HARMONY Gold is weighing up plans to expand its surface remining activities which includes development of tailings facilities accessing 5.7 million ounces in gold resources in the Free State province.Beyers Nel, CEO of Harmony said in an interview on Wednesday “significant capex” would be involved as the group sought to replicate Mine Waste Solutions, the asset it bought from AngloGold Ashanti in 2020 as part of its $200m acquisition of Mponeng mine.“In order to do these things properly — the Mine Waste Solutions approach — you basically build one big tailings dam and clean up all the other old tailings dams,” said Nel.There were additional resources near the group’s West Wits mines Mponeng, Deelkraal and Kusasalethu that could be treated in the same way by Harmony, he said. Mine Waste Solutions produced about 96,000 oz of gold in the company’s 2025 financial year.Nel likened the initiative to “what DRDGold does with Ergo”.“If you think about Harmony doing a one-million oz to 1.5 million oz – that’s three years of Harmony’s production, contained in the Free State alone,” said Nel. DRDGold produces about 100,000 to 110,000 oz a year from its Ergo operations, east of Johannesburg.Nel said the group wanted to expand “this quadrant” of its four types of operations, the other ‘quadrant’ businesses comprising high grade underground gold mines, marginal mines, and two new copper projects currently under development in Australia.Harmony last year completed the $1.01bn acquisition of MAC Copper, a New York listed company that owned CSA, a copper mine in Australia. The group also approved development of Eva Copper, a greenfields project.Analysts sought additional information on Harmony’s plans for CSA which Nel said was “a simply phenomenal orebody”, but which required two years of fixing. Details of the project capital and production guidance would be unveiled when the group posted its year-end numbers in August (for the 12 months ended June 30).CSA has produced about 41,000 tons of copper annually but for the eights months of operation in Harmony’s financial year, it was slated to produce a much lower 27,000 tons (annualised). Nel said the previous production number was “not our guidance”.CSA was deep and technically challenging and therefore unusual in Australia’s copper mining industry but for Harmony Gold, which mines at depths of about four kilometres at Mponeng, it was an ideal asset, said Nel.On Wednesday, Harmony kicked off a new era of returns with a record interim dividend declaration of R5.30 per share, equal to R3.38bn or 43% of free cash. This was in terms of its new dividend policy which increased the base dividend payout to a fixed 30% of net cash (from 20% to 30% previously) with the option of paying out another 20%, at the board’s discretion and if net debt to ebitda was equal to or above 0.5x and below 1x.The JSE’s gold sectors were battered today despite a relatively stable gold price but Harmony was hit the hardest. Shares in the company fell just under 11.5% on the day. On a 12 month basis, the stock is up 28%.The post Harmony studying plans to expand surface gold output appeared first on Miningmx.
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