S.Africa battery-grade manganese plant to open in April
South Africa’s Manganese Metal Company (MMC) is set to commission the country’s first battery-grade manganese plant next month.
The plant is expected to start producing high purity manganese sulphate monohydrate (HPMSM) in mid-April.
“It has been successful and most things have fallen into place and we are hugely impressed with the engineering and plant designers, who have been wonderful in the big part of the project, which is the crystallizer,” MMC CEO Louis Nel told McCloskey.
The plant, including the crystallizer, will be able to produce 6,000 t/y of HPMSM with the capacity of scaling to 30,000 t per month.
MMC sources its raw material of manganese tailings and fines domestically from the Kalahari Basin. Nel said the raw material will be first fed into the existing EMM plant to reduce impurities and produce 99.9% pure manganese metal flake, which will be fed into the new HPMSM plant.
Given that energy is a major cost driver for a plant, MMC has secured two hydro energy offtakes that are capable of driving the HPMSM plant.
“At the moment, 7% of our total energy consumption is from renewables and that gives us enough pre-manganese metal to feed the plant, so we’ve got a green manufacturing plant.”
At a time when the HPMSM market in China remains highly saturated due to the increasing demand of NMC batteries for electric vehicles, MMC targets a niche, non-Chinese market for HPMSM, focusing on battery manufacturers outside of Asia with an incentive price of over $2,500/t.
MMC Marketing Executive Madelein Todd said the primary drivers for its customers were to secure a supply chain independent of China.
“There are government policies, such as the Critical Raw Material Act in Europe that says 65% is the upper limit of single country sourcing and 35% must come from another supplier. It enforces diversification of sourcing especially now with the risk of geopolitical uncertainty,” Todd said.
“Our first customers will be in South Korea who are making batteries on behalf of European and American car companies.”
While the initial product will be out of spec, Nel expects to achieve some reproducible production three months after the commissioning of the plant.
“Once steady state and mass production are reached, production will pause to start the product accreditation process, which is conducted by the customer in the battery industry,” he said.
Nel said that this qualification period can take six months or longer, and operating capital will be necessary to fund the plant during this time before sales can begin.
Once quality standards are met, MMC will then send out its product to multiple customers outside of China using both the Durban container and Maputo ports.
—Reporting by Hlengiwe Motaung, hmotaung@opisnet.com; Editing by Randy Fabi, rfabi@opisnet.com