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REGIONAL PROCESSING COULD HELP SA TO SAVE MINING JOBS
Focusing specifically on South Africa ' s mining sector, the potential for regional beneficiation( mineral processing) offers a solution to mitigate job losses within the industry. Based on a BCG * report projecting a critical mineral shortage over the next decade, mining experts at Boston Consulting Group, Tycho Möncks and Neil Naude, suggest that this shortage presents an opportunity.
The projected shortage of critical minerals over the next decade creates an opportunity for large and small mining companies, governments and offtakers to form regional mineral processing hubs.
With the appropriate policies, transport networks and partnerships in place, South Africa could attract investments and jobs and turn around the long-term decline in its mining sector.
Renewable energy systems and electric vehicles – central components of the energy transition – require several times more minerals than their traditional counterparts. In the race to decarbonise, demand for critical minerals such as lithium, nickel, graphite, cobalt, copper and rare earth elements is forecast to increase two- to fivefold over the next decade, reaching USD750- billion by 2035.
Growing demand coincides with significant geological, operational and technological constraints, including the depletion of existing mines, a general decline in ore quality and a shift in new development to riskier regions. Underinvestment in exploration only aggravates these trends. In addition, stricter social and environmental regulations have protracted typical permitting timelines so much that the average time from exploration to first production is now 16 years.
Export restrictions, reshoring initiatives and the rise of resource nationalism are intensifying the competition for critical minerals and fragmenting global supply chains. Shocks associated with geopolitical realignments, such as between the US and China or Russia and the EU, could disrupt around 30 % of worldwide mineral trade flows over the next decade, exacerbating supply gaps.
At present, both critical mineral reserves and processing facilities are concentrated in just a few countries. For example, China accounts for over 60 % of all minerals processing and Indonesia dominates processing of high-pressure acid leach nickel. Both countries have benefited from the development of minerals hubs, which remain relatively uncommon elsewhere.
Minerals hubs centralise mineral concentrates from various places before processing and selling them to regional or global users. In one location, a hub provides large-scale processing facilities and critical infrastructure to achieve economies of scale and efficiency and keep costs competitive. For example, traditional copper processing facilities generally produce from 25 000 to 100 000 tons of cathode copper each year. A mineral hub can process more than 500 000 tons, often along with other minerals.
Indonesia offers a prime example of the hub concept in action. It has become a global nickel-processing hub, not only because it has the world’ s largest nickel reserves, but because of a series of policies instituted in January 2020. Since then, Indonesia has attracted USD21-billion in foreign investment for mining and processing, as
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