SINCE early on Eighties many mining entrepreneurs have try to make money by reopening old gold mines on the Witwatersrand. Only one Loucas Pouroulis has ever succeed and that was momentary. His previous consolidate Modderfontein operation hit an widespread, very high-grade payshoot but it was finally mined out.

The latest candidate is Central Rand Gold (CRG) and the fall down in its price over the past year from R12 to around 290c/share currently tells the narrative in a nutshell. CRG’s early aim was to start gold manufacture in 2009 at a rate of 100 000oz/year and construct up to 1m oz/year by 2012. The newest plan calls for just 20 000oz to be fashioned this year, with an average of 40 000oz/year to be achieve during the first seven years of mine life.

The cause is only 270 000oz of gold have so far been rehabilitated into the group of probable mining treasury of the total estimated resource of 35,6m oz that CRG reckons remains to be mined from old mines such as CMR, City Deep and Crown Mines. Reason for that is CRG has obviously had a lot of problem persuasive independent mining consultants Snowden its proposed mining plans are viable.

The cruel facts of life discovered by those mining entrepreneurs in the Eighties were that the old timers did a pretty methodical mining job the first time around. If they left something behind there was a good cause for it usually because the ground was very hard to mine.