SA’s oldest gold mine shifts to refrigerated cooling as it reaches greater depths

A cool breeze of change has swept over South Africa’s oldest listed gold mine – the Barberton gold mine, in Mpumalanga – where a refrige- rated cooling system has been installed to improve underground conditions as the mine reaches greater depths, where ambient air temperatures become hotter. The mine is a subsidiary of precious metals producer Pan African Resources and the miner’s flagship project. It has a yearly production target of about 125 000 oz of gold. The mine also pioneered biological oxidation – an environment-friendly process of releasing the gold from the sulphide that surrounds it using organisms that perform this process naturally.