Richard Phillips, Rodney Jones and Hamish Bohannan
Send this article to a friend
Print this page

» Heraeus builds SA platinum refinery
» SA refinery seeks African gold supply
» Harmony shuts its gold refinery
» SA refinery may lift silver output
» Independent Pt refinery plan for S.Africa
» Rand Refinery seeking offshore deal

> JSE:ANGLO PLATINUM LIMITED:
49950c 0%
If you want to share this article, simply sign into one of these sites and select your network. It’s that easy Click here to find out more about how to use this button

Platinum market opens to new entrants
Ciaran Ryan
Posted: Fri, 13 Apr 2007

[miningmx.com] -- DRIVEN by steadily rising demand from autocatalyst producers, platinum production is expected to rise 80% by 2015, research by Independence Platinum shows.

That means annual platinum production will have to rise by about 6m ounces over the next eight years. Not surprisingly, the rate of investment in new platinum mines has reached unprecedented levels, with several junior mining houses now developing mines on the platinum-rich Bushveld Complex.

One major problem they face is the high cost of refining platinum group metals (PGMs). South Africa has three refining facilities, owned by Anglo Platinum, Impala Platinum and Lonrho Platinum.

Mintek’s Rodney Jones developed the ConRoast Process, which has many advantages over conventional smelting technology in terms of environmental issues, health and technical flexibility.

ConRoast is a unique process in the treatment of sulphide concentrates containing PGMs, nickel, copper and cobalt. It removes sulphur from the metal sulphide concentrates by roasting, followed by smelting the concentrate in a furnace using an iron-based alloy as a collector of PGMs and other metals.
Our research indicates there’s room for a new smelting and base metals refinery
Sulphur emissions are captured and removed from the enclosed roasting equipment in a continuous stream of sulphur dioxide gas of an appropriate strength as feed to a plant to produce sulphuric acid for use in downstream base metal leaching operations.

Peter Craven, business development manager at Mintek, says ConRoast provides great flexibility in treating a range of ore types and concentrate compositions without imposing limits on the minimum quantities of contained base metals or sulphur. It can tolerate high contents of chromite, which has traditionally plagued the treatment of UG2 ores. As the Bushveld’s Merensky reef is steadily depleted, PGM producers will have to rely increasingly on UG2 ores to feed growing world demand.

Last year Mintek and Independence Platinum Ltd (IPL) signed an agreement to commercially develop and exploit the ConRoast Process in a new, independent smelter and base metals refinery to process platinum concentrates in SA.

IPL will fund a US$15m, three-year programme – including feasibility studies – to develop the technology and business plan for a new refinery. It will have capacity to process 360 000 t/year of sulphide platinum concentrates, be capable of extracting up to 30 000 t of nickel, 15 000 t of copper and produce 1m oz of PGMs in a high grade concentrate for subsequent refining.

IPL, owned by Braemore Resources (in turn is 44% owned by Atomaer Holdings of Australia), will have an exclusive seven-year worldwide licence to use the ConRoast Process.

For smaller platinum producers it alleviates the headache of finding smelting capacity for their ore. “ConRoast is the most appropriate technology for SA’s future needs,” says Richard Phillips, head of IPL in SA.

Click Here to subscribe to our daily newsletter

“It can handle complex ores, something earlier technologies couldn’t do. The process can handle even ores with 10% chromite or 5% nickel. That removes a major problem for producers in terms of grades and recoveries and makes it viable to process low grade ores.

“Our research indicates there’s room for a new smelting and base metals refinery,” says Phillips. “We see big advantages in this technology over conventional smelting process in terms of reduced operating costs and improved environmental standards.”

Craven says the agreement with IPL, for which Mintek will receive licence fees, is the type of joint commercial development Mintek intends to pursue more aggressively in the future.

Similar initiatives are currently under way in Iran, where a Mintek-developed bio-leaching process is being used by a local mining company to exploit relatively low-grade copper ores.