Message to miners: modernise or fall behind
Jo’burg Indaba emphasises collaboration to haul the country’s mining sector out of its technological slump
South African mining companies and equipment makers have to collaborate to lift the country’s mining sector out of a self-inflicted technology slump and cannot expect the rest of the world to come to its rescue. At last week’s Jo’burg Indaba mining conference, a panel of mining experts spoke of the urgent need to modernise and automate mining in order to bring down costs as well as extend the lives of deep-level South African gold and platinum mines and save jobs. In recent years South African mining research and development has slowly been emerging from the doldrums — when less than R5m was spent annually on exploring new ideas — to a new era when in 2017, R100m of government money has been pumped into this kind of work.It was a long way off the R4bn to R5bn other mining countries spend annually on research and development, said Alastair Macfarlane, a director of mining research at The Mining Precinct, which is a joint industry and government technology research project to modernis...
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