Every Friday, SAfm’s radio anchor speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News & Mining Weekly. Reported here is this Friday’s At the Coalface transcript:
Host: Strong steps are being taken to ensure that demand is ongoing for South Africa’s platinum group metals.
Creamer: Platinum Group Metals have become very important for South Africa. They are bringing in a lot of revenue and for the next ten years, the producers of these, the mining companies, are quite confident that there will be demand. But there are poised to be structural changes in the future, ten years ahead, that could mean that the demand declines or otherwise the demand surges. So, they are doing a lot of research at the moment and they are employing a lot of different companies and academia to plot the next path for platinum group metals.
There are many paths, but they want a very strong path, like we have had for platinum group metals going into cars and making sure that they do not pollute the earth. Now, when electric cars start coming in in big numbers, demand could change. A lot of people are saying, well, green hydrogen demand will take over at that point, which means that the demand for platinum group metals could surge, but if there is more use of electrons rather than the green hydrogen, it could be different. So they are working very intensely to make sure that in ten years’ time, they'll still have a strong market.
