The exploration strategy, made public on April 12 by the Department of Minerals and Energy, aims to take advantage of South Africa’s comparatively advanced infrastructure and mining expertise. It also plans to shrug off the country’s historical dependence on gold to focus instead on metals used in electric vehicles, battery storage and the production of hydrogen.
South Africa, home to the world’s biggest deposits of a number of minerals, has set an annual target of attracting US$900 million ($1.2 billion) of mining exploration expenditure annually by 2025. The target, equivalent to 5% of the annual spend on exploration globally, is expected to kick start a mining industry that, while among the world’s biggest, has stagnated in recent years.
