Monday, 02 November 2020
AmaranthCX, the mining supply sales consultancy, has launched its most comprehensive coal minerals map yet, timed to coincide with this week's Junior Indaba
This is the information that the incumbent organised industry and the SA government Department of Mineral Resource and Energy (DMRE) would far prefer you didn't know and couldn't see.
The organised industry has made a commitment to transparent engagement with the society at large - however, goes on to make the commitment entirely meaningless by not extending it to actually publishing their full registers of Prospecting Rights, Mining Rights and Mining Permits.
Since March 2020 Mining Rights holders have been required to publish their Social & Labour Plans online - which would include the location of Mining Rights. Most Mining Rights holders outside some in the organised industry don't even have their own websites.
The DMRE goes to extensive lengths to hold meaningful detail on Mining Rights, Prospecting Rights and Mining Permits effectively secret. This could well serve to enable corruption and cover up genuine errors, incompetence and regulatory failure.
AmaranthCX has researched, via practically every public means possible (for example public environmental documents, SA Heritage Resources Agency paleontological and archeological reports, satellite photographs, social media crowd-sourcing, and out-of-date public company disclosures) the land boundaries of 271 individual coal mining and project areas across Mpumalanga, Limpopo, KZN, Gauteng and the Free State.
This has been published as an interactive electronic map for use in freely available Google Maps and Google Earth applications - by non-expert users. AmaranthCX will provide it free of charge to a limited number of civil society organisations directly active in the industry. Mining industry players can purchase the maps on the AmaranthCX website.
"This has been a mammoth "lockdown" effort, with hundreds of hours spent researching and digging out details - I would like to thank all those industry insiders who assisted via our social media appeals for information. The fact is, in any world class regulatory environment, this information would be freely and easily accessible from government sources. It should have been completely unnecessary for us to do all this work."
Contact: Paul Miller +27 83 442 7470
Editors: Paul Miller will be available during Junior Indaba to "virtually" demonstrate the map and for interviews.