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Business Reporter
Zimplats will start refurbishing its base metals refinery at a cost of $100 million in July after completing a preliminary plant assessment.
Addressing delegates during a tour of Zimplats’ operations on Friday last week, chief operating officer Mr Stanley Segula said refurbishment would be completed in two years.
“Zimplats made a decision to go ahead and establish a refinery. Phase one will be the refurbishment of the existing base metals refinery,” Mr Segula told delegates on tour.

He said a team of experts was in the country to assess what needs to be done. Segula said the refinery would process more than 7 000 tonnes of platinum matte being produced from the existing smelter to produce the base metals.

Chamber of Mines president Mr Alex Mhembere told the mines body annual general meeting and conference in Victoria Falls last week that platinum producers had pooled $100 million to set up beneficiation facilities in the country.

This comes as Government upped the tempo for beneficiation of minerals to ensure that the country derives maximum benefits from the exploitation of its natural resources.

Beneficiation and value addition is one of the four main clusters under the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation, Government’s foremost medium term economic blueprint covering the period 2014 to 2018.

While the investment forms the bedrock of the beneficiation and value addition agenda of the country, more than $3 billion would be required to complete a fully fledged strategic and critical precious metals refinery for Zimbabwe.

A base metal refinery may process platinum up to 60 percent of PGMs, which will be further processed by a precious metal refinery.
Zimplats’ BMR is located in Selous, about 80km west of Harare. It separates minerals such as nickel, chrome and copper from platinum group metals, but outdated technology made the facility prohibitively expensive to operate.

Zimplats currently sends platinum concentrate to South Africa for processing, a development economic experts argue has prejudiced the country of potential revenue and jobs.

The country exports raw platinum despite the fact that it has the second biggest platinum reserves after South Africa, which processes the precious metal produced in Zimbabwe.

Currently, Zimbabwe has three producing platinum mines namely Implats’ subsidiary Zimplats, Aquarius and Implats’ 50-50 joint venture Mimosa and Anglo-American’s Unki Mines.

The Zimplats COO said the base metals refinery would, however, only take material from Zimplats. Phase two of the project would involve upgrading of the refinery to process ore from Zimplats and other local platinum producers.

Zimplats is currently producing 240 000 tonnes of ore and shipping 7 000t of matte to South Africa for refining annually. The cost for the second phase has not been finalised.

According to the Chamber of Mines the country, which currently produces about 430 000t of platinum annually would need to ramp up production to above 500 000t to ensure that a precious metals refinery in the country runs viably.