JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Time will be spent this year on doing feasibility studies relating to the deepening of the Mponeng gold mine on the West Rand, Harmony Gold CEO Peter Steenkamp said on Tuesday.

In response to Afrifocus Securities analyst Des Moines on how important Mponeng woud be in the years to come, Steenkamp said in his view it would be very important. (Also watch attached Creamer Media video.)

“We haven't made that final decision yet. This year we're going to spend time on doing the feasibility studies,” said Steenkamp.

The studies would go beyond the deepening part of the Ventersdorp contact reef (VCR). The VCR is an Archaean conglomeratic gold placer, mined in the Carletonville, West Rand and Klerksdorp goldfields.

Steenkamp said that with deepening, much of the carbon leader reef (CLR) would also be included. The CLR, a metre-thick conglomeratic unit with a thin bituminous base, is one of the major gold-bearing conglomerate horizons in the central rand group of the Witwatersrand basin.

“But then we’re also looking at the extraction of gold from the Tau Tona and Savuka shaft pillars,” added Steenkamp during question time covered by Mining Weekly.

Harmony is working very closely with the University of Pretoria as the sponsor of the university’s rock engineering chair.

With Bambanani, much work was done to match the extraction rate of Bambanani shaft pillars to the the mining itself to manage seismicity and much intellectual property (IP) was gathered on shaft pillar extraction in general.

“We think that the IP that we created by doing all of that will probably help us to mine the Tau Tona and Savuka pillars”, projects that have still to be approved.

Regarding Mponeng, Steenkamp expressed confidence in the grades that are available at Mponeng going forward and expressed the view that the deepening of Mponeng was likely to be given the go-ahead.

“We’ll most likely give it a go, but again, we still have to take it through the proper approval process. It is certainly a fantastic orebody and will add about 30 years of life to the current Mponeng mine.

On the potential shaft pillar projects, he said: “The Tau Tona and Savuka shelf pillars are about the same size as the Bambanani shaft pillar, and we have four shelf pillars in Tau Tona and Savuka, on the carbon leader and the VCR.

“There has been some mining in the past and so not all available, but it is potentially three or four Bambanani’s that are out there.

“Bambanani is now closed but we mined about 84% of the gold and it was a massively profitable project for us over time and done very safely, so we’re confident that we've got the IP to do that mining,” he added.