Khwelamet ferromanganese revival will begin minute Eskom gives feasible power rate

This audio is brought to you by Astec Industries, a Global Leader in manufacturing equipment for infrastructure, including asphalt production, construction, and material processing, driving innovation and sustainability. The minute that Eskom gives Khwelamet an economically feasible power price, the refurbishing of two of the four furnaces at the dormant former Metalloys plant in Meyerton will begin and take six to nine months to complete. In the meantime, Khwelamet is focusing on a rehabilitation programme, with work being done on the large volume of on-site furnace slag - which can be beneficiated and sold as 73% to 74% alloy - as well as on operational discard that can be used in the cement market. But the ultimate aim is to prepare the whole operation to be restarted as soon as possible. "Eskom's very helpful and is excited as we are because they want to get the smelters back into the business," Menar MD Vuslat Bayoglu told Mining Weekly in a Zoom interview (Also watch attached Creamer Media video.) The previous owner Samancor Manganese is credited with having kept the operations and everything on site in good condition, including the rail siding that is connected to the national rail network. Raw manganese ore will be railed in from the Northern Cape for beneficiation into ferromanganese, which will be railed to either Durban or Richards Bay for export. "Transnet is also very helpful. Immediately they heard about the deal, they came to the party and they said how can we help you because it's a business they ran before and they would like to help us to make it work, so the vibe is there to make sure this business is restarted so that it can be a good example of reindustrialisation in South Africa. "We've got all the ingredients. We just need to make sure we have the right priced power and we've got consistent power," Bayoglu emphasised. Mining Weekly: Given the considerable energy intensity of the ferroalloys sector, how do you foresee Eskom's performance impacting the industry in the future? Bayoglu: Eskom has improved a lot compared with the past. Their loadshedding is less than what we were having in the past, but I'm not sure if they have really reached a stage where we should not be worried about loadshedding again. The reason why most of the smelters in the ferroalloys sector were closed was because Eskom couldn't give them consistent power and Eskom couldn't give them cheap power. If you look at the current price, which is between R1.60 per kilowatt hour (kWh) and R1.80/kWh, I think that price is still a good price if you compare it with other countries, especially in Europe. But it's not competitive enough for smelters to restart or survive in a competitive market, especially coming from China and India. Our competitors are mainly Chinese ferrochrome smelters and Indian ferromanganese and ferrochrome smelters and they're getting power at a very competitive price from either the private sector or government, and we don't have that in South Africa yet. But Eskom is determined to help the ferroalloy industry and to come up with the right price and consistent power. But I still have some question marks regarding the future of Eskom because they need to make it clear as to how they are going to generate power. I think they're trying their best in terms of creating capacity under renewable energy and putting that renewable energy to the grid but they must also be clear on what's going to happen with baseload capacity. I think we're all waiting for the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) to be published. With that IRP, we'll all see what they're planning. It's either nuclear or the current coal fleet to be refurbished or a new coal fleet to be started, obviously with the help of renewable energy, which will help us to transition from fossil fuels to cleaner sources of energy. But I think there's still a question mark and we'll see with the IRP what's going to happen, but I think Eskom's going in the right direction at the m...