As a boy, Pretorius Snr. would perform the daredevil feat of any child who grew up in the shadow of Johannesburg’s gold dumps: slide down them at break-neck speed on a metal sheet.
It’s, therefore, one of life’s little ironies that his son is the head of a company that is taking the dumps down, grain by grain as it were.
Niël Pretorius is CEO of DRDGold, a Johannesburg-listed company that remains gold by re-processing the mini-mountains of rock that contain historic remnants. The so-called Top Star dump, which was a venue to an improbable driven, is one example of a dump re-mined. The recovery is possible because much of the discarded gold slag dates far back into Johannesburg’s history as a mining town. In the old days, gold extraction techniques were not as effective as today.
It’s worth dwelling on this point: The recovery margins are unbelievably slender, yet – if the technology is right – profitable. DRDGold’s Ergo operations (short for East Rand Gold Operations), for instance, yield 0.2 of a gram of gold for every tonne of rock processed. And that’s when the technology is working particularly well, as was the case in the firm’s 2019 financial year.
“Our expertise is rare. We have a team that knows exactly how to extract the gold from many years of experience,” says Pretorius. That’s one of the reasons Sibanye-Stillwater, the gold and platinum producer, was moved to buy a 38% stake in DRDGold last year in return for its West Rand gold dumps, now known in DRDGold’s portfolio as Far West Gold Recoveries (FWGR).
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