South Africa’s Trade and Industry Minister Alec Erwin has ruled out any additional smelters at Richards Bay, however, he says there are “four or five” major industrial projects in the pipeline involving ferro-alloys, mineral processing, agro-processing as well as aluminium linked projects.
Erwin was speaking at a roof wetting function at BHP Billiton’s (BIL) Hillside smelter on Monday.
“The key to the industrial development zone is environmental management. We want to avoid the environment in the area being overloaded. No more major smelters will be possible at Richards Bay,” Erwin said.
“It is premature to make any announcements. One of the things that has to be done is that the highway between Empangeni and Richards Bay needs to be strengthened. We need to build a new bridge over the swamp area. Infrastructure is critical and we are speaking to the national roads agency,” he added.
A key factor that the government was looking to improve was logistics, especially South Africa’s rail systems and the ports, which are currently stretched.
As part of getting the ports working more efficiently, Erwin said the South African government was looking at a concession partner.
“The rail infrastructure currently has some bottlenecks,” he added.
Erwin also said that the key economic advantages South Africa has in the global economy are its cheap energy supply and good raw materials in the form of minerals and metals.
He said South Africa was currently fast tracking its energy needs and was in negotiations with Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique. ‒ I-Net-Bridge