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Bloomberg reports that Sibanye-Stillwater may wind down its three South African gold mines in the next decade or so as it becomes harder to exploit aging assets in an industry that was once the world’s largest.
The company is among the few remaining SA gold producers squeezing profits from mines that are among the deepest in the world and are becoming more costly to run. Sibanye, which also mines platinum-group metals in southern Africa and North America, may look at gold assets outside South Africa as it winds down the three sites there. Unless gold prices moved much higher and the investment environment improved, Sibanye was unlikely to exploit its Beatrix mine beyond about five years’ time, spokesperson James Wellsted said. Meantime, Driefontein will run out around 2030, and Kloof about three years after that. “These mines have got a finite life, some of them are more than 70 years old, so they can’t go on forever,” Wellsted said in an interview. The appeal of investing in the sector has waned amid regulatory uncertainty, high power and labor costs as well as community protests and violence, Wellsted pointed out. Sibanye employs about one-third of the roughly 93,000 workers in SA’s gold industry.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard at Mining Weekly
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