ENERGY & MINING
ENERGY EFFICIENCY = MINING PROFITABILITY
BY TARRYN-LEIGH SOLOMONS
SMARTER ENERGY USE AND SUSTAINABLE PRACTICES ARE TRANSFORMING MINING INTO SHARPER, MORE ACCOUNTABLE AND MORE PROFITABLE BUSINESSES.
Energy efficiency in mineral processing and sustainable practices in the diamond sector are increasingly being treated as business priorities rather than technical exercises.
Dr Lawrence Bbosa, Executive Manager of Minerals Processing at Mintek, made this point during a discussion on smarter energy use in crushing and milling at the Investing in Africa Mining Indaba in February. Energy performance, he stated, must be linked to operational and financial outcomes.
“ We can talk about the energy utilisation. And the kilowatt hours per tonne. We can talk about the amount of energy, but then, when you link it to the throughput, the availability, the recovery gains, that’ s when you’ re starting to translate that into something that can be measurable in terms of the KPIs that will then really move the needle for a particular business,” he said.
Dr Bbosa added that improvements in circuit stability, downtime reduction and equipment availability should not be treated in isolation.“ If you’ re talking about stabilising a circuit, reducing the downtime, the availability of equipment … then you’ re talking about it from the perspective of an operational decision, which is actually a strategic business decision as opposed to something that is purely an energy efficiency exercise.”
Crushing and milling circuits account for a significant share of processing energy. Bbosa said small improvements in specific energy can translate into measurable annual value when applied across high volumes.“ It might be small in scale, but when that translates to volumes of material, it can compound into a significant annual value,” he said. That value, he added, is either“ operating cost savings, or it’ s something that you can then translate into profit”.
The principle of integrating operational performance with broader business and societal outcomes is not limited to mining alone; it follows through to the retail constituent too. In the diamond sector, Tefo Molosiwa, Head of Policy and Planning: Safety, Sustainable Development and Risk at the De Beers Group, outlined how sustainability practices are embedded into the De Beers business strategy.
A central factor of this strategy is provenance. The word‘ origin’, Molosiwa said, denotes the countries in which they source their natural diamonds, adding that De Beers’ s approach“ is to find the intersection where the greatest value exists for our customers, our site holders and our shareholders while also supporting the countries in which we operate”
Molosiwa explained that De Beers’ s tracer platform allows the company to track natural diamonds from source to retail, providing transparency to customers and supporting local communities.
In concluding the discussion, both Bbosa and Molosiwa emphasised that operational efficiency, energy management and sustainability are now integral to business strategy, linking performance directly to cost, output and stakeholder accountability. IB
14 INBOUND SA / MARCH 2026