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: The Americans are funding the Australians to drill for gas in South African waters.

Creamer: This is a very interesting project off South Africa’s west coast, the Ibhubesi gas project, which has been around since 2003.

Mvelapanda was involved at one stage but now there are different players coming in. The big player is Sunbird from Australia and the interesting aspect is, you know, to conform with President Barack Obama’s climate action plan and also to fit in with our own integration resource plan, the Americans are actually putting some funding into this so we can firm up exactly how much gas is really in our largest undeveloped gas project, just off Saldanha Bay.

It is interesting that the Australians should come in to do this in the form of ASX-listed Sunbird and they are convinced that the reserves are already there to supply the Ankerlig Power Station, which is using expensive diesel and to come in with gas is going to be a good proposition.

Also, to start supplying to independent power producers in the Saldanha Bay area and using gas as a resource and not coal.  This is what people want the world to move to.

Makwetla: Australians are making colossal inroads in Africa and are in most cases outdoing the South Africans.

Creamer: The Australians have really got into Africa in quite a big way. Their diplomats help them in. We had the Mining Lekgotla in Johannesburg and it was well attended, but clashing with it head on was Africa Down Under in Australia and many South Africans either attended both or they chose.

A lot of them went to Australia including our Minister of Minerals Resources Susan Shabangu.  She said that it is a very important one and that she wasn't going to miss it. Even though the Lekgotla was clashing with it the Australians have asked her first and she had to honour that. It shows you how quickly the Australians are off the mark.

I want to point to another big Australian contribution in South Africa at the moment and quite an important one last night at the Mining Lekgotla. Although there were South Africans in Perth, we had the president of our Chamber of Mines of South Africa Mark Cutifani, who is an Australian.

He gave an impassioned and powerful speech at the end culmination gala dinner of this Mining Lekgotla. At one stage he was even tearful because I don’t think we realise that there is a war going on within our country at union level.  He was pleading for us to stamp out this violence and intimidation. 

In the week, we saw unionist say, you are calling for productivity, because Cutifani had said that there is no future without productivity, you guys have got to produce. The unions where saying that there can be no productivity with killings. We can’t have our workers going underground and fearing that they are going to die. 

You can’t work in that sort of situation. Then when they go home, shadowy figures lurking around, they kill them.  They are attending funerals every week and the people are being assassinated.

I don’t think South Africa realises and that is why you have an Australian coming in and he is now London based, but our president of the Chamber of Mines viewing this carefully and saying the starting point is to eliminate violence and intimidation otherwise you will never get investment.

Investors won’t come into a country where they see people in the country not getting on with each other.

Makwetla: Where South Africans are beating other countries is in the field of mine safety technology.

Creamer: At least in mine safety technology, that was another thing that come up at this Mining Lekgotla that South Africa is at last getting traction in this and getting ahead of the world. We used to look to the Ontario benchmark, that is the Canadians being the number one underground mining.

All of a sudden our improvement in South Africa, in the last ten years, has been 66% better safety compared with Canada’s 25% and the US’s 47%. In other words, if we carry on moving at this pace we are going to be the world leaders in safety. Last week a driller was merely drilling away underground at Lonmin mine and there was this rumbling. Normally this man would have been dead because there was a rock fall.

A rock fell, it is as heavy as 50 bags of cement coming down, if this had not been intercepted by a net that is now being placed in these mines.  They have got nets and bolts now, he would be dead. In a coal mine in Mpumalanga, BHP Billiton mine, Khulala, a person passed out in a travel way from a medical condition and a two ton truck was coming down the travel way.

Normally that truck would have driven over that man, but because of the transponder in his helmet that gave a signal to the truck through the proximity detection was stopped in its tracks and that man’s life was saved.  This is what is happening now. Technology coming in and South Africa leading the way.

South Africa now the leader in proximity detection. You saw Impala Platinum reporting the best safety results ever in the history of the mines.

Also Impala saying that it was wiped out this fall-of-ground scourge for more then a year now. Impala has not had one of its miners killed from fall of ground, because overhead nets and bolts systems stop heavy falling rocks from flattening workers.

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.