Multidisciplinary international engineering group DRA has been appointed by JSE-listed Pan African Resources to deliver a detailed design and construction supervision service for its Elikhulu gold tailings retreatment plant facility planned for its Evander operation, in Mpumalanga.

This is a substantial project relative to the size of Pan African Resources’ operations in the Evander area and will be a game changer for Evander. The project is equally important to DRA as the lead contractor.

“This is DRA’s first gold tailings retreatment plant development and it includes all aspects of the construction, including hydraulic mining, processing and tailings deposition,” says DRA’s Paul Howard.

The R1.6-billion Elikhulu project entails the construction of facilities and infrastructure at Evander to retreat gold plant tailings at the rate of one-million tonnes a month.

DRA’s scope of services through all stages of the project includes the reclamation of the three existing storage facilities, namely Kinross, Leslie and Winkelhaak.

Further, the project scope includes water supply to the project as a whole; water supply to each of the reclamation sites; hydraulic mining infrastructure; a new carbon-in-leach (CIL) gold recovery process plant; pump and piping systems to transfer the hydraulically mined tailings slurry to the new CIL process plant; residue disposal pumps and piping systems to deposit the tailings in a new tailings storage facility (TSF); and the construction of the new TSF.

DRA’s competitive advantage over other bidders for the project lies in the fact that the engineering firm was involved with Pan African Resources from the definitive feasibility study phase and was able to ensure a cost-effective, fit-for-purpose, technically appropriate solution.

“The team involved in the study phase – and that will also be executing the project – have managed many projects with an array of challenges, including schedule and capital expenditure constraints, as well as limited water availability, all of which were overcome to implement the project plans successfully,” says Howard in a release to Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly.

“DRA has developed a good working relationship with all team members, both on an executive and an operational level, and we will leverage this alliance to further establish a long-term partnership with Pan African Resources,” Howard concludes.

The new CIL process plant will be commissioned in the fourth quarter of 2018 and the final phase of the TSF will be completed in the first quarter of 2019.