South African miners face a conundrum: increasing palladium and rhodium output to take advantage of soaring prices risks depressing the already fragile market for sister metal platinum.
That is because palladium and rhodium are mined as byproducts, with every extra ounce of the former typically coming with two to three additional ounces of platinum.
Stricter emissions standards have boosted palladium and rhodium consumption in autocatalysts for gasoline vehicles. By contrast, the backlash against diesel vehicles, where most platinum is used, has seen the metal languish.
Consequently, some of the world’s biggest platinum miners, including Sibanye Gold Ltd and Impala Platinum Holdings Ltd, are loathe to boost production, even as palladium’s eight-year supply deficit could widen next year.
“They can’t increase production because the main metal is platinum and they don’t want to make the price come down,” said Rene Hochreiter, an analyst at Noah Capital Markets Ltd in Johannesburg.
Platinum has rallied 15 percent this year from a decade low, but demand is forecast to drop next year, pushing the market back into a surplus. Palladium has jumped 41 percent this year, while rhodium has surged 144 percent.
“Expanding production to try and benefit from higher rhodium and palladium prices can be quite risky,” said James Wellsted, a Johannesburg-based spokesman for Sibanye. “Most companies seem reluctant to raise production in South Africa due to the possible impact it will have on the platinum price.”
The rally in palladium and rhodium is extending the life of older shafts along Rustenburg’s platinum belt, but producers are not rushing to invest in new mines, Implats spokesman Johan Theron said.
Boosting production would make the platinum market “even more supplied,” he said.
Given the geological and market restraints, Implats expects output from South Africa’s mines to start declining over the next five years.
New projects in South Africa would take years to develop, while those in neighboring Zimbabwe might be stymied by political and economic uncertainty, he said.
Anglo American Platinum Ltd, the most profitable of South Africa’s producers, is expected to make a final decision on whether to expand its Mogalakwena mine at the end of next eyar, Anglo spokeswoman Jana Marais said.
Unusually, the company’s flagship mine produces more palladium than platinum, but Amplats must weigh the prospects for power supply from South Africa’s troubled state-owned utility before moving forward, she said.
MMC Norilsk Nickel PJSC is one company planning to boost supplies. The world’s top palladium producer said its platinum-group metals output could almost double by 2030.
Still, there is not enough metal in the near term to close the current supply gap, Sibanye chief executive officer Neal Froneman said last month.
Other commodities:
‧Spot gold edged up 0.2 percent to US$1,467.26 per ounce, but lost 0.08 percent for the week.
‧Iron ore climbed 1.8 percent to US$86.57 per tonne, gaining 3.99 percent for the week.
Vaccine skeptics blocking transfusions for life-saving surgeries, Facebook groups inciting violence against doctors and a global search for unvaccinated donors — COVID-19 misinformation has bred a so-called “pure blood” movement. The movement spins anti-vaccine narratives focused on unfounded claims that receiving blood from people inoculated against COVID-19 “contaminates” the body. Some have advocated for blood banks that draw from “pure” unvaccinated people, while medics in North America say they have fielded requests from people demanding transfusions from donors who have not received a vaccine. In closed social media groups, vaccine skeptics — who brand themselves as “pure bloods” — promote violence against doctors
Asteroid mining start-up AstroForge Inc is planning to launch its first two missions to space this year as it seeks to extract and refine metals from deep space. The first launch, scheduled for April, is to test AstroForge’s technique for refining platinum from a sample of asteroid-like material. The second, planned for October, would scout for an asteroid near Earth to mine. The missions are part of AstroForge’s goal of refining platinum-group metals from asteroids, with the aim of bringing down the cost of mining these metals. It also hopes to reduce the massive amount of carbon emissions that stem from mining
‘IT HURTS TOO MUCH’: After talks between Blizzard and NetEase over their contract broke down, servers hosting Blizzard’s games in China were shut down Millions of Chinese gamers have lost access to World of Warcraft after a furious dispute between US title owner Activision Blizzard Inc and NetEase Inc (網易), its longtime local partner in the world’s biggest gaming market. Devotees of the popular game took to social media networks to bemoan the loss, with one posting an image of a failed connection message accompanied by crying emojis. “It really hurts my heart,” one wrote. “It hurts, it hurts too much,” another said. Massively popular worldwide, particularly in the 2000s, World of Warcraft — often abbreviated as WoW — is an online multiplayer role-playing game set in
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) on Tuesday accused Alphabet Inc’s Google of abusing its dominance in digital advertising, threatening to dismantle a key business at the heart of one of Silicon Valley’s most successful Internet firms. The US government said Google should be forced to sell its ad manager suite, tackling a business that generated about 12 percent of Google’s revenues in 2021, but also plays a vital role in the search engine and cloud company’s overall sales. “Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies,” the
RSS