JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Pallinghurst mining company Jupiter Mines on Monday announced that it would make a further $25-million distribution to its shareholders in September.

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange-listed Pallinghurst, which is an 18.43% shareholder in Jupiter, expects to receive a further distribution of $25-million in September 2017.
 
Jupiter is a 49.9% shareholder of Pallinghurst-group manganese mining company, Tshipi é Ntle.

Positioning Tshipi Borwa in the lowest cost quartile, at a time of rising manganese prices resulted in Tshipi making its maiden R1-billion distribution in March.

With the manganese price remaining strong over the past few months, Tshipi has agreed to distribute a further R500-million to its shareholders in September, which will result in a total shareholder return of R1.5-billion this year.
 
Of the $55-million Jupiter distributed in March, Pallinghurst received $10-million and in total Pallinghurst now stands to receive $15-million from its Jupiter investment.

Pallinghurst last month outlined plans to swop its investment fund status for a diversified miner’s status and to unlock value through full absorption of coloured gemstone Gemfields and to target a possible listing of the enlarged but greatly simplified Pallinghurst on the main board of the London Stock Exchange, without any change to its primary JSE listing.

“We’re converting Pallinghurst into a diversified, ever-green company and we’re taking the assets of Gemfields in-house,” Pallinghurst CEO Arne Frandsen explained to Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly Online at the time.

The company has also announced a revolutionary new cost-slashing method of processing platinum-group metals (PGMs).

The new Kell concentrate-to-refined metals plant to be built at Pallinghurst’s Sedibelo platinum mine in North West province will run in parallel with the building of up to five Kell plants in Zimbabwe, where it has been agreed that over time all the platinum concentrate produced in Zimbabwe will be Kell processed.

This follows a 2012 commitment to the development of Kell by Frandsen, Pallinghurst chairperson Brian Gilbertson, Kell developer Keith Liddell, IDC CEO Geoffrey Qhena and IDC mining executive Abel Malinga.

Now, five years later, Kell is making it possible for local beneficiation to take place super competitively, not only in South Africa, but also in neighbouring Zimbabwe, the world’s second major platinum destination.

Kell also opens the way for lowest-cost local manufacture of PGM-using autocatalytic converters and platinum-using fuel cells, if not in South Africa then in Zimbabwe.

Kell reduces mining-to-refining time to a week instead of a month plus, uses less than a fifth of the electricity needed for smelting, replaces a smelting plant that costs $1-billion with a modular hydrometallurgical plant that costs $100-million, widens mining scope by throwing chrome-ore content caution to the wind, adds tens of millions of dollars to the revenue stream by recovering the cobalt metal that smelting obliterates and eliminates all pungent and toxic sulphur dioxide emissions that smelting causes.

“It’s green, it’s right and it’s here in South Africa,” Frandsen enthused to Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly Online in an interview.