The present and future role of renewables at Ivanhoe mines - interview with Marna Cloete, President and CFO, Ivanhoe Mines

Ivanhoe Mines is a Canadian company with three projects in Southern Africa. They are focused on powering their mines primarily with electricity generated from clean, renewable energy sources, such as hydropower, solar and wind where applicable. The Kamoa-Kakula and Kipushi projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo are already using hydropower-generated electricity, and they are looking at ways to incorporate solar power to augment grid-supplied power at all operations. In this interview, Ivanhoe President Marna Cloete discusses the role of renewables at Ivanhoe Mines.

EandM: Can you share some details on how you’re assessing options for wind and solar in Southern Africa, South Africa and DRC?

MC: In South Africa, the location of our Platreef palladium, platinum, rhodium, nickel, copper and gold project, there are some very promising examples of mining companies beginning to roll-out solar initiatives to increase the use of renewable energy. For example, Gold Fields recently reported that energy regulators have approved plans to build a 40MW solar plant to replace coal-fired electricity at the South Deep mine west of Johannesburg.

We’re excited about the role Platreef could play in green technologies given its strategic mix of metals and are currently reviewing engineering plans to expedite development at the project. So that gives us a great opportunity to explore the feasibility of renewable technologies in the mine design, and it’s great to see other operators providing examples of technology, like solar, working at the mine level.

EandM: Where are the gaps in the market for energy services and suppliers - what energy challenges are not being fully addressed?

MC: It seems that the largest emerging challenge in terms of renewable energy and green technologies relates mainly to electrical infrastructure and the power grids. We have seen this globally; everywhere from South Africa, to California and Texas in the United States. Many of these grid systems and related infrastructure are becoming quite old by modern standards and are clearly having issues with the transition to new technologies.

There has been an acknowledgement by governments that this energy transition is going to take a significant amount of investment, perhaps more than the world had anticipated, and it seems like a lot of that capital is going to have to be committed to modernization and upgrading electrical grids to better sustain technologies that are, for a lack of a better phrase, “climate friendly”.

The complication in that regard is that we’ll require a significant amount of resources, including a vast supply of metals, to build the infrastructure to green the grid, so we’re going to need a lot of mining to complete that task.

And that puts Ivanhoe Mines in a very strategic position in the DRC because of that access to hydropower. We will mine ultrahigh-grade “green copper” with an industry-leading carbon emission profile.

In addition, due to the nature of our ore bodies at Kamoa- Kakula, we will deliver around half of the tailings material back underground in the form of pasted backfill, which also gives us a small project footprint in comparison to other world-scale copper mines. So, if you take a holistic look at the environmental elements of Kamoa-Kakula, along with top-tier grades, we really don’t think there are many mines that can compete when it comes to producing low-impact copper.