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SA power crisis bothers Botswana miners
Sandile Mchunu
Posted: Thu, 27 Mar 2008
[miningmx.com] -- POWER shortages in South Africa could extend to De Beers’ Botswana-based diamond mine, Jwaneng, which the diamond group is planning to expand.
“We are concerned about power cuts (in South Africa),” said James Kirby, manager of the Jwaneng mine.
“We are ready to deal with short-term knocks, but continuous knocks will have a negative impact on our productivity,” he said.
De Beers is currently conducting a pre-feasibility study into expanding the opencast Jwaneng mine which produced about 15.6 million carats in the 2006 financial year. This is slightly less than the 17 million carat/year Orapa mine, also in Botswana.
Debswana, the De Beers and Botswana government joint venture, will spend R11bn over the next decade to make its existing Botswana mines bigger to sustain production.
Botswana is the single-largest source of rough diamonds and the De Beers’ mines are the leading suppliers.
Debswana will also build two new processing plants at Jwaneng and Orapa, and build a 1km deep exploration shaft at Jwaneng as the precursor to a fully fledged underground mine in 2022.
It is the first time miners in Botswana are going deep underground to hunt for diamonds.
“Currently we are at 350 metres,” said Jwaneng GM, Balisi
Bonyongo. “So you can see we still have a very long way to go.”
Jwaneng contributes between 60% to 70% of Debswana’s profits, which totalled Pula 12bn in the 2006 financial year. Debswana is the world’s largest producer of diamonds.
In 2009, Debswana will begin sinking a 1,000 metre exploration shaft near the pit to wring the maximum value out of the deposit, which comprises three kimberlites clustered together, much like the roots of a tooth, and are currently mined in one massive pit.
The Jwaneng pit is 357 metres deep already and will go down to 650 metres by 2022, by which time Debswana intends to have its underground mine in production.
The economics at the mine make it clear why the company wishes to extend the mine’s life. Its profit to revenue ratio is 80%, said Bonyongo.
A process called a cut, the eighth and final, will begin in 2011, allowing mining at Jwaneng to go deeper to extract what it can from the opencast mine. The
cut, which increases the diameter of the pit, will necessitate the construction of a new processing plant to combine two processes that are currently run separately, namely the main treatment plant and the re-crushing unit.
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