Besides the dust that cloaks pathways, windowsills and gardens, the towering grey heaps of discarded rock are another unwelcome reminder of the platinum mine next door to the South African township of Chaneng.
In and around the city of Rustenburg, the low-grade platinum ore that has made South Africa the world’s top producer of the silvery metal creates massive waste piled in large rocky heaps known as tailings. For every tonne of metal extracted, hundreds of tonnes of waste rock is left behind in huge piles.
The transition to cleaner energy system is expected to push up global demand for platinum group metals (PGM) – which include palladium and other precious metals, as well as platinum. They are used in hydrogen-related technologies such as fuel cells and electrolysers that split water molecules as well as in hybrid cars that need catalytic converters to curb pollution.
To secure supplies, mining companies are starting to make use of what was once considered waste.
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Reprocessing mine tailings using new technology can be a more sustainable form of producing minerals and metals needed for the energy transition because it is expected to reduce the size of existing waste heaps and boost output without the need to open new mines, which can cause more environmental destruction and community displacement.
“Tailings reprocessing offers genuine benefits, reducing pressure for new mining [and] addressing existing environmental liabilities,” said Mathikoza Dube, an expert on critical minerals based in Rustenburg.
“It offers the world a pathway to secure supplies of energy transition minerals while remediating waste that’s contaminated communities for generations,” Dube added, cautioning it is not a “magic solution” and should be approached in a way that ensures local communities benefit.
In Chaneng, where the tailings dumps loom over backyards, residents are wary.
“Same theft in new clothes”
They fear the plan to reprocess mining tailings at the neighbouring mine – operated by South African platinum miner Sibanye-Stillwater – is being dressed up as sustainable when in reality it will mean more contamination, blasting, dust and no end to their community’s problems.
Despite decades of mining, unemployment in the area remains high, many people say they never received compensation for the loss of their agricultural land and most households still lack access to basic sanitation infrastructure.
Water testing carried out by SRK Consulting in 2009 found elevated nitrate levels exceeding World Health Organization guidelines in community boreholes, and health practitioners document dramatic increases in respiratory diseases.
“Now they want to dig up the waste piles and call it progress? Show us the ownership papers. Show us the rehabilitation plan. Otherwise, it’s the same theft in new clothes,” said Johannes Kgomo, a community leader.
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South Africa’s mining legislation requires that 26% of mining assets are held by historically disadvantaged people including Black South Africans, and Chaneng residents are demanding a stake of 15% to 30% in any tailings operation on their land, allowing them to have a say in how the business is run.
They say that should be granted to them as compensation for the health and environmental problems they have endured as a result of the mine.
The community is also demanding comprehensive water testing and treatment, adequately resourced clinics with respiratory specialists, compensation for destroyed agricultural land, infrastructure repair and long-term health monitoring.
“We are not asking for handouts,” said Gideon Chitanga of the National Union of Mineworkers, which often takes the side of local communities in disputes with companies.
“These people have already paid with their health, their water, their land. That contamination, that suffering – that is their investment. Now they want returns and decision-making power,” Chitanga added.
A spokesperson for Sibanye-Stillwater declined to comment.
A mining industry source, who asked not to be identified, said conversations with community members were ongoing.
“Nobody disputes these communities have suffered. The question is how to structure ownership in a way that’s legally sound, financially viable, and genuinely empowering,” the source said.
New technology boosts metal recovery in waste
New reprocessing technology has made it economically viable to extract platinum group metals from tailings, and several operations are already underway in South Africa’s platinum mining belt, around the city of Rustenburg.
Sibanye-Stillwater already operates multiple retreatment facilities, processing thousands of tonnes of waste ore monthly.
Another South African miner Tharisa processes chromite from PGM tailings commercially. Chromite is used to obtain chromium, a metal used in the manufacture of wind turbines and some energy storage batteries.
“Historical tailings facilities contain economically viable concentrations that were unrecoverable with older technology,” said Leo Vonopartis from the University of the Witwatersrand’s BUGEMET research programme, which studies the geology of South Africa’s Bushveld Complex mining belt.
Tailings in the area around Rustenburg can contain up to 2.5 grammes per tonne of combined platinum, palladium and rhodium – along with chromite. Vanadium, cobalt and rare earth elements have also been found.
At current prices, which have rallied this year, it is worth extracting the rare metals, despite the challenges.
Breaking with the cycle of extraction and injustice
“The technology exists. The economics work. The question is whether we can structure these projects to genuinely benefit the people who have paid mining’s costs,” a spokesperson for one mining company said, asking not to be named.
Without that, local expert Dube said, the reprocessing of tailings is scarcely better than other forms of mining.
“Reprocessing tailings does not erase the damage that created them. If it is structured as extraction by another name – where companies profit and communities remain marginalised – we have just found a new way to perpetuate old injustices.”
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Gesturing toward the tailings dam visible from her yard, Noxolo Mthembu recalls the days when her vegetable patch used to feed the family.
“We used to grow spinach, tomatoes, pumpkins,” she told Climate Home News. “Now nothing grows. The dust kills everything. My children have asthma. My husband died of lung disease at 54.”
Like many of her neighbours, she says any new cycle of mining activity – this time in the name of the clean energy transition – must not repeat the past.
“Show me the ownership papers with our names. Show me the water treatment plant. Show me the clinic with enough staff. Then I will believe this time is different.”
The post South Africa’s platinum mine dumps get a second look as clean energy lifts demand appeared first on Climate Home News.
South Africa’s platinum mine dumps get a second look as clean energy lifts demand
Transitioning to sustainable practices could boost resilience to compounding geopolitical and climate threats, experts say.
The worldwide fallout from the U.S. war in Iran isn’t limited to gas prices.
Ocean and coastal creatures are being put at risk by the spills, noise, dredging and shipping associated with new offshore oil and gas infrastructure, says a new report by a group of environmental NGOs.
The report by a group of twelve environmental groups analysed planned new offshore oil and gas blocks covering 430,000 square kilometres – an area the size of Sweden – in 11 countries.
Blocks in countries such as Kenya, Indonesia and Australia overlap with some of the planet’s hotspots for marine biodiversity, home to mangroves, coral reefs, sea turtles, sharks and whales.
Oil and gas expansion is advancing in spite of the legal protections already in place, the report says, with a third of the area being licensed overlapping with marine and coastal protected areas.
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“It is alarming to see the research findings and the sheer scale of fossil fuel expansion trajectories threatening the health and future of our shared ocean,” said Tyson Miller, Executive Director of Earth Insight, one of the environmental NGOs involved in the report.
At the first conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, around 60 countries floated the idea of creating “fossil-fuel-free zones”, which would seek to place limits on coal, oil and gas in areas where development would lead to severe social and environmental harm.
As part of the landmark Kunming-Montreal biodiversity deal, governments have also pledged to protect 30% of the planet’s land and marine ecosystems by 2030. This could be used as an opportunity to limit oil and gas expansion in sensitive areas, Miller said.
The report says the findings “reinforce the need for governments, financial institutions and companies to stop funding and supporting offshore oil and gas expansion”, and calls for the creation of fossil-fuel-free zones in “high-value marine and coastal areas”.
Oil bidding in biodiversity hotspots
As one of the case studies, Kenya — which is set to host the Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa later this month — has opened 50 offshore oil and gas blocks for bidding in the Lamu Basin, one of East Africa’s marine biodiversity hotspots.
These blocks overlap with all the region’s mangroves and coral reefs, the report says, which provide nursery habitats for fish, sea turtles and the vulnerable dugong.
These ecosystems are already under severe stress from climate change-related ocean heating and increased water acidity and could now face seismic surveys, offshore drilling, dredging, increased shipping traffic, oil spills, chemical discharge and underwater noise pollution.
The government estimates that oil production will start by 2026, aligning with “global best practices”, and has said the Lamu basin has vast “untapped potential”. The country is expected to open bidding for the first 10 blocks by September.
Muturi wa Kamau, network coordinator for the Kenya Oil and Gas Working Group, said in a statement that the country “is preparing to open ecologically sensitive areas for fossil fuel exploration” while positioning itself as a leader in ocean diplomacy.
“The question is: at what cost are we willing to risk these fragile ecosystems and the livelihoods of coastal communities who have depended on them for generations?” Kamau said.
Australia’s Otway Basin
After a four-year pause, Australia — which will act as co-presidency of the COP31 climate summit — resumed offshore exploration in the Otway basin last year, with American energy firm ConocoPhillips among the operators approved for exploratory drilling off the country’s southern coast.
The sites under exploration are as close as one kilometre from a series of marine reserves known as sanctuaries for pygmy blue whales, who travel thousands of kilometres to reproduce in those waters. Orange roughy, a deep-sea fish that can live for over 140 years, may also be harmed.
In total, the report analysed new LNG export projects in Argentina, Alaska, Mexico and Tanzania, as well as expanded offshore oil and gas licensing in Australia, Cameroon, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kenya, Norway, and Trinidad and Tobago.
The post Planned offshore oil and gas expansion threatens key marine ecosystems, report appeared first on Climate Home News.
Planned offshore oil and gas expansion threatens key marine ecosystems, report
As competition for minerals needed to produce clean energy technologies intensifies, a growing number of countries have resorted to an age-old mechanism to cope with the threat of scarcity: stockpiling.
The world’s biggest economies are racing to shore up reserves of cobalt, lithium, graphite and rare earths, which are needed to produce batteries, electric vehicles, wind turbines and electric systems to wean the global economy off fossil fuels. The same minerals are also increasingly sought after to manufacture military hardware and chips for AI, adding further pressure on supplies.
But the cutthroat scramble to build up reserves threatens to drive up the costs of the energy transition by intensifying competition and pushing up prices of key materials needed to produce clean energy technologies, research published today has found.
“If you undermine the financial viability of [clean energy] projects through higher raw material costs, you’re going to delay their roll-out,” co-author Hugh Miller, the critical minerals lead at the Centre for Economic Transition Expertise at the London School of Economics and Political Science, told Climate Home News.
Stockpiling “is happening, whether we like it or not”, said Miller. “But if we’re going to do it, we need to have it in a coordinated manner that means we don’t have massive market volatility and adverse implications from every country trying to go at it alone,” he added.
The rise of stockpiles
A growing number of governments have adopted national stockpiling programmes in response to heightened geopolitical tensions around mineral supply chains.
Earlier this year, US President Donald Trump announced the establishment of a critical mineral reserve known as “Project Vault” to protect American businesses from shortages after China imposed export restrictions on rare earth supplies.
Beijing suspended the measures until November as part of a trade truce with Washington but the episode spooked Western governments and exposed how strategic materials can be weaponised to achieve geopolitical objectives.
Australia, China, the EU and India have also announced measures to create strategic mineral reserves. Japan and South Korea already have long-standing mineral stockpiling programmes.
“Legitimate concerns”
“There are legitimate concerns with regards to potential global shortages of these minerals,” said Miller, citing rapidly rising and concurrent mineral demand for the energy transition, AI, data centres, and military technologies, combined with underinvestment in new supplies for some minerals, such as copper.
While stockpiling can serve as an emergency response mechanism during acute shortages, it does nothing to address the underlying concentration risks in mineral supply chains. The Democratic Republic of Congo holds around 70% of the world’s cobalt reserves, for example, while China dominates the processing of 19 out of 20 minerals deemed critical by a large number of nations.
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Uncoordinated stockpiling programmes risk heightening the price volatility they are designed to hedge against, according to the report.
Researchers found that if Australia, China, the EU, India, Japan, South Korea and the US simultaneously built reserves of minerals to cover six months of imports, the aggregate stockpile demand could represent up to 34% of global annual cobalt supply and over 10% of global lithium, graphite and copper supply. That could cause a shock to the market, triggering the shortages and price spikes they are trying to avoid.
Miller said it was unlikely that every country would stockpile at that rate, but aggregate stockpiling demand of just 5% of global mineral supply would have an impact on prices.
Coordinating stockpiles: a role for the IEA?
Researchers found that avoiding the negative impacts of stockpiling requires global coordination over how mineral stocks are accumulated and released – a mechanism which already exists for other commodities, including oil.
Coordination should include agreed rules for countries to build up their stocks over a slow and staggered timeline and pre-agreed conditions for releasing reserves to provide market predictability and reduce the risk of price spikes.
The International Energy Agency (IEA), which was established after the 1970s oil crisis to coordinate emergency oil stock releases among member countries, is best placed to oversee such a mechanism, they say.
Earlier this year, IEA member countries called on the agency to strengthen its work on critical minerals, including by providing support to countries “that choose to establish and expand critical minerals stockpiling systems”.
But Miller and his co-author Pau Morandi, a policy fellow at the Centre for Economic Transition Expertise, argue that members should go one step further and mandate the IEA to coordinate the security of supplies, rather than only helping individual governments.
The IEA has been contacted for comment.
A call to action for the G7
Miller said he hoped the research could be picked up by the G7 group of wealthy countries, which could lead on mandating the IEA to take on this coordination role.
France, which is presiding over the group this year and is hosting leaders in Evian on the shores of Lake Geneva in mid-June, has made strengthening the resilience of critical minerals value chains a priority.
In a communique last month, finance ministers agreed to “deepen and expand our cooperation among G7 members and with like-minded partners” to strengthen and diversify critical mineral supply chains and to continue discussions “on how to best organise analytical cooperation”.
Sebastien Treyer, executive director of the Paris-based Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI), said he hoped the G7 leaders’ summit can help move the discussion on critical minerals towards greater international cooperation to secure the resources the world needs to build a clean economy.
From inclusive and mutually beneficial partnerships to mine resources to stockpiling minerals, “we need to coordinate more like a trade organisation than something that is about securing supply,” he said.
The post The scramble to stockpile critical minerals could drive up energy transition costs appeared first on Climate Home News.
The scramble to stockpile critical minerals could drive up energy transition costs
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