JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Mining veteran Peter Skeat's new gold-mining and exploration company Galaxy Gold is heading for a reverse listing on the main board of the JSE on August 11.

The new company is taking up where old-timers left off in Barberton's greenstone belt, except this time helped by a technology that removes the sulphide from the ore, plus a fleet of trucks that facilitate bulk mining.

After three months of mining, Skeat reports that Galaxy is exceeding breakeven on an orebody from which the company derives its name.

It has secured 26 separate but virtually contiguous orebodies over a 5 km strike that will be mined from a single spiral shaft system that will be incrementally sunk.

Skeat, who tells Mining Weekly Online that he has personally invested R50-million in the business, currently owns virtually half of the company's shares.

Galaxy intends raising from R250-million to R400-milion to achieve a production of 53 000 t/m by December 2011 and then explore and mine simultaneously to achieve a five million ounce complaint resource by 2014.

Best known as an opencast specialist who mined the Afrikander Lease that morphed from gold to Dominion uranium now taken up by the Zuma-linked Shiva, Skeat will this time around be turning his hand to underground mining, but of a kind that he describes as the closest one can get to opencast mining in an underground environment, at a R200/t mining cost.

A licence to use the Gold Fields' Biox technology to remove the sulphides has been secured. A flotation circuit and a Biox circuit have been built at competitive cost at the frontend of Galaxy's existing 91%-recovery carbon-in-leach plant.

Mining is currently taking place at the Galaxy and adjoining Wooding & Giles mines, and six of the remaining 24 orebodies within a 5,8-ha lease area have already been sporadically drilled.

Skeat led a consortium that acquired the assets for R17-million in 2008. So far, R90-million has been invested in the business.

Some 18 000 t/m at a grade of 4,6 g/t are yielding 23 000 oz/y at a cash cost, Skeat tells Mining Weekly Online, of between $400/oz and $500/oz.

At 53 000 t/m, the company expects to produce 78 000 oz/y at the same cash cost from material with an improved grade of 5,3 g/t,

Production of 120 000 t/m is targeted in the longer term. Current brownfield exploration is focused on the deeper portions of five orebodies.

"At a time when Wits Basin gold producers are grappling with a growing battery of challenges - depth, heat, seismicity, health and safety, soaring costs, and increasing regulation - Barberton's greenstone belt is enjoying considerable renewed interest," Skeat commented.

The company will also go to market with a 21% to 26% black economic empowerment partnership. Applications have been submitted to the Department of Mineral Resources for new-order mining rights.

Applications for prospecting licences are also in to facilitate future greenfield exploration on a further 3 243 ha to the east and west of the current mining lease area.

Skeat's team includes former Gold Fields, Northam and Platmin mining executive Ian Watson as nonexecutive chairperson; former Ergo and DRDGold metallurgist Wayne Hatton-Jones as COO; and greenstone geologist Dale Richards as director geology and exploration.