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It must be appreciated that the current high price of fuel is a function of the war in the Middle East and South Africans must work together in confronting the major impact that this high price is having on the South African economy, Mineral Resources and Petroleum Minister Gwede Mantashe urged during the final speech on the final day of this week's vibrant Joburg Indaba.

Mantashe expressed the wish to address the high fuel price issue amid the South African government being blamed for something that the South African government had not brought about. (Also watch attached Creamer Media video.)

Regarding the dozen WhatsApp group discussions in which he partakes daily, he said: "I go to everyone, every day, and people will blame government for the price of fuel, and I was saying to members of my party, don't own something that's not yours.

"We must appreciate that the price of fuel is a function of the war in the Middle East, and that is not a local war. The Strait of Hormuz happens to be located there, and every time a barrel of oil costs more than $100, you must know that we're going to see that in the pump," Mantashe pointed out at the Joburg Indaba event covered by Mining Weekly.

When appealing to the government to soften the fuel price blow, what also had to be appreciated was the impact of the price of oil on the rand-dollar exchange rate.

Mantashe advocated requesting the government to cushion the fuel price and let it be known that this had been under way since the Russia/Ukraine conflict and also during the current Middle East war. But he urged that when doing so, price cushioning should not be taken as an entitlement but something that the State must do in sympathy with citizens, "and the citizens must appreciate that".

"Once it becomes entitlement, Bernard," a reference to Bernard Swanepoel, the chair of the Joburg Indaba event, "we're walking on a very dangerous route, because everything becomes a right.

"We must remember that if we take money from the fiscus to cushion the price of petroleum, there's something that we are going to give up, because for every rand you spend on something else, it's in exchange for something else you could have spent it on, and our people must appreciate that very well, and appreciate that it is a disaster facing the country and that we must work together in confronting it.

"I must go and basically kneel in front of the Minister of Finance and beg him, 'but listen, you can tamper with the fuel levy, you can tamper with that, please let's cushion it' – a relatively difficult Minister, by the way.

"I do go to him and tell him listen, brother of mine – and I become very soft – let's put some money aside, but when I do that, I don't do that because people are entitled to it.

"I do it because I understand that it's contributing to the rising cost of living, and it's our responsibility to explain to our people that it is something out of our control. We are intervening in this issue that's a disaster facing us," Mantashe explained.

This audio is brought to you by Endress and Hauser, a global leader in process and laboratory measurement technology, offering a broad portfolio of instruments, solutions and services for industrial process measurement and automation.

The European Commission has chosen 46 strategic raw material projects to benefit from faster permitting and help in bidding for public and private funding, as the bloc races to diversify supply chains and reduce reliance on China, it said on Friday.

The EU, along with other major Western economies, is heavily dependent on China for critical minerals and components such as batteries and rare earths used in the defence, aerospace, automotive and renewable energy sectors.

Beijing has increasingly used those dependencies as a trade lever over the last two years, adding urgency to EU efforts to secure supplies and explore a joint stockpile of key raw materials.

Progress on the projects picked last year has been slow and some have struggled to move forward. The Commission said it had already mobilised more than €2-billion ($2.24-billion) in public funding, but developers warned in August that more projects could fail without urgent funding.

The Commission hopes prioritising projects will help the bloc meet targets set out in its 2024 Critical Raw Materials Act, under which the EU aims to mine 10%, process 40% and recycle 25% of its annual needs by 2030.

The projects are spread across 16 EU countries and cover 15 of the EU's list of 17 strategic raw materials including copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, graphite, rare earths, magnesium and tungsten.

"The 46 new projects are expected to require around €21.1-billion ($23.7-billion) in capital investment, mobilised from a combination of public and private sources," the Commission said.

Notable projects include the Zinnwald Lithium project in Germany, the Skouries mine in Greece, Arctial's planned aluminium smelter in Finland and the Viscaria copper project in Sweden, as well as projects backed by major European industrial groups including Umicore, Aurubis and Leonardo.

Strategic projects do not automatically receive EU funding. Instead, the Commission said it "facilitates access" to EU funding and helps connect project developers with lenders.

The latest set of projects follow 60 that were announced last year, including 13 outside the EU in countries such as Brazil, Greenland and Kazakhstan.

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Making green iron-ore for exportation is a great opportunity, South Africa's Joburg Indaba heard on Thursday, October 8, when Kearney South Africa energy partner Frances Phillips drew attention to South Africa's renewable-energy, iron-ore and platinum group metals (PGM) endowments in urging that South Africa's green hydrogen thoughts extend beyond green hydrogen molecules alone.

In response to a question during a panel discussion chaired by NOA Group CEO Karel Cornelissen, Phillips said: "There's opportunity for us to bring the renewable energy that can make green hydrogen together with some of the mineral deposits that we have."

Critical elements would, however, include having the renewable energy, and rail and port infrastructure in place to facilitate export.

"But, absolutely, there's an opportunity around how we take the renewable energy, make green hydrogen, but maybe not to export green hydrogen, and then use that to add value benefits on local grounds before we export it to other countries. A big opportunity there," Phillips pointed out in the panel discussion in which Seriti Resources CEO Mike Teke, National Transmission Company South Africa CEO Monde Bala, and Eskom GM strategy Matthew Mflathelwa also took part and which was covered by Mining Weekly. (Also watch attached Creamer Media video.)

"We all know that we are endowed with renewable energy, a critical element of making green hydrogen. But unfortunately, I think we've not managed to get the bankability across the value chain, and I think there's a number of reasons for that – demand, infrastructure, ports, reliability of electricity. There's many factors that have unfortunately contributed to this, but it doesn't mean that there isn't still opportunity, and maybe I must declare my bias: I was a metallurgist and a steelmaker before I became an energy strategist."

Viewed as a second opportunity by Phillips is PGM- and green hydrogen-linked component manufacturing.

In opening the discussion on the subject of South Africa's renewable energy generation advance, Cornelissen drew attention to well north of R100-billion rands being committed in the last 12 months to build additional generation capacity "for this country that we love so much, and this is not a one-off commitment. I believe we're going to do this every year for the next 20 to 25 years.

"It's estimated that this is going to be a R3-trillion energy transition, and I think if we play our cards right, this could be the stimulus that our South African economy needs for explosive growth," Cornelissen added.

The day's three themes were the just transition, ensuring that South Africa gets maximum benefit out of this transition, and the energy trilemma, which put in simple words, he said, related to "how does one balance reliability, affordability, and the desire for a clean future".

Meanwhile, South Africa's electricity generation hub was described by Bala as moving from Mpumalanga to the Northern Cape, where the national electricity grid was weakest.

Mflathelwa drew attention to the newly launched Eskom Green having an ambition to generate 32 GW of renewable energy by 2040, helped on by putting 2 GW into the market this year and 6 GW by 2030.

And Kearney spoke of the prioritisation of energy storage to alleviate stability challenges, as well as the introduction of gas. At the centre would be the grid being able to get power from where it is produced to where it is needed and remaining stable through every different technology mix into the future.

Cornelissen: How do we make sure that this is a just transition?

Teke: It's interesting for us to look at the crisis we faced with loadshedding in 2023, when we had something like 6 900 hours lost because of loadshedding. We took advant...

This audio is brought to you by Endress and Hauser, a global leader in process and laboratory measurement technology, offering a broad portfolio of instruments, solutions and services for industrial process measurement and automation.

TSX-V-listed Rock Tech Lithium has announced preliminary results from the ongoing definitive feasibility study (DFS) for its Red Rock converter, in Ontario, Canada.

The company reports that the preliminary DFS results indicate total capital costs of C$596-million, comprising C$546-million of direct capital costs and C$50-million of owner's costs, with a tolerance of about 20%. The study is based on a production capacity of about 30 000 t/y of lithium salts.

"The preliminary DFS results are an important decision-making milestone for investing in a modern and scalable lithium production platform in Ontario. They underline that the Red Rock converter can be built at a highly competitive capital cost – a level not yet achieved within the Western lithium supply chain," says Rock Tech CEO Mirco Wojnarowicz.

The DFS is being conducted by China CEC Engineering Corporation (CEC), an international engineering, procurement and construction engineering service provider with expertise in lithium conversion.

Rock Tech explains that CEC has extensive experience in the development and construction of battery materials plants with a combined yearly production capacity of more than two-million tonnes of battery salts.

For localisation of the project, CEC will be working with established Canadian partners.

Rock Tech says the DFS remains ongoing and is expected to be completed by the end of this year.

The results of the final DFS are expected to provide further details on capital and operating costs, project economics, technical parameters, implementation schedule and financing structure.

The preliminary DFS results announced today remain subject to the final DFS results and further engineering, technical and financial validation by CEC. Subject to the final DFS results and receipt of the required project approvals, construction is currently expected to begin in the second half of 2027.

This audio is brought to you by Endress and Hauser, a global leader in process and laboratory measurement technology, offering a broad portfolio of instruments, solutions and services for industrial process measurement and automation.

With the prospect of even more extreme climate change, with the challenges faced in the environmental space worldwide, the importance of a holistic, joined-up, collective understanding of ecological science grows daily, Oppenheimer Generations executive chairperson Jonathan Oppenheimer said in opening the fifteenth Oppenheimer Research Conference on Wednesday, October 7.

"We are, I believe, very close, if not at, a tipping point in terms of what happens going forward," Oppenheimer told a full house at the Randjesfontein Cricket Ground in Midrand. (Also watch attached Creamer Media video.)

"As we know, in science nothing happens overnight. It's not something that we can measure and produce a set of results and correct in 24 months, let alone over 12 or six, and we live in a world that is looking for instant action.

"So, we here are critically challenged to try and make what we do, which is longitudinally complex and inevitably takes time, immediately and vitally important to what happens to society as a whole. Making that connection between the science here and the science that's done globally, and what that means for society and humankind itself, is somehow critical.

"The narrower and the more precise and the more specific we become around our own particular research topics, is in many respects, incredibly valuable for us as individuals, but fails in our ability to communicate and carry that message to a much larger audience.

"I don't need to persuade you here in this room that conservation is the way we ensure our species' survival, but I do need us to find a way to carry that message beyond these two and a half days," said Oppenheimer in pointing out that it was the majority that drove public opinion and the only way to get most people to back conservation was to make it relevant to them.

"What we do is longitudinal in its nature. It takes time. What they want is an Instagram post for 30 seconds and we bridge that gap in the first instance by being able to sell our ideas to each of us who are open-minded and already curious and interested, and then once we've done that, we have to refine it further to sell that message to a larger and larger audience, until in the end we sell this message to 100% of the public in the world. That is the challenge of this conference," Oppenheimer added during the event covered by Mining Weekly.

Former De Beers and Anglo American leading light Nicky Oppenheimer, in a joint programme document, joined his son in pointing out that the research presented at the multi-day conference fostered collaboration not only across disciplines but also across scales, from microscopic to landscape and global.

"In doing so, we're bringing African voices to global conversations on environment, conservation and sustainability," it was noted.

In his keynote address, Nobel Peace Prize winner for global climate action Professor Guy Midgley, the director of the School for Climate Studies at Stellenbosch University, pointed out that before the Paris Accord, the world was heading for a global warming level of 4o. "Now our projections are much closer to 2.5o. Not good enough yet, but a huge advance," Midgley highlighted adding that the highest carbon emission trajectories that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change once projected "are now no longer plausible", which he described as being "huge for the planet".

"In Africa, our median age is about 19; in Europe, it's over 40. We still have a demographic dividend ahead of us. Unlike the developed world, we are urbanising faster than anywhere on the planet, and our cities are expected to add a billion people by mid-century.

"Yet we've managed to keep remarkably large wild landscapes intact. We must now answer the question of how to bu...