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Gold Fields Australia site visit: Darlot Gold Mine Andrew Bywater - PDF document

Gold Fields Australia site visit: Darlot Gold Mine Andrew Bywater 14 July 2014 We are in an area very prospective for gold for Australia obviously, 900 kilometres out of Perth. Here we are, Darlot. Weve got the other mines, you can see St


  1. Gold Fields Australia site visit: Darlot Gold Mine Andrew Bywater 14 July 2014 We are in an area very prospective for gold for Australia obviously, 900 kilometres out of Perth. Here we are, Darlot. We’ve got the other mines, you can see St Ives. We’ve got Granny’s and of course Agnew/Lawlers. So we’ve got the full mine package. We’ve got the processing facility. We’ve got the full management team. We’ve got the full workforce. We’ve got an experienced team, a central location not far from Agnew, as you have seen. A big challenge for us at the moment, is to firm up our 2015 resources. We have a good package of exploration tenements, which we’ll go into a bit more detail. There’s a lot of shallow drilling through the area, but there’s not a lot of deep drilling. The whole Centenary ore body is found from 400 metres depth. And we were quite lucky to find it. There was no surface impression. It’s very important to note there are only 95 drill holes deeper than 100 metres . Lots of drilling and a lot of that is the typical WA shallow RAB, which means a lot of opportunity for us. 2

  2. Gold Fields Australia site visit: Darlot Gold Mine Andrew Bywater 14 July 2014 Gold was first discovered in the late 1800s in the area. There was nearly half a million ounces of alluvial material, from what we can see in the previous reports. The more recent mining at Darlot included an open pit. It’s not operating now but was founded around 1986 to 1988, and was completed by 1995. That had around 400,000 ounces in it. That then leads you to the underground ore bodies, the Darlot ore body, and adjacent to that is the deeper Centenary ore body, which was found a little bit later at depth. There has been close to 2.3 million ounces produced since around 1990. So there’s a fair amount of gold that’s coming out of this system. 3

  3. Gold Fields Australia site visit: Darlot Gold Mine Andrew Bywater 14 July 2014 So having looked at the history of reserves in 2002, so that will mainly be a bit of open pit with underground reserves. You can see they have dwindled, and our challenge now is to bring this back up and define a decent reserve in front of us. The reserves and resources are very small at Darlot at the moment, and part of our job will be to build them up again. 4

  4. Gold Fields Australia site visit: Darlot Gold Mine Andrew Bywater 14 July 2014 On to the tenement slide. The grey area is 100% Gold Fields. The yellow and pink areas are joint venture leases. We’ve got plenty to keep us busy within a 2.5 km distance from the Darlot centre where we fully own most of the tenements. 5

  5. Gold Fields Australia site visit: Darlot Gold Mine Andrew Bywater 14 July 2014 I have introduced you to the team that’s on site today. 6

  6. Gold Fields Australia site visit: Darlot Gold Mine Andrew Bywater 14 July 2014 7

  7. Gold Fields Australia site visit: Darlot Gold Mine Andrew Bywater 14 July 2014 What does Gold Fields pick up with this asset? W hat you can see is there’s the old open pit, the Darlot open pit that’s about a kilometre in strike. We’ve got the mining infrastructure and mine department buildings here on the west side. There are two portals in the pit, one here and one down here. We have waste dumps, industrial landfill, bio remediation, the processing plant and the ore pad down here. And four tailings dams. Then we’ve also got authorisation to build another dam and extend this one to make it bigger. The power station, the coreyard, old pits, the camp. We’ve got a modern paste plant, and we do pasting to backfill which helps extract as much ore as possible . I won’t say 100% recovery, but the recovery on the ore body is as much as we want it to be with paste. 8

  8. Gold Fields Australia site visit: Darlot Gold Mine Andrew Bywater 14 July 2014 On the reserve snapshot, as I mentioned it’s not a big reserve and resource base, but we ca n grow. It just needs us to get in there and start drilling and putting some money into the ground in the right places. This work has commenced. What you can see here is the ore body superimposed on the open pit Darlot workings. You can see the two main decline and access areas, and then the Centenary ore body deeper in the system. So that’s in plan view, and in the cross -section you can see surface at about 1,500 m RL and we’re working down to the 720, and I’ll talk a bit later about our future developme nt for next year between 700 and the 620mRL. And then we’ll talk about Centenary depth, that’s at another couple of hundred metres depth. 9

  9. Gold Fields Australia site visit: Darlot Gold Mine Andrew Bywater 14 July 2014 So the bulk of the infrastructure – we have a 400 room camp. It’s a little bit old but it’s very comfortabl e, and it’s a very nice camp. So we’ve got the gravel airstrip and we’re investigating right now about going over to larger jets, which we can do on the gravel and will also save us potentially half a million dollars a year. We’ve got our own licensed bore field, which supplies all of site ’ s water requirements . We’ve got the LNG power station with diesel backup which was the original power supply and diesel can cover 50% of our needs if required. 10

  10. Gold Fields Australia site visit: Darlot Gold Mine Andrew Bywater 14 July 2014 I mentioned our paste plant, which is in very good condition and really just commissioned a couple of years ago. Two main declines for access, which is very handy, and we’ve got approval for an additional tailings dam. So it’s a pretty compact site, it’s got everything we need. There are no approval issues, relatively low risk in all those aspects. 11

  11. Gold Fields Australia site visit: Darlot Gold Mine Andrew Bywater 14 July 2014 The mining site. About a year ago we went from Sandvik looking after the maintenance to owner maintenance. The transition was a bit tough at the time, but it’s certainly paid off for us now, looking a fter our own equipment. It’s paid off in the quality of the work done, and the amount of labour that we need to run for the same amount of equipment, is reduced. Long hole stoping with paste filling, most of our equipment is Sandvik brand drills, trucks and loaders. We’re actually running a trial truck with Sandvik - their first 663. It is a 60 tonne truck and moving away from their six-wheelers to a four- wheeler component. It’s been very successful, and we have a partnership with Sandvik here, and we have gone on to already sell many units and it is looking like a very good truck. We are now hiring that truck to continue the trial with Sandvik. So a little bit on equipment. Two jumbos, two longholes, two remote and one manual loader, three 50 tonne tru cks and the one 60 tonne. So it’s not a big fleet. We are only moving 600,000 ton nes per annum from underground so we don’t need a very big fleet to do that. 12

  12. Gold Fields Australia site visit: Darlot Gold Mine Andrew Bywater 14 July 2014 13

  13. Gold Fields Australia site visit: Darlot Gold Mine Andrew Bywater 14 July 2014 So what does Gold Fields see as the value? Darlot last year was operating at quite a significant loss, but Gold Fields saw an opportunity to break even or better. People, processing plant and the opportunity to extend that out from what is obviously a very short reserve life. This is really the core of what has to happen to get Darlot back on track and to be successful. In terms of synergies with other sites, our sister sites are all in the area. I will talk about what we’ve already started there. And we really need a game-changer so that we can set up a five year Mine Plan. We want to push from 80,000 to 100,000 oz target and then Darlot can generate some good money for the group. 14

  14. Gold Fields Australia site visit: Darlot Gold Mine Andrew Bywater 14 July 2014 15

  15. Gold Fields Australia site visit: Darlot Gold Mine Andrew Bywater 14 July 2014 So what sort of things have changed since we went from Barrick to Gold Fields? If we look at our all- in costs we were operating at a cost of $1,500 an ounce which was unsustainable and we are now close to $1,100 /oz. Ounce production hasn’t changed too much. It is still around that 20,000 ounce per quarter, which fluctuates a little bit. But a lot of work obviously has to go in to strip out $400 an ounce from cash costs. So what were some of the things that we did? The first thing when Gold Fields came in was a very serious and detailed operational review. And there were three main things that had to happen. We had to turn from loss making to at least break even and really a profitable operation. That was the first thing. We tried to move towards the Gold Fields target of 15% free cash flow margin. We also wanted to cover our own costs. Darlot couldn’t afford to be a burden on the rest of th e group, we had to make money and cover our exploration costs , which is what we’ve d one. And then we had to take the asset, the workforce, the mine, the processing plant that is ready to go and the ore that is required so that we can turn around to profitability. 16

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