Every Friday, SAfm’s radio anchor Sakina Kamwendo speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News & Mining Weekly. Reported here is this Friday’s At the Coalface transcript:
Kamwendo: A gold mine is being restarted in South Africa’s Mpumalanga province.
Creamer: You know the gold price is so good and having such a good gold price is so important for South Africa. To the extent that mines are being restarted. This mine was the Burnstone mine and it has got a lot of infrastructure in place. It has even got trackless mobile equipment in place, so that this can get going very quickly and will probably get going early next year and start production. When they start production, they start exporting gold that is sold internationally and we get a lot of foreign exchange.
So, always these mines are fantastic. It is being done by Sibanye-Stillwater and that is a company that also is involved in platinum group metals. Those are also doing very well. So, on the mining front, there is a lot of revenue coming in, a lot of free cash and people are looking to investments. On top of that they have got a second project that they will build in Tasmania, Australia. That is a copper, gold, silver project. Again, this is going to be a quick start. Nobody is going into greenfield or long-term investments. These are responsible investments that are going to give return very fast.
