Stirring up the west coast

A phosphate mine in the Western Cape has forged ahead with its plans despite opposition from a small group of environmentalists, writes Leon Louw, editor of the magazines African Mining and Mining Mirror.

The West Coast is not known for its mining activities. Tourism and fishing has put this part of South Africa on the map. So when large earthmoving machines and mining equipment rolls into town, it is bound to stir up even the most laid back of Capetonians.

When it was announced that a phosphate mine was about to be established next to the West Coast National Park, the people of Cape Town were up in arms. Even politicians got involved. Former Finance Minister Trevor Manuel demanded that the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) ‘clean up its act’ because of the controversy it provoked by granting a permit to Kropz, the company that plans to mine phosphate on the doorstep of the Langebaan Lagoon, which forms part of the national park. Perceptions about mining in these regions are not good, even if the mine promises to create at least some jobs for the poverty-stricken community of Hopefield, the town where the mine is located.

Kropz, partly owned by South African business mogul Patrice Motsepe’s investment group, was in for a fight. The major environmental concerns were the impacts that the mining activities would have on the groundwater and the indigenous Fynbos vegetation. So Michelle Lawrence, technical director at Kropz, and her team brought in the best geohydrologists and rehabilitation specialists they could find.

“We spent more than R5.5-million just on understanding the impacts of mining activities on the groundwater in that area,” says Lawrence. Kropz spent a total amount of R25-million on environmental and social studies.

A Stellenbosch-based company called Geohydrological Spatial Solutions (GEOSS) and Johannesburg consultants SRK studied the effects of open pit mining on the water system in the Langebaan area. “We spent most of our time during the mine design on the groundwater issue,” says Lawrence. The solution was to dewater the pit through a series of bore holes around the pit, and to then recharge that water into the aquifer further downstream.

“The water will not be used for processing, it will not be consumed in any way and will stay in a closed system. This has been the main concern for environmentalists as there was a perception that we would pollute the groundwater that ultimately flows into the Langebaan Lagoon,” says Lawrence.

Accusations not scientific

That the mine has evoked serious emotions cannot be denied. However, many of the comments and accusations are not based on scientific evidence. The groundwater model built by GEOSS and SRK is detailed and predicts the impacts of the phosphate mining operation over the entire life of mine from a dewatering and re-injection perspective. “The problem was that we are all technical people and didn’t necessarily simplify the explanation. It is quite a detailed process that we needed to explain better to everybody. I think that maybe we should have managed perceptions better from the start,” says Lawrence.                                  

Mining next to a national park is always a difficult undertaking. Engaging with and satisfying all stakeholder expectations is a massive task. Rehabilitation and keeping the end game in sight is almost more important than the actual mining operation. Especially if the mining takes place in a sensitive area. The Kropz mine, besides being located close to an important lagoon, falls within a biome characterised by Fynbos vegetation.

The rehabilitation aspects of the project are managed by Deon van Eeden, a rehabilitation expert that has been working in the area since 1996. He has been part of the Kropz team since 2013.

Lawrence is confident that once mining has been completed, the area will be incorporated into a protected area or game reserve. The farm Elandsfontein is about 5000ha and the Kropz footprint is only 500ha. Roll over mining will be part of the method that makes the rehabilitation a little easier.

"We are also entering into an offset agreement where Kropz will protect 15ha for every hectare that we disturb, and in the end, all of that land will have protected area status,” says Lawrence. Kropz is also working with the University of Cape Town (UCT) to establish a benchmark for mining and sustainability in terms of social, legal and environmental issues. 

Operational issues

Elandsfontein is about 100km north of Cape Town, near the town of Hopefield. The project falls within the Saldanha Bay Municipality (SBM). The nearest communities are those of Hopefield, Langebaan and Vredenburg, all of which are between 14km and 15km from the mining operation.

The Langebaan Lagoon is about 15km from mining operations. The land on which the project is located was previously zoned as agricultural land, and no communities or economic activities were displaced as part of the mine development.               

Mining at Elandsfontein is expected to yield 5 million tonnes per annum (Mtpa) of ore. About 10Mtpa of overburden, consisting largely of silica sand, will be removed to access the ore.

The overburden will be deposited on a softs stockpile during the early production stages. After 24 months, when steady state mining has been reached, it will be returned to the mining void as part of the mine’s ongoing rehabilitation programme.

The processing plant beneficiates the ore and the mine plans to recover up to 1.5Mtpa of phosphates to be used in fertilizer production. The estimated life of mine is 15 years.

Preparation of the mine box cut started in August 2016. Although mine production was expected to start in March 2017, there is still one or two questions. The biggest of these is that the water use license has (at the time of writing in April) not yet been awarded.

However, production is still expected to get underway before the end of 2017. “We will not start mining before we are awarded the water use license. There are more than 103 mines in South Africa that are operating without a license and we don’t want to be one of those mines. The application that we submitted was an enormous amount of work and I think it is taking time for the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) to process, digest and understand it all. The specialist report shows no fatal flaws. There are no other water users within a 5km radius, the nearest communities are 14km away and the results of the ground water model shows that our dewatering is not going to impact any farming activities. So we are confident that the license will be awarded soon,” says Lawrence.

Construction

Construction is at an advanced stage at Elandsfontein. The access road and power connection is complete. The mine has a loop-in, loop-out arrangement into an existing 132KW Eskom powerline and there is an Eskom substation on site. The Eskom line is about 5km long.

The mine will be an open cast pit (or strip) as the deposit is very shallow. In fact, it is very similar to strip mining but at 50m the strips are a lot narrower than regular mining strips. There will be about four of these strips open at any one time. The overburden in the pits are about 20m to 25m thick, and the ore is another 20 to 25m thick, so the pit (or strip) is on average about 50m deep.

“We did consider other methods,” says Lawrence. Underground mining was not an option. The material is very sandy, so underground mining would not have been feasible at all. Another option was to mine it hydraulically with dredging or sluicing. But the deposit lies within an aquifer, so from an environmental perspective that would have been disastrous. “It means we would have to mine through the aquifer and use the water to recover material, so that would have been detrimental to the water in the area,” explains Lawrence. 

Construction of the processing plant was completed by Cape Town based engineering company DRA. The mining process at Elandsfontein is basic. Apatite grains (a group of phosphate materials) are unearthed and separated from silica through a series of size classifications and flotation. It is all free dig operations where an excavator loads the material into trucks. Less than 10% of the material needs to be crushed and the plant has small impact crushers to cater for that. However, there are no mainstream crushing and milling circuits.

Kropz’ business model is to keep a small owners team and then to contract out the plant operations, the mining and the concentrate transport. The company has already appointed several contractors, some of them are already on site. Trollope Mining Services will take care of the actual mining, while Minopex will run the processing plant.

Trollope uses 40 tonne Volvo Articulated Dump Trucks (ADTs) for its mining contract, while Kropz has purchased Metso pumps, Vibramech screens, Multotec cyclones, Roytec thickeners and filters and Eriez column flotation cells.  

Logistics

A local transport company called Van der Merwe (VDM) Transport has been contracted to haul the concentrate to the Port of Saldanha, from where it will be shipped.

Saldanha is about 40km from site by road. The initial study suggests that four 36 tonne trucks will take to the road every hour to transport the material. The mine access road that Kropz constructed is 13km long and that road links to the R45, which connects the towns of Hopefield and Vredenburg. The R45 is currently part of a road infrastructure upgrade by the Western Cape Government, so it will be a dedicated freight route. This road will ultimately link to N1. “We are on a freight route that is actually very convenient for us. The R27, which is the road most tourists use will not be impacted at all by the mining. It has worked well for us and has also allowed us to open our link to Hopefield, one of the poorer towns in the Saldanha Municipality and the main labour beneficiary of the project,” says Lawrence.

Management at Kropz estimates that the project will provide work for about 450 people. While the mine was being constructed it employed 1 778 people of which about 927 were local. Lawrence says the mine is targeting 70% local employment in the long term. According to Lawrence the mine has been well received by the community in Hopefield.

“We have also tried to get our sub-contractors to spend as much within the SBM as possible. By the end of February 2017 we spent about R133-million in the SBM, that is excluding wages, which we estimate is close to R60-million,” says Lawrence.

Phosphate on the west coast

South Africa is not known for its phosphate deposits. Apart from in the Phalaborwa area of Limpopo most other phosphates are found in small deposits on the west coast. In and around Phalaborwa, the phosphates are igneous type deposits, whereas it is sedimentary at Elandsfontein.

All the deposits on the west coast were formed when old lagoons were cut off from the sea. The phosphates are basically formed from marine fossils. The Elandsfontein deposit is about five million years old. It is also not the first time a mining company has operated in the area. Samancor operated a mine about 18km from Elandsfontein in the 1980s. The deposit was discovered in 1975 and later acquired by mining giant BHP Billiton. Canadian company Montero Resources is exploring another phosphate deposit, called the Duyker Eiland deposits, close to Paternoster, about 40km from the Elandsfontein deposit. The deposit is very similar to Elandsfontein, but the mine has not yet been developed.