JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – “It’s potentially another Ergo”, is how Gold One CEO Neal Froneman describes the Gold Fields/Gold One plan to combine and reprocess their West Rand surface deposits.

The aim of the proposed joint venture (JV) will be to recover a potential nine-million ounces of gold and 130-million pounds of uranium from 700-million surface tons that represent 60% of the total tailings in the region, the other 40% being primarily material belonging to gold major AngloGold Ashanti.

“I do think it will make logical sense somewhere down the line to involve AngloGold, but at the moment, we’re really just focused on making the Gold Fields and Gold One JV work,” Froneman told Mining Weekly Online.

Tailings retreatment is a low-margin business that thrives on large volumes of material being subjected to tightly controlled factory-like processing procedures.

Gold Fields CEO Nick Holland described it as a relatively low-risk opportunity to extract value not yet inherent in the Gold Fields share price.

The trailblazing Ergo, which was commissioned in 1977, continues to recover residual gold from the slimes of old East Rand mine workings, even though it was originally expected to last for only 15 years. The slimes also contain uranium and sulphuric acid.

Now a key part of the JSE-listed DRDGold, Ergo also pioneered the 'cleaning up' of frowned-upon dump legacies.

The 475.6-million tons of tailings that Gold Fields owns on the West Rand are said to contain 4.5-million-ounces of gold and 53.6-million pounds of uranium, while Gold One’s Randfontein surface operations, recently acquired from Rand Uranium, currently processes 300 000 t/m of tailings through the Cooke gold plant.

“We specifically haven’t quoted numbers because, having just acquired Rand Uranium, we are busy reviewing all resources, but what I can say is that, after you’ve applied cutoffs, we have a similar amount of gold (4.5-million oz) and a lot more uranium. There’s a uranium reserve of just on 80-million pounds,” Froneman told Mining Weekly Online.

Gold One is also at an advanced stage of planning the building of a uranium metallurgical plant to treat the Cooke tailings.

A detailed scoping study, scheduled for completion by June, will be the first item on the JV’s agenda.

Gold Fields has a newly built site on which material left over after reprocessing is deposited, and Gold One is well advanced with the close-by Geluksdal redeposition site.

“We’re also very much aligned with Gold Fields on the environmental standards required for sustainable tailings deposits,” Froneman added to Mining Weekly Online.

Gold One is also assessing the potential treatment of several other surface tailings deposits that formed part of Rand Uranium’s mining and prospecting licences.

Gold Fields produces 3.5-million gold equivalent ounces a year from eight operating mines, and Gold One, in which the Chinese Baiyin NonFerrous, the China-Africa Development Fund and Long March Capital are the majority shareholders, last year produced 123 000 oz from its flagship Modder East operation.

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