Lessons from the past
Before being
placed on care
and maintenance,
Burnstone produced
of gold.
about 38 000 ounces
Drilling at the beleaguered Burnstone Mine in 2012.
However, when we visited the mine about
a year later, at the start of 2012, the group
was noticeably smaller, and it was clear that
the mining team had run into some trouble.
The visit was organised by GBG as a damage
control exercise, and after speaking to the
management team, we knew that the writing
was on the wall. The cost of development was
just too exorbitant. The mine was spending
too much money just to get onto the reef
and to get the equipment underground.
Furthermore, there were numerous structural
faults that the mine planners never foresaw,
and water ingress that wasn’t planned for.
Basically, the ore body didn’t lend itself to
the mining method being employed, and the
underground mining team had to overcome
too many geological challenges.
Nonetheless, the deposit (Kimberley reef )
was a good one with huge potential. In 2013,
there were a number of interested parties
of the opinion that they could turn the
fortunes of the mine around. The most vocal
was Philip Kotze, then CEO of the JSE-
listed Witwatersrand Consolidated Gold
Resources (Wits Gold), who didn’t mince
his words, and opined that the mine lends
itself to conventional mining methods, rather
than mechanised methods. Wits Gold put
in a bid to acquire the mine, but in the end,
Sibanye Gold (today Sibanye-Stillwater),
on an acquisition spree under CEO Neal
Froneman, bought the Burnstone assets in
July 2014, after the mine had been in care
and maintenance for close to two years.
Sibanye’s assets included two shaft
complexes — the surface portal and
mechanised vehicle access decline, and the
vertical shaft (shaft bottom at 495m below
surface) — as well as a 125 000 tonnes
per month (tpm) gold processing plant,
the tailings storage facility and surface
infrastructure to support a producing
operation, albeit with areas still to be
constructed.
Before being placed on care and
maintenance, Burnstone produced about
38 000 ounces (oz) of gold. The feasibility
study for Sibanye-Stillwater’s Burnstone
www.miningmirror.co.za
project was approved by the board for project
execution in November 2015.
According to the company’s website, the
project is planned with a six-year build-up
to steady-state production by 2022, then
averaging 125 000oz annually for seven years
until the end of 2028. Thereafter, a seven-
year period of decreasing but profitable
production supports an initial 20-year
life-of-mine (LoM) plan, yielding some 1.9
million ounces (Moz) of gold production
from the feasibility resource of 5.7Moz.
This initial LoM plan was limited to
about 60% of the total Burnstone resource
of 8.9Moz as the mine design and schedule
in the feasibility study was limited to
mineable reserves within a 3km radius of
the shaft infrastructure. During steady-state
production, the potential of the 3.2Moz
resource excluded from the initial LoM plan
will be evaluated.
Burnstone re-evaluated and declared
1.934Moz of mineral reserves and 9.015Moz
of mineral resources as at 31 December 2017.
The company said in a statement in 2017
that the following advances were made at
Burnstone at a cost of R395-million:
• Delivered 5073m of access development;
• Shaft Tip 3 construction was completed;
• Conventional raise development crews
were initiated.
Geological difficulties and water ingress
continue to hamper development at the
mine. At the end of 2017, Sibanye said that
numerous water intersections (fissure water)
were intercepted.
“These intersections delayed development;
however, a comprehensive water handling
plan has been implemented to minimise
any delays in production going forward,”
the company stated. It has to be asked
whether Burnstone will ever live up to the
expectations and become a top gold producer
in South Africa, or has too much damage
been done to get the operation back on its
feet again?
APRIL 2019 MINING MIRROR [35]