Gqeberha engineer Heinrich Gerber builds a salt harvesting machine

Heinrich Gerber is a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy. Now he’s built a machine that can mine that earth for its salt.

The home-grown engineer has led a team in creating a home-grown “monster” in his home town of Nelson Mandela Bay. Gerber, 31, grew up in nearby Despatch, attended a local technical high school, then went to Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University to study mechatronics, a subject that combines electrical and mechanical engineering.

He and his team have created a big yellow machine that resembles Bumblebee in the Transformers movie franchise. It will soon be released on the salt pans of Botswana where it could help extract lithium, an element in high demand and which is found in high concentrations of salt. The price of lithium has surged recently as it is used in battery-powered electric cars. So Gerber’s machine can deliver more than just salt on the table.

The 45t salt harvester took Gerber and his team more than a year to build, working 12 hours a day. Recently he was able to give his creation a quick spin before it was disassembled for the trip to Botswana. It will be transported in three or four different components and will take four to five days by road, assuming all goes smoothly at the border controls, says Gerber.

He led a team of about 100 people from ROVD Engineering in Gqeberha to design and build the salt harvester, which is worth about R18.5m. The machine, which can harvest 600t of unprocessed salt in an hour, is the first of its kind to be built in Africa and has also attracted interest from Europe. The company is the only plant in Africa to build such harvesters. The machine is powered by diesel engines that can cope with high altitude and the high temperatures typical of salt pans.

ROVD’s business development manager, Athi Lupondwana, says the company is expecting a boom as the world shifts to green energy. “This will create an even bigger demand for lithium.” He says there is interest from Europe for the base of the salt harvester to be converted into exploration drilling rigs.

Gerber took a conventional salt harvester into the 21st century, with a swivel cab that allows the driver-operator to keep an eye on the elevator putting salt into the trucks. Lupondwana says remote technology involved with the harvester can “foresee any problems before they even occur, to save the client time and money”.

Work began on the new harvester in September 2021 and Gerber was given the project because of his engineering background. It is the company’s 23rd salt harvester, designed to Botswana Soda Ash’s specifications and is an updated version.

Gerber was disappointed that he “couldn’t really give it a go” in the limited space of the firm’s assembly hall, but has set his sights on putting the monster back together in Botswana. “The salt pans are flat as far as the eye can see with beautiful pods of flamingos in the distance. I keep imagining how cool it will be to be the one commissioning ‘my baby’.”

The harvester is not Gerber’s only “baby”. He has worked at ROVD for eight years and been involved in projects from mechanical design to electrical design, to software development and project management. Among the projects that stand out are a double-dump press that compresses wool into units for easy shipping, a new facility to control the flow of raw paper into a money-printing machine, and a lot of work for BMW, Daimler, Toyota, Nissan and VW.

ROVD group CEO Garth de Villiers says the harvester project was a complex combination of electrical, hydraulic and mechanical engineering. Soon it will be put into action to “pass the salt”.