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JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Multicommodity-focused projects embracing iron-ore, vanadium, titanium and phosphate are rolling out on the rich northern limb of South Africa’s Bushveld Complex, a huge mineral repository best known for its world-leading platinum and chrome endowment.
Currently some of the Bushveld’s least-mined metals and minerals are beginning to come to the fore as experienced South African geologists prove up the area as a new iron-ore province with strong titanium and vanadium by-products.
The Council for Geoscience estimates that the Bushveld hosts between 25-billion tons and 27-billion tons of iron-ore and the metallurgical impediments that have stood in the way of easy exploitation have been steadily removed.
In addition, the Bushveld granites contain tin, as well as fluoride, uranium, base metals and rare earths. “All of a sudden, if you look at the area, it’s probably the richest piece of real estate on the planet,” Bushveld Minerals technical director, Professor Richard Viljoen, formerly of the University of the Witwatersrand, tells Mining Weekly Online in a video interview (see attached).
The London Aim-listed Bushveld Minerals itself has what its CEO Fortune Mojapelo describes as “very systematic” multicommodity project implementation, which takes full advantage of all of the credits of every available commodity.
There is thus another Merensky reef story unfolding outside of the traditional platinum and chromium paradigm.
“Getting this right has huge implications for the Bushveld Complex, which to date has not really been exploited from an iron-ore, vanadium and titanium perspective,” Mojapelo points out.
Bushveld Minerals’ first drill hole intersected a very thick titanium-magnetite layer, from which the company has developed a 718-million-ton multi-commodity resource.
The company now has four key platforms made up of iron-ore, vanadium, tin, and with the acquisition late last year of ASX-listed Lemur Resources, a large coal deposit in Madagascar, as well as a relatively high junior-miner cash balance of $16-million.
Bushveld Minerals’ parallel iron-ore and vanadium deposits are 1.5 km apart, which positions them well for the sharing of infrastructure, including initial processing infrastructure.
Critical to the company’s iron-ore success is being able to extract the vanadium, titanium and even the phosphate credits through the vertical integration of mining and processing and the implementation of value-adding production, which fits hand-and-glove the South African government’s beneficiation policy.
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