Every Friday morning, SAfm’s AMLive’s radio anchor Tim Modise speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly. Reported here is this Friday’s At the Coalface transcript:

Modise: Zimbabwe miners are allowed to sell their gold on the open market once again and they are bringing it down to Johannesburg for refining. Tell me more.

Creamer: Gold sellers in Zimbabwe have been very restricted and have had to market their gold through the Reserve Bank and then they have also had some of their foreign exchange handed over at sub-economic rates.

Now, everything has been freed up ahead of the main legislation, which will hopefully come through this session to make investing in Zimbabwe far more friendly when it comes to mining. Ahead of that, already, gold-miners are allowed to sell their gold on the open market.

We see a lot of them coming through the Chamber of Mines, pooling their gold and coming down to Johannesburg and having it refined here. We also see a lot of activity on the platinum front, which is seen as pretty strategic at the moment and a lot of people say that when you go to those platinum mines now in Zimbabwe it is like being in a different country, because these people have been given very special dispensations for sometime now to invest their own money and to carry on in a normal commercial way.

The contingent of Zimbabwe politicians and Chamber of Mines people come down to Johannesburg this week and are very keen that Zimbabwe again puts its best foot forward as far as mining is concerned. They are trying to rebuild Zimbabwe as a destination of choice when it comes to mining investment.

Modise: On the energy front, South Africans have succeeded in producing electricity from a fuel cell in the coal-gas fields of Limpopo province.

Creamer: Yes, there is no doubt about it. The fuel-cell is going to be the machine of the future. We always think of it in terms of cars, that this will be the engine of the future and will drive our cars because it produces the electricity and the waste product is water, which is very benign.

We don’t often think of the fuel-cell as a power station and that is what has just been experimented now with Anglo Platinum and Anglo Coal. They have got an African first in the Limpopo province where they have actually put the gas that was in the coal fields, methane gas, you pass that gas through the fuel-cell on the surface and you produce electricity.

It is a small quantity of electricity at the moment, but what we normally do to produce electricity from coal is to dig that coal out, we first got to get there, dig is out, put it through its processes and then convert it to steam. It is a big operation.

This is a far more direct way and as I say, only a small amount of electricity at the moment, 200 kW, but it is the story that it presents. This could be something of the future and as we say, they are doing it in Britain and all over the world now, instead of mining they actually either create underground coal gasification or they use that methane gas and pass it through fuel-cells.

Modise: Other news on the mining front, Gold Fields of South Africa is frontier-bound, exploring in the wilderness of the Tien Shan geological belt. What is the story there.

Creamer: A lot of people aren’t even spending on exploration. We know we have come through this financial meltdown, a lot of people have pulled in their horns, keeping in their budgets and holding on to their cash, but here we see Gold Fields going to the frontier, which is a very interesting development.

They are, of course, mining already in South America, Australasia and also in West Africa, but I’m talking about going into areas that are wilderness areas like the Tien Shan belt where they are settling in in Kyrgyzstan, around Talas, and starting to create scoping activity in the hopes of creating that big 30-year mine of the future that we have got here in the Witwatersrand.

Also interestingly, going over to British Colombia. Now, of course, that is first-tier country, its Canada. What has happened there is that British Columbia has been dependant on the timber industry. The timber industry has been very big for British Colombia.

But, because of global warming, there is an infestation of beetles and these beetles are eating away at the trees. They have to diversify now out of timber and also into mining. Gold Fields is actually getting a rebate from the British Columbian government to go in there and to explore in an area which is very unexplored.

Modise: Thanks very much. Martin Creamer is publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly, he’ll be back with us at the same time next week.