Modern Mining April 2016

COVER STORY

rensky. Now compare this with the situation we have with the Flatreef, where the typical mining stopes will be 60 m long, 15 m wide and 20 m high and yield 18 000 m 3 – or 55 000 tonnes – of ore. Clearly, we can use highly mechanised, bulk mining methods on a scale never before seen in underground platinum mining – and this is precisely what we intend doing.” The project is located on the Northern Limb of the Bushveld Complex near Mokopane in Limpopo Province, with its nearest neighbor (adjacent to the north) being the Mogalakwena open-pit operation of Anglo American Platinum, currently ranked as the world’s biggest and most profitable plati- num mine. Commissioned in the early 1990s, Mogalakwena was the first – and is still the only – mine exploiting the Platreef. Ivanhoe’s Platreef mine will be the second and – once it moves into its second phase of development – will very likely overtake Mogalakwena in terms

Left: Platreef project employees on site with the headgear of Shaft 1 in the background. Below: Looking down the barrel of Shaft 1 during the pre-sink stage (photo taken during night shift).

platinum mining game-changer

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