Chromium/Platinum Group Metals

 Mining Weekly is South Africa’s premier source of weekly news on mining developments in Africa’s most important industry. Mining Weekly provides in-depth coverage of mining projects and the personalities reshaping the mining industry.

South Africa has a long-standing chrome value chain that sustains 200 000 jobs and R42-billion a year in gross domestic product (GDP), but the industry speaks with one voice when it says that it is in meltdown mode.
 
If things go on like this, it could shed 60 000 to 80 000 of those jobs and lose its once dominant market position to China, despite China having no chrome of its own.
 
The contribution of the ferrochrome industry to South Africa’s GDP could plunge to R23-billion, and chrome ore prices could collapse.
 
On the environmental protection front, global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from production would rise by at least 15% a ton as a result of the displacement of capacity from the world’s most efficient South African smelters to the world’s least efficient energy-sapping and CO2-spewing Chinese smelters.

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 Mining Weekly is South Africa’s premier source of weekly news on mining developments in Africa’s most important industry. Mining Weekly provides in-depth coverage of mining projects and the personalities reshaping the mining industry.

JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Stability can be brought to South Africa’s ferrochrome industry by creating a marketing organisation for ferrochrome similar to the Canpotex marketing arm that boosted potash in Canada, the South African ferrochrome industry says in a brochure handed to the media.

The stricken ferrochrome industry says that Canada in 1972 faced a similar situation in potash to what South Africa is facing in chrome – a long-term potash price depression.

It was then that Canada formed Canpotex, a marketing and logistics company that sells and delivers Saskatchewan potash to international markets as a wholly owned entity of potash producers.

“The Canadian potash industry provides an excellent case study,” says the South African ferrochrome industry in the nine-page handout to analysts, investors and journalists at the presentation of the results of the black-controlled Merafe Resources, which is part of a chrome-to-ferrochrome venture with the London-listed and South African-led Xstrata, the world’s biggest ferrochrome producer.

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Mining Weekly is South Africa’s premier source of weekly news on mining developments in Africa’s most important industry. Mining Weekly provides in-depth coverage of mining projects and the personalities reshaping the mining industry.

JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – The proposed $100/t tax on the export of raw chrome ore would destroy the South African chrome ore mining business and allow competitors from other producing countries to benefit, JSE-listed Metmar CEO David Ellwood said on Wednesday.

Ellwood was responding to Merafe CEO Stuart Elliot’s revelation of the proposed imposition of a $100/t export tax as a means of giving the industry “some breathing space” in the short term.

Elliot complained that South Africa’s ferrochrome production was being displaced by Chinese ferrochrome production. “It’s unbeneficiated ore that is leaving the country and growing the Chinese ferrochrome industry at South Africa’s expense,” Elliot said.

Ellwood claimed that the proposed tax represented a 100% tax on the chrome ore production cost and a 300% tax to upper group two (UG2) operations, many of which were community based.

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