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

Host: A US company this week took steps to buy South Africa’s big aluminium smelter in KwaZulu-Natal.

Creamer: A US firm has agreed to buy Hillside Aluminium Smelter, which is the biggest aluminium smelter in the southern hemisphere. It is interesting that a US company is interested in investing in South Africa, which is a great plus for us. What they are going to do is they are going to buy all the aluminium assets from a company that is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange called South32. So, South32 has got aluminium assets in Australia, aluminium assets in Brazil and aluminium assets in South Africa.

They want to concentrate more on mining certain metals than they want to dispose of this. Alcoa, that is buying this, concentrates only on aluminium. Many feel that this is going to be better for South Africa, because you are going to get a company that is only a pure playing aluminium company owning our biggest aluminium asset, which is likely to mean that there is going to be positive developments there, greater expansion and obviously the jobs are a big thing. There are more than 3 000 people that are employed there and if you look at the downstream activities, we take that aluminium and we also make things from it in South Africa, which gives rise to a lot of other jobs. So, many are enthusiastic and listening to the Americans, they seem dead keen to buy this, because they say that Hillside is very cash positive and they feel they can do a lot with it.

Host: Action is being taken to create new long-term demand for South Africa’s valuable platinum group metals.

Creamer: Platinum group metals are very important for South Africa and the demand over the next ten years they feel quite comfortable with. But, going beyond the next ten years, they feel there could be structural changes in demand, because most of their demand has come from cars that have auto catalysts in them that stop polluting big cities, so these exhaust emissions are prevented from polluting with the help of platinum group metals.

Many cars are going over to electric vehicles now and with the electric vehicle era, you won't have that same demand for platinum metals, but between now and ten years they feel there will be hybrid vehicles as well, which will give good demand. So, in the meantime, they are paying a lot of companies to do research to make sure that they will have demand come the mid-2030s. They don't quite know what that demand will be, will it be higher demand, because if they go into green hydrogen, they could find that they have got to really supply a lot more, or if that doesn't really work, will it be a declining demand? So, they are in a certain stage of  demand crossroads at the moment, but cleverly they are paying a lot of people to do research to make sure that there is demand.

Host: South Africa’s DRDGOLD is spending R8-billion to grow its gold-from-mine-waste business by 40%.

Creamer: That is a wonderful investment. So, you have got DRDGOLD, listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. It takes mine dump material and it extracts the gold from it, and because they don't have to go underground, that is always lower cost. So, it is very encouraging.

They have got the Ergo operation out on the East Rand and the Far West Gold Recoveries on the West Rand. they are developing new activities through what they call Vision 2028. By 2028 they will have 6 t of gold coming from these mine dumps, which is really exceptional. We are hoping that the model can also then move to other materials, particularly platinum group materials. A lot of people are saying we have got platinum waste dumps, we can get the platinum from those and I think that will also be something that DRDGold will focus on in the future.

Host: Thanks very much. Martin Creamer is publishing, editor of Engineering News & Mining Weekly.