Africa’s number-three gold producer Harmony Gold, which lost about 800 kg of gold production during January’s power cuts, is considering producing power at five of its South African mines, and it might even make sense to build coal-fired power stations, CEO Graham Briggs revealed on Friday.

He said that the company was looking at developing such power projects at its long-life assets.

"We have certainly been looking at cogeneration projects,&quocrusher aggregates productiont; he told Mining Weekly Online.

"If we’ve got a ten-year or 20-year life on the asset, then we can have cogeneration from a coal-fired plant, for instance," he said. "Then mobile aggregates crusher austriathat would make good sense."

He said that Harmony had looked at developing such projects at five of its operations.

However, speaking after the firm’s second-quarter results presuppliers of rock crushers in the usasentation in Johannesburg, Briggs stressed that the firm had not moved any of these studies to a very advanced stage.

LOST PRODUCTION

Meanwhile, Briggs said that Harmony had lost an estimated 800 kg of gold production in January, when State-owned Eskom told mining companies that it could not guarantee them power supply after it ran out of generation capacity.

Most of the country’s mining industry ceased operations ceased underground operations for nearly a week, after which the power utility told them that they could resume production at 90% of their average power usage last year, levels that they would have to operate at for the next few months at least.

It was difficult to predict how the power crisis would affect production going forward, but Briggs said that Harmony was planning around it.

It had already completed a review of all operations late last year, and the power crisis had prompted it to relook its plans.

"With the power reduction, we have looked at areas that are really high cost and marginal," Briggs told Mining Weekly Online in an interview.

Briggs said earlier that Harmony had already reduced its power usage by 3% by just economising.