Pan African is preparing for new phase of gold production
Fri Nov 15 2024
Investing in the gold mining sector comes with soaring highs and crushing lows. While throwing your weight behind an exploration-phase minnow can generate eye-watering returns if all goes to plan, the potential rewards come with a high risk factor. Cancelled and delayed mining permits, regional strife, fluctuating market dynamics, and the simple fact that yields might be a huge disappointment all play a hand.
But that just makes the payoff even sweeter when the risk-reward scales tip in the right direction. Take Pan African, whose chief executive Cobus Loots is approaching his 10th anniversary as top dog at the London- and Johannesburg-listed gold producer.
Pan African has chalked up many notable wins in recent months, not least the all-share acquisition of Tennant Consolidated (TCMG), which is developing a gold project in Australia’s Northern Territory.
Discussing the acquisition with Proactive, Loots called it “an opportunity of further expanding production, diversifying our business even more, reducing volatility and basically acquiring growth at what we think is a reasonable price”.
High-margin tailings opportunities
Pan African also recently announced the successful commissioning of the Mogale Tailings Retreatment (MTR) operation in South Africa. This project will expand Pan African’s production capabilities even further. But there’s more to it than that. The 100-year history of large-scale South African gold mining is written into the contours of the landscape in the form of these legacy tailing dams.
Tailings are essentially a by-product of gold mining. They are swathes of materials left over after gold has been extracted from the earth. These tailings are dumped and often abandoned in sites called tailings dams.
They are not worthless. In fact, they’re literal, albeit very low-grade, gold mines.
Pan African is one of three main companies sifting through these tailings to extract residual gold reserves.
Around 0.3 grams of gold per tonne is extracted from these tailing, and while the recovery rate is only half that amount, the cost benefits make the endeavour worthwhile.
“Because this process is so simple and efficient and the scale is so large, it gives us these economies of scale,” said Loots.
There’s a big ESG angle too, in that you’re “reducing legacy liabilities (and) consolidating residual tailings onto new, modern facilities”, he added.
On average, it costs around $1,000 to produce an ounce of gold from the MTR tailings facility. Not bad when the price of gold is going for more than double that.
Which brings us to an important point.
Solar-powered production ramp-up
Gold prices have gone gangbusters in 2024, reaching an all-time high of $2,800 per ounce at the end of October. While prices have since entered a correction phase, gold still remains in a solid position at $2,568 per ounce (as of 15 November).
Hopeful gold can sustain these bullish prices in the year ahead, because Pan African has some lofty production targets up its sleeves. In the 2024 financial year ending 30 June, Pan African produced just shy of 190,000 ounces from all of its operations. The current-year production target is for 215,000 ounces.
For next year? With MTR running at full tilt and Tennant Creek producing, “we can get very close to 300,000 ounces of production”, stated Loots. To top it all off, Pan African is tapping renewable energy to help sustain desirable margins.
In the 2024 financial year, Pan African sourced 6% of its energy requirements from renewables (primarily solar). The target is for a 30% renewable energy mix by 2030, although Loots sees the potential for it to be as high as 50%. In conjunction with Pan African’s numerous year-to-date achievements, its share price has soared by 90%, but analysts believe there’s more to come.
“Against this backdrop of near-term production growth, particularly with the MTR project offering low-cost growth, as well as improving margins… we expect Pan African to enter a period of enhanced profitability,” Berenberg analysts wrote in a recent broker note.
Loots stated that Pan African is done with acquisitions for the time being and the company will be focusing on making good on existing projects in the year ahead.
Source: https://www.proactiveinvestors.com/