Siyabonga Gama, chief executive, Spoornet
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Spoornet coal hauling is improving says CEO
Allan Seccombe
Posted: Fri, 24 Mar 2006

[miningmx.com] -- South African state rail utility Spoornet will shift up to 76 million tonnes of coal to Richards Bay port this year, and it is talking to producers about securing supplies to raise this to 92 million tonnes a year, CEO Siyabonga Gama said on Friday.

“We hope to rail 74 to 76 million tonnes this year from April. We are wrapping up volume guarantees with various mines and players in the next few days,” Gama told delegates at the Coaltrans conference in Johannesburg.

The coal is railed from the Mpumalanga coalfields to the port where the Richards Bay Coal Terminal, owned by the seven largest export coal producers, is embarking on a billion rand expansion plan to lift capacity to 92 million tonnes by mid-2008.

Spoornet wants assurances from coal producers that upgrades to the railway line to cope with 92 million tonnes, and the additional locomotives and wagons that will be acquired at a cost of billions of rands will be fully utilised.

Spoornet is spending R4.8bn to lift its capacity to 78 million tonnes from next year.

“We still have to approve the ramp up from 78 million tonnes to 82 million tonnes or 92 million tonnes, depending on the discussions we are having with our customers,” Gama said.
We hope to rail 74 to 76 million tonnes this year
Spoornet commonly rails 168,000 tonnes a day to the harbour, but has been trying to move this above 200,000 tonnes. A couple of weeks ago it shifted a peak of 251,000 tonnes in a single day.

“We don’t think that will be sustainable, but it’s an indication of what we could do when there’s better supply chain collaboration and more transparency on the supply chain,” he said.

RBCT executive chairman Kuseni Dlamini said stocks at the terminal were at 1.8 million tonnes, well below the ideal level of three million tonnes, partly because of delayed cargos from the coalfields because of weeks of rain.

The 1.2 million tonnes of coal railed to the Durban harbour each year could be shifted to Richards Bay in the future, he said.

MATOLA

The Matola coal terminal in Mozambique could be an ideal alternative port for empowerment mining companies that cannot win an export allocation at Richards Bay, said the terminal’s managing director John Muller.

Empowerment companies have complained bitterly at the conference about the smallness of the allocation they have been granted.

However, the major bottleneck for Matola is the lack of rail capacity to ferry bulk products from South Africa to the harbour, Muller said.

“We’ve got great plans for the Maputo Corridor, which we see as a growth corridor. It will be one of the fastest growing corridors,” Siyabonga Gama, Spoornet CEO, said. JSE-listed Grindrod, which bought the terminal last year, is investing R186m over five years to upgrade facilities at the terminal, which currently handles coal and magnetite from the Palabora mine in South Africa. The upgrade will bring capacity at Matola to six million tonnes a year.
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Muller forecast coal shipments through Motola this year of 1.2 million tonnes rising to 1.7 million next year and three million tonnes in 2008.

“We do see positive growth in the junior and empowerment mining sector and we wish to cater for those who can’t meet the Richards Bay criteria. Not everyone can operate at that kind of level,” Muller said.

Magnetite shipments are seen at a million tonnes a year in 2006 and 2007.