Mpumalanga Business 2017-18 edition

OVERVIEW
the Burnstone gold mine near
Balfour.
After the Canadian-listed
company Great Basin Gold
went into liquidation in 2012,
Wits Gold acquired the mine
and Sibanye has purchased
Wits Gold. Sibanye is reviving the
mine and reports that Burnstone
has a maiden gold reserve of
1.8-million ounces.
Stonewall Resources runs
the TGME Project, near the
towns of Pilgrims Rest and Sabie.
Operations began in 2011, expanding
from an existing tailing
operation. The area is historically
one of the oldest gold-mining
areas in the country. Stonewall
has ambitious targets of going
beyond production of 40 000
ounces from this and other
historic mines in the area.
There is renewed interest in
the Barberton Greenstone Belt.
Having listed on the Australian
stock exchange, Vantage
Goldfields owns the Lily mine
which was in the news spotlight
in 2016 when three workers were
trapped underground in a container
after a rock slide. Vantage
purchased Barbrook because
it has a processing plant. This
plant has been renamed Central
Metallurgical Complex.
Galaxy and Gold Hill mine
currently produce 20 000 ounces
of gold per year. The Galaxy
company is using new technology
to get the ore body out of
the sulphide minerals in which
it is embedded.
Having taken full control
of its Barberton mines, Pan
African improved its BEE position
(Shanduka Gold is a 23.8%
shareholder) and set about increasing its annual gold output to
100 000 ounces. The company announced in 2010 that new finds
at Royal Sheba will extend the life of Barberton Mines by another
15 years.
Pan African Resources is building a trailing retreatment plant at
Evander which will be completed in 2018.
Cement
Sephaku Cement produces 1.4-million tons of cement at its grinding
plant in Delmas. There is undercover storage available for 15 000
tons of bagged cement at the facility.
Clinker for the Delmas plant comes from Aganang in the North
West Province and fly-ash is sourced from the Sephaku classification
plant at the Kendal power station, located about 35km to the east
of Delmas. Fly-ash is an extender in the final cement product and
Sephaku makes about 1.3-million tons of it.
This development is partly a response to increased activity in
the power sector (Eskom’s build programme) but the company
is also very upbeat about the country’s housing sector and the
national government’s infrastructure programme. The company
was responsible for a 1.2-million- ton fly-ash-beneficiation plant at
the Kendal power plant.
Platinum group metals
Northam Platinum, which has assets on both limbs of the Bushveld
Igneous Complex, has purchased the Everest mine from Aquarius
Platinum. Everest is adjacent to Northam’s existing Booysendal
mine (35km west of Mashishing, formerly Lydenburg). By the end
of 2016, and with this new asset, Northam expects to be producing
460 000 ounces of platinum group metals (PGM). A concentrator
and a chrome extraction plant were included in the sale price of
R450-million.
The plantinum concentrator at Northam’s Booysendal plant was
the site of a technology first in 2014/15, with the first use of a type of
flotation control introduced by Mintek, the organisation that does
research and development for the mining industry. The technology
is software-based and is called FloatStar Grade Recovery Optimiser
(FSGRO). The grade measurements which make the process possible
were obtained from another South African product, the BlueCube
MQi slurry analyser.
Jubilee Platinum sold its Smelting and Refining business in
Middelburg to Siyanda Resources for R110.5-million in 2015. Jubilee
wants to concentrate on being a miner, and is confident that its
37 MPUMALANGA BUSINESS 2017/18