SUN CITY (miningweekly.com) – The South African coal line to Richards Bay would include a Botswana link in seven years’ time, Transnet Freight Rail CEO Siyabonga Gama said on Wednesday.

Gama told the twelfth Coaltrans Southern Africa coal conference that the proposed border-straddling connection would form part of Transnet’s investment in the upcoming Waterberg, the coalfield in South Africa’s north-west, close to the Botswana border, which would be the source of significant future tonnages of coal for both domestic consumption and export. 

“We’ll link the Waterberg with Botswana by 2020,” he said, adding that a rail line would then couple the developing Mmamabula coalfields, in Botswana, to Lephalale, in the heart of South Africa’s Waterberg, and then pass through Thabazimbi on its way to the coal area of Oogies, in Mpumalanga, and then on to Richards Bay in KwaZulu-Natal.

The developments would be integrated through the Presidential Infrastructure Coordinating Commission and the strategic infrastructure programmes it oversees, which are designed to accelerate economic development and create jobs.

“Part of what we would want to do is to unlock the northern mineral belt, and as we do that, we need to facilitate further participation in the coal mining sector by emerging miners, as well as a broad participation by black people,” Gama explained.

Railing coal from Botswana via Durban had already begun on a moderate scale. “We’ve moved the first few trains from Botswana to BMA,” he said, BMA being the JSE-listed Bidvest group’s Bluff Mechanical Appliance, which handles two-million tons of exports a year.

South Africa’s major coal-export outlet is the private-sector-owned Richards Bay Coal Terminal (RBCT), through which 68.3-million tons of coal was exported last year and which has a capacity of 91-million tons.

Transnet moves more than 95-million tons of coal a year and also serves other smaller export outlets, including Navitrade and the Dry Bulk Terminal, also in Richards Bay, and Matola, in Mozambique, and rails large coal volumes domestically for State power utility Eskom and other entities.

Gama said there had been a number of successes in the quest to increase the access of junior miners to markets.

He added that provided the various port capacities were correctly allocated, all producing coal miners would be able to export through existing channels.

Rail was seen as integral to the success of emerging juniors and Eskom’s plan to source a billion tons of coal from emerging coal miners would be a game-changer.

Gama said that Transnet would be railing more than 32-million tons of coal for Eskom by 2019 and 60-million tons by 2030 as the Waterberg came into play.

Rail capacity on the Richards Bay line to the RBCT would be increased to 95-million tons by 2018 and investment in the Swazi rail link would take noncoal freight off the coal line and thus open up more capacity for coal.