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On-The-Air (29/05/2015)

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29th May 2015

By: Martin Creamer

Creamer Media Editor

  

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

Kamwendo: South African platinum power is beginning to spread through the world with 1 000 fuel-cell cars targeted for the UK this year.

Creamer: Marketing is really an important thing in platinum. We see that there are targeting of 1 000 platinum powered cars now. These are fuel-cell cars in London. It is wonderful how the South African’s have worked together with the South Koreans. Hyundai actually handed over a fuel-celled car to Anglo American in London this week. The South Africans are driving around in this car.

The idea of getting platinum marketed is crucial, because platinum is never consumed. You need to have an expanding marketing horizon. Hyundai coming in targeting 1 000 fuel-cell cars this year in the UK, you see hydrogen stations, 65 of them where these will fuel. Japan setting up hydrogen stations also moving towards the fuel-cell cars. In Japan government officials have to drive cars that are platinum powered.

The Tokyo Olympics coming up is going to be powered by fuel-cells as a showcase. We know that 5.4-million homes in Japan are also going to have stationary fuel-cell power. This is really music to the ears of South Africans who really need to move on this. We have heard it happening for so long that we are going to get this fuel-cell power. Really in South Africa we need to do more, in the Free State there are 34 households now that are participating in fuel-cell power. This is something that is tailor-made for rural spread. In the areas outside of the grid, outside of Eskom power, this is a way of getting power through fuel-cells.

They are experimenting a lot with it at the moment in South Africa and hopefully it will spread. We know that the Chamber of Mines building is already off-grid, they generate their own power from a fuel-cell. We are hoping that South Africa will commit to 1 000 MW of fuel-cell power just as they have done to other renewable energy methods, which could really give a stimulus to platinum which we mine in this country.

Kamwendo: X-ray technology developed by the South African mining industry has advanced from mines to hospitals and mortuaries.

Creamer: I have been through so many diamond mines and they have actually used this x-ray technology on me, because as they say not everyone in the diamond industry is a crook, but all the crooks are in the diamond industry, so they used to make sure that I don't have any diamonds.

They could actually look through my body from head to toe in 13 seconds to see whether I was carrying any diamonds. This technology, Lodox, we saw it going into hospitals and it was actually migrating from the mines to the hospitals where De Beers have developed it and it had gone into the hospitals and Grey’s Anatomy featured it in the medical drama series. Now, it is going into mortuaries. We see in Pretoria the medico-legal mortuary has now got a Lodox machine and it is able to go through dead bodies that need forensic checks in 13 seconds.

It then builds up a whole lot of images of that in another 10 seconds, which is extremely important for the courts and also cutting costs. They are actually starting to predict now the whole way of doing autopsy’s are going to change with Lodox playing its role there. We see that one industry can feed another and also it creates a nice spin-off from a financial point of view.

Lodox is really an example of this with no need to wear additional protective gear. You are also able to identify if a person has got a contagious disease, see how many bullets are in it in a matter of seconds. This is really speeding up, because Pretoria do about 2 000 of these forensic checks a year.

Kamwendo: Sugar producer Illovo is at the ready to generate electricity for South Africa as it is already doing in Swaziland.

Creamer: Swaziland with Illovo has got the first integrated system where they actually go downstream. They not only produce the sugar, but they take the sugar waste, which is known as bagasse, and they then process that to generate electricity.

This has been through an agreement with the electricity authorities in Swaziland and sold commercially into the grid. We are hoping that South Africa can also do something like that, because the sugar companies for long now have been standing at the ready. We are hoping that the next quarter, in fact, the Department of Energy will issue and invitation for preferred bidders to come forward.

As we heard from Illovo this week, they are just looking for a policy regularity and certainty so that they can come in. They want to go downstream, because it adds value to their sugar and they believe that they can put about 800 MW to 1 000 MW into the system. At the same time they are already providing their own electricity. So 90% of Illovo’s electricity needs in South Africa are covered by themselves. This company operates in six different countries in Africa and it is looking to do this sort of thing everywhere.

We know it is big in Brazil where they get a third of their electricity from sugar and they also make ethanol. It is important, because the hydroelectric intensity in Brazil means they need it in the dry season. This is what could also happen in South Africa, because this will be produced between April and November, our winter season when the electricity tariffs are higher, we need more electricity coming in. Hopefully it will come through with some certainty before the end of the year.

Kamwendo: 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.

 

 

Edited by Creamer Media Reporter

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