http://www.miningweekly.com/page/americas-home
CAPE TOWN (miningweekly.com) – Japan was building platinum-using fuel cells to provide clean electricity and heat to 5.3-million homes, Ivanhoe Mines executive chairperson Robert Friedland told the Mining Indaba on Wednesday.
Japan was also planning to run the Tokyo Olympics on fuel cells to showcase the arrival of the hydrogen economy. It had also become mandatory for all Japanese government cars to be hydrogen fuel cell driven to ensure cleaner air, which was a growing imperative in a world where 66% of people would be living in cities by 2050.
Platinum-group metals (PGMs) were absolutely critical to having cleaner air, Friedland said in outlining the progress being made at Ivanhoe’s rich Platreef PGMs and nickel project on the northern limb of the Bushveld Complex in South Africa’s Limpopo province, where Japanese government agencies are 10% shareholders.
To show the growing use of PGMs in everyday products, he flashed on to a large screen pictures of fuel-cell driven Toyota and Honda cars as well as fuel-cell-powered smartphone chargers, before going on to provide detail on Ivanhoe’s upcoming Platreef project, where a Stage 2 drilling programme has firmed up 78-million ounces of mechanically mineable PGMs and substantial nickel at a depth of 700 m.
The flatness of the average 24-storey-high orebody provides 360 degrees of mining flexibility, not dissimilar to the potash mines of Canada, where Ivanhoe – which has indicated that it will list on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange – is already listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Platreef, which has been engineered as a bord-and-pillar mine using trackless equipment, expects to be a zero fatality operation.
For the rest of this article, click here: http://www.miningweekly.com/article/platinum-fuel-cells-to-power-five-million-japanese-homes-ivanhoe-2015-02-11