* Says S. Africa’s Platreef to produce PGMs at negative cost
* Declines to comment on IPO prospects
By Clara Ferreira-Marques and Wendell Roelf
CAPE TOWN, Feb 8 (Reuters) – Ivanplats, controlled by
Ivanhoe Mines founder Robert Friedland, expects to produce
platinum at negative cost at its giant Platreef complex in South
Africa, potentially shaking up an industry squeezed by
stoppages, rising wages and power charges.
Privately owned Ivanplats, whose other major projects
include the Kamoa copper and Kipushi zinc operations in the
Democratic Republic of Congo, said it would be the lowest cost
producer of platinum in the world at Platreef, thanks to the
discovery of the high-grade Flatreef ore body in 2010.
“I believe that it will be a negative cost producer of
platinum group metals,” Friedland told a gathering of mining
executives. “The base metal endowment is strong enough to cover
more than 100 percent of the cash operating costs to produce
platinum, palladium, gold and rhodium,” he said.
Friedland said Ivanplats intended to build a
fully-integrated processing facility and a series of underground
shafts and to mine on a bulk scale, in a highly mechanized
process.
“This couldn’t be more dissimilar from the mines that are
currently in the platinum mining industry or anywhere else in
the world,” he said. “This is a highly disruptive discovery of a
world class nature that will have an extremely long life, and it
will be the lowest-cost producer of platinum in the world.”
Friedland said the high-grade Flatreef discovery had ore
bodies 25 or 50 times thicker than those traditionally mined.
Continued…
