09/08/2013 (On-The-Air)

9th August 2013

By: Martin Creamer

Creamer Media Editor

  

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

Makwetla: South African-developed robots are at the ready to turn South Africa’s loss-making gold and platinum mines back into profit.

Creamer: Hard-rock mines are in a bad state at the moment.  That is the platinum mines and gold mines that are all under water and they are not making money. 

Up comes the CSIR, which is the State-owned parastal for Council for Scientific and Industrial Research this week, and says take a look at the robots that we have been developing for the past number of years.  These robots have been developed mainly for mine safety.

hey have a mine safety platform for when there are accidents or when there needs to be some sort of intervention by non-human activity to see if things are right they have been sending these field robots in that are mobile and have sensors so that they can report back. Now they are saying lets move further with that and get these into production. We know that robotics has advanced enormously in the world and mainly in the military sphere our own CSIR has several segments.

What the CSIR is talking about here is that we have got a Centre for Mining Innovation that looks at the mining innovation side of it and they have got so much backup in the CSIR with all the other elements. 

They also believe that mining here has reached a similar crossroads to what happened to copper mining in North America in the 60s and 70s when they looked like they would have to close down. Coming to the rescue was technology and that was solvent extraction electrowinning technology, which is still keeping it afloat today. 

They feel that a similar intervention should now take place to get those profit margins up in this loss-making hard rock South African gold mines, which are at a deep-level.

Makwetla: AngloGold Ashanti is implementing its revolutionary new automated mining technology at yet another one of its struggling South African gold mines.

Creamer: Again, along this automation route. People have been saying we should have mechanised and others are saying we should automate, leap right over mechanisation and get right into automation. 

You can see with AngloGold Ashanti it is implementing this revolutionary automated mining technology at yet another one of its struggling South African gold mines.  At TauTona it has been through three sites where there has been success with the testing. Now it is going on to Kopanang. Already other mining groups are coming into AngloGold and saying that they also want to use this technology. Platinum miners are also saying that they want to use the technology. 

What does this technology do?  Well, it gets rid of our normal way of mining.  The blast idea of you drill, you blast, you clean, that is being eliminated by this new technology and it effectively removes the seismic impact. So, because you don’t blast you don’t unsettle everything and snarl things up and make things dangerous for people.  It is a continuous mining, raise-boring and tunnel-boring system that they have introduced. 

They have got the machinery now being built and they are quite convinced and telling the world that this can work.  It is not to get rid of labour, but this is to go into unmined areas. South Africa has still got more gold than we’ve mined. You can go into these areas where you’ve had to move out for safety reasons and you can send this new system in.

The beauty of the new system is that it can work 24/7 365 days a year.  At the moment we are only working 274 days, because our manual system people have to have a break. We are not keeping up with our international peers, a lot of them who don’t have this deep, dark and dangerous type of effort that we have. 

This is tailor made for our deep, dark and dangerous mines and it enables us to leap over mechanisation totally into automation.

Makwetla: A new Bill now before Parliament throws out the old first-come, first-served tradition of awarding mineral rights and brings in a new opportunity for these valuable rights to be auctioned.

Creamer: This new Bill before Parliament now is part of the MPRDA, which is the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act.  This is wanting to throw out – and it is a draft law at this stage – the old first-come first-served tradition of awarding mineral rights. This is colonial really.

People wanted to encourage investment in the colony so they’d say come in come have a look if you are here first then you can take it. This sort of tradition has sort of continued all over Africa.

People are now saying hang on a bit, we now know a lot about what is happening in our country, we know where the value is, why should we just give this away to people who often just dress up something that someone else has found a long time ago. They get huge value for R500 or a nominal fee.

So now they are saying let’s throw that out and let’s get rid of the first-come first-served tradition and replace it with a public auctioning system. If we know that there is value there, lapsed rights or people have withdrawn, let us say you want it, but who else wants it. Let’s have a bidding process so that there can be a revenue stream for those assets. 

There is, of course, another part of this Bill, which is very interesting and that is the clause that gets people to beneficiate. At the moment if you come in the door and someone else comes in the door at the same time you then have to have good BEE credentials, then whoever has the best wins. 

But, what is now being speculated is if people come in on a auction, who is going to win this auction, what basis are you going to do it on? Is it just going to be cash, or is it going to be linked to beneficiation. Whoever adds the most value to that might get the rights.

Makwetla: 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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