Amplats invests heavily to find new platinum uses
Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) is investing heavily in alternative technologies that will diversify the demand for platinum away from autocatalysts and jewellery, which make up the bulk of offtake.
“It’s a prudent business strategy to have a diverse source of demand for your product, diverse in application and diverse in longevity you’d expect a particular application to be in place,” Andrew Hinkly, the executive head of marketing at the world’s largest platinum miner, said in an interview.
While platinum producers are jockeying for position in the power trains — essentially the mechanisms that power cars, trucks and buses — that use hydrogen-based fuel cells or batteries, they are well aware the fossil-fuel engines that dominate the industry now and are a major consumer of platinum group metals (PGMs) for autocatalysts to scrub out gases will not be around forever.
Amplats is monitoring, investing in, and partnering new applications for platinum and its many sister metals including palladium, rhodium, ruthenium and iridium. It has a R1.5bn fund to stake in companies developing uses for these metals, ranging from innovative hydrogen storage, food preservation, fuel cells and batteries.
“Some of the applications for the metals we mine have yet to be discovered. It would be a shame to let those applications languish,” Hinkly said last week.
“It’s an opportunity for economic growth and advancement of mining companies and the nation, so it’s a responsibility to ensure we find those applications and make good use of them.”
The government is pushing hard for the beneficiation of minerals domestically instead of exporting raw materials as it seeks to create jobs and wealth from SA’s mineral endowments.
Other companies, such as Impala Platinum, are working hard in collaborative partnerships on fuel cells, wanting to run its entire refinery in Springs off platinum-based fuel cells as well as testing hydrogen storage technologies to power fuel cells in vehicle applications.
Six South African platinum producers contributed towards the funding and creation in 2014 of the World Platinum Investment Council to provide the market with reliable supply and demand data every three months and to promote investment products for the metal.
“The world economy has had a few shocks in the past seven or eight years and maybe that has heightened everyone’s awareness of the need for a resilient strategy and plan for the future. Dependency on one sector for demand is not a robust strategy,” Hinkly said.