JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – When the R10-billion five-project Vision 2028 expansion plan of Johannesburg Stock Exchange-listed surface gold company DRDGOLD was conceived in 2024, its market capitalisation was about R13-billion and the gold price R1.2-million per kilogramme.

Currently, DRDGOLD’s market capitalisation is in the region of R30-billion and the gold price R2.1-million per kilogramme.

“Our timing could not have been better,” DRDGOLD CFO Henriette Hooijer pointed out during DRDGOLD’s Vision 2028 update, in which DRDGOLD CEO Niël Pretorius and DRDGOLD COO Jaco Schoeman participated. (Also watch attached Creamer Media video.)

With just over R5-billion already spent, DRDGOLD is roughly halfway through its Vision 2028 programme, with most expended on the Driefontein Two (DP2) project at Far West Gold Recoveries on the West Rand, the regional tailings storage facility (RTSF) also at Far West Gold Recoveries, and, in the current financial year, also on the Daggafontein tailings storage facility (TSF) at Ergo on the East Rand.

As Vision 2028 proceeds into financial year (FY) 2027, very little capital remains to be expended on DP2 and Daggafontein, “so yes, we’re tracking well”, said an upbeat Hooijer, who emphasised how chuffed the team was to pour the first doré gold bar in the new DP2 smelt house on schedule and on budget on Tuesday, July 14.

After the smelt, the 17 kg of gold was whisked away by helicopter off the new fully walled adjoining helipad.

Capital spent still to be spent to FY2029 includes:

• R3.4-billion on the very large RTSF;
• R1.9-billion on DP2, where R880-million for an up-flow reactor (UFR) has also won board approval;
• R1.2-billion on the 135 km of pipeline network to serve DP2, RTSF and the Libanon TSF in Westonaria;
• R0.5-billion for the Daggafontein TSF at Ergo; and
• R3-billion for the Withok TSF on the East Rand.

“A new feature is the UFR plant,” Hooijer disclosed during the presentation covered by Mining Weekly.

Most of next year’s planned R2.6-billion expenditure relates to RTSF, a little bit on the pipelines and hopefully also commencement at Withok, where the original capital expenditure forecast of R2.5-billion has had to be increased to R3-billion on account of the impact that disruptive geopolitics has had over the last few months on the oil price and inflation.

“We believed it to be prudent to re-evaluate, also based on the new information we got on Withok from a design point of view,” Hooijer explained while adding that the R3-billion would still be refined as time passed and that the Withok construction timeline is also fairly fluid.

POTENTIAL CODE-CRACKER

The UFR is scheduled to be completed at Far West Gold Recoveries in the last quarter of FY2027.

“We did some testwork. We liked what we saw. We took a recommendation to the board and we've been given the go-ahead to build an Aztec up-flow reactor.

“This is frontier stuff for us, so whilst we’re very happy with the pilot work, which was not laboratory scale testwork but proper pilot plant testwork, this technology has not been tested in real world conditions and we’ll only know what the contribution of the UFR will be once we see it.

“So, we're not updating any of our forecasts or any of our guidance in terms of what we believe this reactor will deliver until we've seen real world numbers. It's an important development, though, and we hope that it lives up to expectations,” Pretorius explained.

The mammoth RTSF can take far more than its initial throughput of 1.2-million tons per month. This large facility has the capacity to accommodate double that, with throughput potentially being incrementally increased by 600 000 t a month over the next seven years.

“What we need to do now is to find the additional opportunities to take it up to those additional tons. That's tomorrow's story, but we're thinking about it already, and hopefully at some point in future we'll be able to have some news on that as well,” Pretorius explained.

Daggafontein, DP2, the pipeline and the RTSF establish a collective capacity to take DRDGOLD to 2.85-million tonnes a month (Mtpm) and an estimated output profile of between 185 000 oz and 195 000 oz of gold a year.

Once Withok is commissioned, a further 150 000 t a month are added to take throughput to 3Mtpm. Until then, Ergo stays at 1.65Mtpm, a rate it can maintain until 2031.

In summary, Daggafontein is operating, DP2 is moving through commissioning, the pipeline network is 95% complete, with Libanon pump-station to follow, RTSF remains the regional deposition platform that completes the Far West Gold Recoveries scale up, and Withok will create deposition optionality beyond Ergo’s current window.