Name: Driefontein mine.

Location: Driefontein is located in the West Wits Line of the Witwatersrand basin, near Carletonville, in Gauteng, South Africa.

Mine Owner/s: Sibanye-Stillwater.

Brief Description: Driefontein is a mature shallow to ultradeep level gold mine, with a life of mine until 2030. The mine exploits underground deposits and shallow rock dumps.

Brief History: Mining operations have been undertaken in the Far West Rand goldfields since the late nineteenth century and at Driefontein since the 1930s. Driefontein was one of the assets acquired by Sibanye when Goldfields International completed its February 2013 unbundling transaction.

Primary Metals: Gold.

Secondary Metals: None stated.

Geology/Mineralisation: The orebodies at Driefontein are laterally continuous, with relatively long-range predictability. This lends to clear patterns of mineralisation governed by sedimentary characteristics.

The principle mining at Driefontein is undertaken on the Multiband Carbon Leader reef. In most cases, the reef was deposited along a structurally controlled basin edge, which created discrete unconformable surfaces of deposition. This led to typical main channel, wide-reef packages, which are generally more than 2 m thick and bottom loaded.

Reserves: Total gold reserves as at December 31, 2018, were estimated at 15-million tonnes grading 6.9 g/t gold.

Resources: Total gold resources as at December 31, 2018, were estimated at 47.9-million tonnes grading 12.5 g/t gold.

Mining Method: Underground using scattered conventional breast mining (74%) and pillar extraction (26%), as well as using surface rock dump mining, with load haul dumpers and trucks.

Major Infrastructure and Equipment: The current mine infrastructure consists of six producing shaft complexes, including four subshafts, one tertiary shaft and one single lift shaft, and three gold processing plants – No 1 carbon-in-pulp, processing underground ore and low-grade surface rock dump material, and No 2 carbon-in-pulp and No 3 carbon-in-leach, each processing only low-grade surface rock dump material.

Tailings are contained in three tailings storage facilities, with a combined capacity of 79.4-million tonnes.

Prospects: Driefontein is focused on optimising the mineral resource, stabilising production profiles at current performance levels, reducing pay limits through quality mining and cost reduction, and targeting secondary reefs on an incremental basis above existing infrastructure.

Contact Details:
Sibanye-Stillwater
Tel +27 11 278 9600
Email ir@sibanyestillwater.com
Website https://www.sibanyestillwater.com