Ivanhoe’s Friedland talks up new Limpopo resource saying it will dwarf Platreef

https://www.miningmx.com/news/markets/53677-ivanhoes-friedland-talks-up-new-limpopo-resource-saying-it-will-dwarf-platreef/

VANHOE Mines executive co-chairman Robert Friedland doubled down on comments he made last year about mineralisation adjacent to the firm’s Platreef project in South Africa’s Limpopo province saying it would transform the country’s mining sector.

“We have a project called the Mokopane Feeder, a gravity anomaly that is four miles long and three miles wide. We think it is the source of the Bushveld Complex. It could be the largest mineral discovery of our species,” he said.

Friedland said that “not begun to scratch the surface of its minerals”. He was speaking at the London Indaba, an inaugural conference focusing on African mining.

Ivanhoe said in October that the properties under its control – about eight farms it took eight years to secure – were “… postulated to be geologically significant by our leading geoscientists”.

The Bushveld Complex is host to the largest known reserves of platinum group metals, chromium and vanadium, as well as gold and base metals including nickel and copper. The Platreef project will produce platinum and palladium as well as nickel and gold.

Friedland said there was “little to fear” in South Africa.

“There was a defective monopoly of all the mineral rights during the racist and colonial era and now the country has to reinvent itself,” he said. “I haven’t taken one penny out of South Africa and I’ve worked there for 10 years. We are not a colonial miner stealing the metal and taking it back to Eruope. We are reinventing mining for people who live there and for their benefit.”

“We are very bullish on the South African mining history. Our costs are in rands but the revenue in dollars so when there are bad news about South Africa our costs go down,” said Friedland. “People get everything backwards. The best place to go mining is these African countries that have amazing mineral endowment,” he said.

Ivanhoe expected to spend $490m Platreef project this year and in 2024 of which $390m would be on phase one of the project and $100m on a second phase. Throughput of an estimated 700,000 tons a year is expected in the first quarter of 2024, according to the company.