In a massive boost for emerging miners, Transnet Freight Rail (TFR) and Manganese giant, Kalagadi Manganese Resources (Pty) Ltd, have signed a historic partnership. The public signing on the sidelines of the all important Investing in African Mining Indaba at the Cape Town Convention Centre, saw the two parties commit to further growing the sector with the roll out of a pilot project to assist the emerging miners with rail loading facilities. 

This first of a kind inititive will help ease the bottlenecks faced by emerging miners which includes access to capital for investment in rail loading facilities, without which the emerging miners are being excluded from the export markets as they cannot access rail services. 

Transnet has been engaged in the project to enable new emerging miner entrants in the export manganese sector and made available 2mtpa of rail and port capacity to emerging miners, commencing on 1 April 2023. 

Kalagadi has offered to make its state of the art rapid load out station available for use by emerging miners who will benefit from the 2mtpa allocation. This move sees to a number of emerging miners who would not have been able to raise the required capital for investment in a loading facility accommodated on rail. Kalagadi will hand over the common user facility to a third party operator. This will enable independent, transparent and equitable operation of loading services across all common users, including Kalagadi. 

The Kalagadi rapid loading station is a state of the art facility that can turn around Transnet trains less than four (4) hours against the rail service design of 12 hours. This will enable better efficiencies on the rail operations as the trains will turn around quicker, enabling increased volumes through improved asset utilisation. The common user facility is next to the Kalagadi Mine farm in the Hotazel Area, Northern Cape. 

As a custodian of the Manganese Export Capacity Allocation (MECA) program, Transnet welcomes this development and is excited at the prospects of the new entrants commencing export market participation by 01 April 2023. 

The parties have agreed on a working team including a representative from the merging miners that will focus on operationalization of this facility by 01 April 2023.