Titanium for Aircraft?
Transkei titanium offers potential jobs - at a cost
October 19, 2007
By Donwald Pressly
Cape Town - The titanium mining industry is poised for a major boost as the government promises to encourage local beneficiation to supply global aircraft companies with components.
The downside is that the environmentally sensitive Transkei coastline, rich in the mineral, would be disrupted.
MRC Resources, a local subsidiary of the Australian firm Minerals Commodities, is awaiting a mining rights licence from the department of minerals and energy to unlock a multibillion-rand business.
The inaccessible Transkei coast is reported to be rich in the mineral, which looks like oil streaks in the sea sand along the lush and largely unspoilt coastline.
Science and technology director-general Phil Mjwara said South Africa was looking closely at Boeing's use of titanium products, which were light but as strong as steel products.
Mjwara said Boeing's 787 aircraft had about 20 percent titanium products and the economics cluster departments - including trade and industry, minerals and energy and his department - were keen to promote the metal and its local beneficiation.
He said: "We have the raw material on the east coast," a clear reference to Xolobeni in the Transkei.
He said his department was also talking with Mintek and the CSIR about the beneficiation process.
Tshediso Matona, the director-general of the department of trade and industry, referred to the need for a smelter close to a port so that the products could be easily exported.
John Barnes, MRC Resources' general manager of a greenfields project near Vredendal in the Western Cape and the proposed project at Xolobeni, said plans were still in place to build a smelter in East London, but this depended on his company gaining the mining licence.
Barnes said titanium products at present were largely directed at providing titanium dioxide for the paint industry.
Richards Bay Minerals, which is co-owned by Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, had a mine in northern Kwazulu-Natal and had been mining for 30 years, he said.
Anglo American was involved in an operation in Vredendal. Another Australian Company, Ticor, which has a joint venture agreement with Kumba Resources, was involved in mining at Empangeni. These operations largely produced an ore with low titanium concentration known as ilmenite .
It was reported in April this year that Minerals Commodities, which is listed on the Australian stock exchange, had applied to the South African government for the rights to mine titanium deposits worth R11 billion on the Pondoland coast. The firm said at the time that the project would create 300 direct jobs and would fast-track infrastructure roll-out in the deeply rural area.
Environmentalists, however, warned that mining would destroy the region's ecotourism potential while bringing few long-term benefits