Platinum group metals (PGM) mining and marketing company Anglo American Platinum (Amplats), which recorded a spectacular 120% increase in half-year headline earnings per share, is screening the opportunities to use fuel cell trucks in its fleet.

The cash-rich company has declared an interim dividend of R3-billion after achieving another strong financial performance in the first half of the year, on the back of robust market fundamentals.

Each employee will this year receive R4 000 cash plus R4 000 in shares as part of the company’s employee share ownership scheme, which last year paid out R9 000 to each employee.

The company achieved an all-in sustaining cost per platinum ounce sold of $517/oz, compared with a realised platinum price of $831/oz.

“We think that, by this time next year, we’ll have the largest fuel cell truck operating anywhere in the world,” Amplats CEO Chris Griffith said at last week’s presentation of sensational results in every aspect of the business, including lifting half-year earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation by 82% to R12.4-billion.

He said investing in the green economy remained key, including in battery technology, where research and development was under way with respect to the use of PGMs.

The company was itself continuing to reduce emissions and energy intensity in its operations and assessing the potential to use renewable technologies within its portfolio.

These included the launching of a tender process for a 75 MW photovoltaic solar energy plant at the high-performing Mogalakwena mine, where other metal credits resulted in the cost of producing platinum entering the minus range of –$292/oz.

The company was also assessing further potential solar plants at its processing operations and at the Unki platinum mine, in Zimbabwe, which had a record first-half production.

Meanwhile, a

five-year R2.5-billion capital investment programme is under way to reduce sulphur dioxide emissions from the company’s smelters.

It is carrying out a revised strategy to leverage the company’s differentiated value proposition still further.

What Amplats previously described internally as a “burning platform” has been turned into a four-part “burning ambition” of technology advancement, fast payback projects, expansion studies and market development.

Its P101 strategy is aimed at beating global benchmarks through modernisation and the use of FutureSmart technology.

On the mining front, this involves the advancement of bulk sorting and shovel performance at Mogalakwena, in Limpopo, the evaluation of shock-break technology at the Baobab concentrator and modernisation of the underground Amandelbult mine.

On the processing front, trials are planned for coarse particle separation next year; a concept study is under way into fine particle recovery; a project is at feasibility stage for fine chrome recovery; and copper circuit debottlenecking is in execution phase at the base metals refinery.