AMN - INVESTMENT POTENTIAL: Rivanet and Precious Metals Refinery

Delivering Engineered Concepts (DEC) is a South African-based company operating in the African mining industry, developing projects, construction and procurement of materials, services and equipment. It holds the Rivanet and Precious Metal Refinery projects in South Africa which offer a unique opportunity in mining, processing and refining gold. The mine and process plant are at Rivanet and the Refining Plant is north of Pretoria. Rivanet also has reserves of manganese and diamonds. The asking price for each project is US$35m.
Rivanet
The Rivanet project has the rights to approximately 60km of mineralisation strike in the North West Province of South Africa. The Gold Mine covers the farms Palmietfontein 189 IP, Drylans 64 IQ, Rooipan 96 IQ and Varkenskraal 93 IQ and recent published records for the Drylands operation show a gold production of 1220 kilograms.
The gold reserves are contained in black reef in the Ventersdorp area. The strike on surface means that for the first 10 years at least the resource can be mined by opencast methods. During this initial period of opencast mining the underground operations will be developed and it is anticipated that these operations will not go below 200 meters. The reserve estimates have been done to the 100 metre break, thereafter the gold bearing reef is exponentially larger. The average grades are better than 4.5 grams per tonne mined.
Gold production is estimated at greater than 5 million ounces over the Life of Mine, estimated at 20 years, with an upside potential to be approximately 10 million ounces once all the drilling and geophysical work has been completed.
The manganese resource is low grade and is used primarily in the process of mining for uranium and producing “Yellow Cake” in that industry. The indicated reserves are greater than 28 million tonnes in situ, with an average grade of manganese oxide of 46%, and an expected recovery of 20 million tonnes of product.
Diamonds have been found on the property, whilst not a primary focus of the project to date, proven reserves indicate at least 185 000 carats of gem quality stones. Development of this mineral will be to locate the kimberlite pipe that reports suggest should be on the property. A pure blue diamond of 10.48 carats was sold in 2012 for $10.8m.
Old order mining rights are in place which will be converted to new order rights, once the current infill drilling program is complete and evaluated.
Precious Metal Refinery
The Precious Metal Refinery is capable of refining run of mine material, mine tailings, mine concentrates, refinery waste and reclaimed catalytic converters. The factory is north of Pretoria in a fully developed industrial park and is fully serviced.
Operations ceased in 2007 as there has been a lengthy court case, with a major mining house, of the tenure of some of the dump material stored adjacent to the factory. This case has been ruled in favour of the current owners.
There is more than 80,000 tonnes of dump material with a grade of up to 16 grams per tonne of PGMs. Initial production will focus on treating this material at a rate of 5 tonnes per hour, while the factory is upgraded. The resulting concentrate will be sold to a smelting operation in Europe, with whom they have been dealing with for over 15 years.
The refinery has a Precious Metal Refining Licence valid until 2040, which are not easily available. Following the initial production from the dumps, production will focus on the refining of the Rivanet gold concentrates, toll treating of PGM’s from the smaller miners and reprocessing of spent catalytic converters.
The estimated value of the PGMs in the dumps is US$40m and the value of plant, equipment and land is approximately US1.5m.
DEC is finalising the terms to conduct an exclusive due diligence on the refinery, operations and dump in situ grades.

- For more information contact: Kim Holmes, Office Manager, Email: kim@decconcepts.com Phone: +27 7949 17042