South Africa can return to being global ferroalloy hub, ARM’s Andre Joubert reiterates
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South Africa has extensively tested highly convincing home-grown smelting technology that has the potential to re-establish this country as a global ferroalloys hub by enabling it to produce quality, low-cost, ferromanganese and ferrochrome - and even some forms of steel to boot, African Rainbow Minerals (ARM) Ferrous CE Andre Joubert highlighted very explicitly in an interview with Mining Weekly.
Joubert's firm stand follows the comment of Glencore Operations South Africa CEO Japie Fullard during question time at Merafe Resources' presentation of 2024 financial results on Monday, March 10, that the results of the pilot testing of the new Proudly South African SmeltDirect technology are "looking great".
The Glencore team spent the whole of last week at the operation where chemical reactions rather than large electricity volumes smelt ore.
"I must say that the partnership that we've got is really working well," Fullard enthused.
Very importantly, the partnership involves ARM and Glencore commercialising SmeltDirect, which when retrofitted to existing smelters lowers the electricity requirement substantially, reduces costs to a level that could invite the competitive recommissioning of many of South Africa's idled ferroalloy smelters, and opens the way for considerably greater environmental protection by driving down carbon emission.
"We've made fantastic progress," said Joubert, who is exceedingly bullish about the prospect of the new technology creating a platform for South Africa's return, in significantly competitive fashion, to the ferroalloy renown this country once enjoyed - and some.
"This is something that can revitalise all the dormant plants that we've closed down over many years in South Africa," he noted.
Capital cost hinges largely on the production volume required, with work done putting capital at about $175-million to $180-million per 200 000 tons a year (t/y), a fraction of what it would cost to establish a new greenfield plant from scratch.
"We can revive existing plants in the exact area where they are. Infrastructure is already there, licensing and all those things are already in place, so if we really want to, we can accelerate this quite hard," Joubert outlined.
Every detailed due diligence undertaken has concluded that the technology will work.
"We've been doing detailed work with Glencore for the past month, and I think we'll be able to give you some news by the end of May to say whether we're going to advance this project to a commercial state or not," Joubert forecast.
Mining Weekly: Will ARM be reviving its own Machadodorp smelting complex in Mpumalanga?
Joubert: That's what we're planning and that's the engagement we're having with Glencore right now, that both companies develop this together.
Is this partnership approach open to others?
We haven't gone to that level yet, and I guess once we've done this preliminary work, we'll make those announcements.
To what extent is this technology more environment-friendly than conventional technology?
This is one of those almost unintended benefits of this whole process. Obviously, our initial focus was to get the electricity improvement, but through this process, we now find, just on the chrome side, that by just using anthracite, we'll be 35% less carbon-emitting than conventional processes, and we can take a further step using charcoal as a reductant agent, which will bring us down by 65%. Because a big whack of energy is no longer required, you can then apply green electricity to that, so you can almost come down to carbon zero, or at least be carbon neutral. But I'm not putting out today that next week it will be carbon neutral. We're going to take this first process sort of conventionally and then bring it down by 35%. We've already d...