Johannesburg-based DRDGOLD Ltd (NYSE:DRD) (JSE:DRD) said Monday it is set to commission its first phase of the Far West Gold Recoveries project in West Rand, South Africa starting Thursday.
This July, DRDGold completed the purchase of parts of Sibanye-Stillwater’s West Rand tailings dumps, which increased the company's gold reserves by 82%.
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DRDGOLD says it is targeting a processing rate of 500,000 tonnes per month.
Chief Executive Officer Niel Pretorius said the project is on track to achieve targeted production by the first quarter of next year.
The company said that starting Thursday, material will be pumped from the Driefontein 5 dam through a 2 km pipeline to the Driefontein 2 plant.
A parallel pipeline to return water from the plant to the site has been completed, as well as an 8 km pipeline to take retreated tailings from the plant to the Driefontein 4 tailings dam and a parallel pipeline back from the dam to the plant.
The first phase is expected to contribute to DRDGold’s bottom line by the second half of its 2019 financial year.
In phase two, scheduled to come online two years after phase one, a central high-volume processing facility and new deposition site will be developed to handle about 1.2 million tons of material monthly from different sources.
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