PILANESBURG, South Africa, March 27 (Reuters) – South African Wesizwe Platinum’s flagship Bakubung project, backed by Chinese funding, could start production about six months ahead of schedule due to the use of new techniques to build the mine, the company said. 
Bakubung is China’s first direct investment in the South African mining sector, and Wesizwe aims to start production once the mine is partially ready in 2017 and churn out 420,000 ounces of platinum group metals a year by 2021 when fully completed.
Eddie Mohlabi, general manager of the Bakubung mine, said the speed of building the mine accelerated after the company installed two separate shafts, one for ventilation and another for workers. This almost doubled the number of hours workers could spend underground, he said.
Most South African mines use one main shaft for both ventilation and transporting workers.
“We don’t want to make the same mistakes as our competitors,” Mohlabi told Reuters on Thursday at the mine set near the rugged hills of the Pilanesberg Game Reserve, some 163 km (98 miles) west of Johannesburg.
Mohlabi said the company had also introduced a longer drilling steel to dig a shaft at the mine, penetrating more of the rock face at a faster speed than has been used in the past.
The next milestone for the mine would be to complete two main mining shafts, expected to be about one km deep, by the end of the year in both shafts, he said.
Mohlabi said state utility Eskom is building a 60 megawatt power station to meet the demands of the plant.
Bakubung is one of only a handful of platinum shafts being sunk in South Africa, at a time when other producers are selling off under-performing and labor-intensive shafts following a five-month strike in 2014 that dampened their hopes of making them profitable.
South Africa sits on about 80 percent of the known global resources of the white metal, used mainly for catalytic converters in motor engines and jewellery.
