eBusiness Weekly
Kamativi is one of the largest tin mines in Zimbabwe located in Matebeleland North Province. At its peak, it was one of the biggest underground tin mines in Africa, employing 1 350 people. Its woes started around 1991 when 700 workers were retrenched due to falling commodity prices before eventual closure in June 1994.
Since the closure, several investors have come forward with proposals but none of them have materialised.
Kamativi Tin Mine requires around $60 million for recapitalisaion, a figure which analysts now say is low considering the rare earth minerals that are known to be at the mine and surrounding figures. The main attraction at the mine is the presence of lithium deposits and not tin. Lithium is considered the mineral for the future as improved battery technology could mean good things for the mineral.
Dubbed the “new gasoline” for its ability to power EVs and other energy hungry devices, lithium demand is soaring. The rapid rise is raising questions about producers’ ability to keep up with the staggering growth. If there’s going to be a significant shortfall by 2020 as predicted, lithium producers and technology innovators are going to have to step up to the plate.
Zimbabwe is known to have two significant lithium deposits; at Bikita and at Kamativi. Bikita is currently mining although the life of mine is short while at Kamativi the lithium occurs in a massive outcrop, estimated at 3,5 million tonnes behind the area previously mined for tin. The tin is now exhausted and even the small-workers have drifted away.
The lithium ores include:
Spodumene;
Lapidolite.
Lithium also occurs in several salt brines in South America but is contaminated with magnesium which is costly to extract.
The market requires LITHIUM CARBONATE which is used in lithium ion computer batteries – as well as being used in tiny quantities in medicine to treat manic depressives! In the short term Lithium batteries hold enormous potential. Because lithium is light-weight lithium batteries are used exclusively in the Tesla Electric motor car. Google “Tesla Elon Musk.’ All other electric cars (including hybrids) use a lithium ion battery — as do computers Tesla are building a billion dollar factory to manufacture lithium hydride batteries — and having started construction they have announced the start-up of a second similarly sized plant. Within 20 years ALL cars will be electrically-powered and will use a fuel cell, battery, hyper capacitor combination.
Recently the rebuilt large scale collider at CERN in Switzerland was ‘fired up’ and yielded an encouraging output – for a short period of time. This promises to be the long-term solution to mankind’s requirement for sustainable and pollution free energy. The fuel for the fusion reactor will be tritium and deuterium. One gram of this will be equivalent to thousands of tonnes of coal. The tritium is made ‘in situ’ by bombarding a tank of molten lithium with neutrons.
An expert suggested that whoever is permitted to mine the claims should beneficiate the ores to the maximum extent. “This involves reacting lithium ore with sodium carbonate from Zimbabwe. Some serious politics involved here!” The expert also suggested that all the claims should not be allocated now — but be retained for the time being until the technology “matures”. — FinX .
