South Africa’s gold production is centred overwhelmingly on the Witwatersrand Basin, a 350km arcuate basin that stretches to the east and west of Johannesburg and southwards into the Free State. This basin comprises seven major discrete gold fields and has historically produced over 247 million of ounces of Gold. The Witwatersrand Basin Project (WBP) comprises five distinct project areas and overlays different reef horizons of the Central Rand Group. The five principal auriferous conglomerate units in the Central Rand Gold Field are the Main Reef, Main Reef Leader, South Reef and Bird Reefs, which occur as part of the Johannesburg subgroup. The fifth conglomerate unit, Kimberley Reefs, are locally important and forms part of the Turffontein subgroup, which overlies the Johannesburg subgroup. The WBP has been split in two, i.e. the east and west sides. The re-evaluation focussed on the eastern portion of the project, namely the Bird Reef (BR), Main Reef Leader (MRL) and Main Reef (MR) mineral resources. This dividing line between the East and West is defined by a large fault that displaces the reef horizons with approximately 350m on surface. The area now outlined as WBP East was historically mined by Rand Leases. All three reefs (BR, MRL and MR) have extensive lengths of outcrop, with an approximate length of 2.2km outcrop inside West Wits’ Mining Right boundary. Historically, opencast mining already exploited the reefs on outcrop position. From the outcrop, the reefs dip ........

Qala Shallows represents only Stage 1 of 5 projects stages to be developed by West Wits (WWI) comprising the Witwatersrand Basin Project (WBP).

The West Wits initiated an Early Works Program at Qala Shallows in October 2021, engaging mining contractor, Modi Mining (Pty) Ltd (“Modi”). The Early Works Program presented an ideal opportunity to establish a small-scale mining operation, with the objective to proof the designed mining method to mine areas already exposed at WBP and resulted in the delivery of first ore of approximately 3 000t during the period.

This allowed the West Wits team to expedite the production profile to allow for a quicker build-up to an increased steady-state production level.

A mining method selection process was undertaken. The evaluation of various alternative mining methods considered for the Qala Shallows Project showed that conventional breast mining in an underhand configuration is the optimal method for the Qala Shallows deposit.

The stopes will be accessed by strike drives developed on the K9B Reef horizon and both K9A and K9B stopes will be accessed from this infrastructure. The strike drives will connect to a decline system developed from the existing Qala Adit box cut, which will be located centrally in the mining area and in the footwall of the K9B Reef.

Most of the mining will take place in a large unmined block of ground to the east of the property, there will however also be limited m ........

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