Water on the Way for Rustenburg Platinum Mining and Processing Boom

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). Scheduled for completion in the first quarter of 2003, Anglo Platinum's (Angloplat) $130 million platinum group metals (PGM) smelter at Polokwane in South Africa's Limpopo province is designed to smelt upper group (UG2) ore. The smelter will be the largest of its kind in the country. A six-in-line 68 MW electric furnace, with a smelting capacity of 650,000 tons per year, will produce a furnace matte which will be shipped to the Angloplat converter project near Rustenburg. Hatch (Johannesburg, South Africa and Mississauga, Ontario) was responsible for furnace design and Drytech (Cookstown, New Jersey) for the flash dryers.

Project engineers Hatch drew specialist process and furnace design capabilities from its North American offices when working on the recently commissioned Waterval $140 million converter project. The plant will improve sulfur fixation levels of converter gas from the present 55% to more than 95%. This will lower the total sulfur dioxide emissions to well within the 20 ton per day limit required by the department of environmental affairs and tourism. Angloplat has also committed to reducing the frequency of hourly sulfur dioxide ground level exceedances to less than two a year. An exceedance occurs when the hourly average is more than 300 parts per billion.

The project has involved replacing the Peirce Smith converter technology with Australian Ausmelt (Dandenong, Victoria, Australia) technology with the objective of achieving first world emission and environmental standards. The Ausmelt converter is a totally contained vessel which makes it possible to contain all the gases generated in the converting process. The offgas from the Ausmelt converter is then fed to a new acid plant that is able to treat both the high-strength Ausmelt converter gas and the low-strength gas from the existing electric furnaces, which was formerly vented to stack. The acid plant technology converts sulfur dioxide into commercially viable sulfuric acid.

The new converter is fed with granulated electric furnace matte whereas the Peirce Smith converters take hot charges matte. The project also includes brownfields electric furnace matte granulation facilities. After slow cooling, the solidified converter matte is crushed and sent to Angloplat's base metals refinery to separate nickel, cobalt, copper, and PMG metals.

With the platinum mining and processing boom in full swing (there are a number of new projects in the Rustenburg area similar in scale to those above), the Rand Water utility is at the engineering and environmental impact stage along the route of a $40 million water pipeline. The pipeline will stretch 80 kilometers from the Vaal river system in Gauteng province to deliver water to platinum mines, processing plants, and local municipalities and settlements in the Rustenburg area. The main contracts for the four-year pipeline project will be for 1,000mm to 1,400mm diameter steel pipelines, valves and meters, and a reinforced concrete reservoir near Rustenburg.