Aim-listed gold recovery company Goldplat has been granted a new 12-year water use licence (WUL) for its operations in South Africa.
The new WUL includes stipulations on the abstraction and use of water in Goldplat’s recovery processes, as well as the impact of its new tailings storage facility (TSF).
The new TSF, adjacent to the current TSF, will be constructed over the next four months and has sufficient capacity to store deposits (at current production rates) for the next seven years.
“The new TSF will also allow us to divert all deposition from the current facility, which will provide us with the ability to process the current facility to recover an estimated 81 959 oz through a third-party facility.
“To enable us to process the current TSF through a third-party facility, we will require approval to install a pipeline to this third-party processing facility, and will need to finalise commercial agreements with the third party,” explains CEO Werner Klingenberg.
Goldplat expects this approval by the end of 2022.
Klingenberg concludes that the WUL authorisation was the first step towards processing the current TSF, as well as an integral part of the South Africa operations’ future plans.