have been discovered under cover using modern exploration techniques, for example Platinum Group Metals’ Waterberg project and Ivanhoe Mining’s Flatreef project. This means there may be potential for more economic resources to be discovered should the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE) provide a better investment environment.           

  Despite the private sector’s initiatives to help drive exploration, such as AmaranthCX’s mapping exercises, Miller says the DMRE appears to lack the political will to support the industry in this regard.

  “The kind of culture required to stimulate exploration investment requires a change from the current situation where the DMRE regards industry participants as political adversaries to be bent to the DMRE’s will, rather than investors to be attracted to invest. This required culture change is only likely to happen on the back of more general political change in South Africa or at the insistence of an outside entity, such as the World Bank.”

  He says commodity prices are currently supportive of more exploration into resources, but points out that the South African government does not seem to understand that attracting exploration investment is a competitive endeavour.  Other countries are improving their offering to investors all the time, whereas South Africa is doing the opposite.

  Meanwhile, Miller confirms that AmaranthCX is considering adding iron-ore and vanadium information to its manganese map, while there also appears to be interest in a country map of industrial minerals.

• [Editor:Catherine Ren]