Broad-based black economic-empowered company Ntsimbintle Mining was targeting the development of a new 800 000 t/y manganese mine, in the central-northern part of the Kalahari basin, in the Northern Cape, Ntsimbintle director Justin Pitt has revealed.

Speaking to related media online at a Ntsimbintle gala dinner, in Kimberley, on Friday night, he outlined that the company owned 51% of the new project, which would be developed by Mokala Manganese, a company that was established specifically for this purpose.

Undisclosed parties held the remaining interest in Mokala Manganese.

Pitt said that, following an initial drilling programme, the Mokala Manganese project had been progressed to the bankable feasibility study (BFS) stage.

“Additional holes are being drilled and the objective is to complete a BFS by the end of next year,” he noted.

At this stage, Ntsimbintle believed the resource contained about 18-million tons of manganese, which could be mined in an opencast operation, after which the project could go underground.

Meanwhile, Ntsimbintle CEO Saki Macozoma said the company would, in the meantime, continue developing the Tshipi Borwa manganese mine, in the Northern Cape, as it aimed to remain in the top quartile of low-cost and high-quality manganese producers.

Ntsimbintle owned 50.1% of Tshipi é Ntle Manganese Mining, which held the Tshipi mine, with Jupiter Mines owning the remaining 49.9%.

Macozoma said that, while the Tshipi mine had been developed in such a way that its production could easily be increased above its current two-million-ton-a-year capacity, given current market conditions, such an increase would not be wise.

“There is an oversupply of manganese at the moment; the price is very weak and the market in China is constrained. But if these conditions were to change, we built the mine in such a way to produce whatever the market requires,” he said, adding that the company would, therefore, look to expand when the time was right.

Meanwhile, Macozoma pointed out that Ntsimbintle was not targeting beneficiation at this stage, given the country’s constrained electricity supply.

“One thing that tempers our enthusiasm for beneficiation is that the biggest input into beneficiation is electricity and we have to weigh between the use of that electricity to beneficiate a product and what alternative use we could have had for that electricity,” he explained.

He added that, for beneficiation to be effective, there also had to be a significant local steel industry to take up the products, stating that whether South Africa would be able to absorb more beneficiated products was another question that had to be answered.

• [Editor:Sophie]