Sibanye Stillwater Limited (SSW) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Greetings to all our stakeholders that are focused on this Investor Day. Good morning to those of you that are not local to our region. Good evening to those of you who may also not be local. And of course, good afternoon to those that are in our local time zone. Today is all about, in my mind, people. And yes, we're going to be talking about ESG. We're going to be talking about our gold business, but a business is about the people. And from the very first slide, you will see that people are very, very important to our business. People, good people with a good strategy and good assets can really move mountains. And today, you are going to have the chance to listen to our very engaged and professional senior managers in our business. And they will be doing most of the talking. And in fact, we'll do most of the answering of questions, and I'm sure you will appreciate it as much as I do. The first section is about ESG and a bit about strategy. I spent quite a bit of time on strategy with our H1 results. But for those of you who were not present or did not have the opportunity to join us for that, I will go through it in a little bit more detail. There is a safe harbor statement in the presentation and of course, there are forward-looking statements and observations, please take note to them. All right. If we can actually then move on to the first official slide, please. A tree and our tree, the Sibanye tree has received international acclaim. And the tree is a very, very important part of our business, a part of our thinking. In fact, it describes our ethos. And much of what you see in a tree is reflected in our business. A lot of what you don't see, obviously, in the tree, such as it's root, are also very, very important. And a lot of communication happens through the roots of trees. And when I describe the roots of our tree, you will also recognize why it's important for the roots to communicate with other trees, send signals and they do send signals. In fact, I'm told from having recently read a book on trees that signals between trees move at 1/3 of an inch per second. So very slow, but nevertheless, they communicate. The roots of our tree holds our values and our values are commitment, accountability, respect, enabling and safety, and that's a synonym for CARES, and we talk about Sibanye cares. Now as you start thinking about this tree, of course, it has a truck and the people of our company. And as I said, you will recognize this constant theme about the importance of people, whether they are our employees, whether our stakeholders, such as our investors, organized labor, supplies, all very, very important to us. But our employees provide the strength and direction of the tree to the canopy, obviously, targeting sunlight so we can grow. And of course, to grow, we have to be profitable, and to be profitable you -- in mining terms, you got to talk about save cost, quality and volume. And if the profitability is there, we can develop that canopy of the tree. And again, the canopy of the tree contain things such as the environment, shareholders, communities, all our stakeholders, organized labor and so on. And we've managed our business to understand what is superior value, which is our vision for our company for each one of those stakeholders. And of course, the tree bears fruit when it's properly nourished and it's profitable. And for each one of those stakeholders, we recognize what are the fruits that come with superior value creation. So that is really our tree, and it's well understood in our company. If you visit our operations, you will see it well displayed. And as I say, this concept of stakeholder capitalism is well recognized, and certainly, we are seen as a leader in those fields. Our purpose, which is the [ raw ] from the tree and our ethos and thinking, our purpose is, we believe, our mining improves lives. And as I've already said, we do that by creating superior value for all our stakeholders, and that's the company's vision. And our strategic intent at this point in time is to strengthen our position as a leading international precious metals group. So that's our ethos. That is the way we think. It's not smoke and mirrors, and we use this very effectively. Next slide, please. As I said, our strategic intent is to strengthen our position as a leading international mining group by focusing on the 6 strategic focus areas that are contained within the pie. The one at the center is one we will be focusing on today, but it is also the central theme in terms of our strategic focus. And you can see that is about embedding ESG excellence as the way we do business. But other strategic focus areas, building a value-based culture, very important for safety. And of course, for the overall success of the group. That is really led by Dawie Mostert Who you will meet in the next presentation. Focusing on safe production and achieving operational excellence is a strategic focus area. I think we've done that particularly well. That area of our strategy is led by Dr. Richard Stewart, and he will also be introduced to you in the next session. Optimizing capital allocation. We're very disciplined. We have stuck to our capital allocation model, and I think that's well known and was discussed in detail at our H1 results. Prospering in South Africa's investment climate. The majority of our assets are in South Africa. It's a tough place to operate. We know to do that well, and we know how to prosper. Building an operating portfolio of green and related technologies, green metals and related technologies is a key strategic focus area, and I'm going to cover that in the next few slides as well. So that's how we move from the tree to profit strategy that is crystallized and focusing on these areas and there's an executive responsible for each one of these areas. Thank you. So talking about value creation. And remember, we said that our vision is to create superior value for all stakeholders, and we have done that particularly well, building off what was seen as unwanted gold assets. I will cover that in some -- in a bit of detail, as I explained this sigmoid curve. We then entered the PGM business in South Africa, and we exposed the company to palladium, platinum, rhodium, iridium ruthenium and through our investments in DRD tailings retreatment, specifically in the gold segment, but we also do a bit of PGM tailings retreatment in the South African segment. We then acquired the Stillwater operations in Montana, and that gave us exposure to PGM recycling and palladium, platinum and rhodium in that region as well. More recently, we announced our intention to enter the battery metal space as our fourth sigmoid curve. And after significant due diligence, we announced our intention to obtain exposure to lithium, nickel, cobalt is a bit of a challenge, manganese, graphite. Of course, recycling is a green metal, irrespective of where it may come from. Uranium, the transition of PGMs into the hydrogen economy. We're well exposed to that. Copper is a common denominator and of course, metals produced from tailings retreatment complement that. So the battery metal strategy, together with the PGM strategy, plus exposure to uranium, which I'm going to discuss in a bit more detail, has really crystallized our strategy, as you will see from the following slide, which is a puzzle that pulls it all together. So let's have a look at that. You can see the base of the puzzle is the PGMs, recycling, uranium, tailings retreatment with our investment in gold and then, of course, the green energy metals. And I believe this is the unique combination of metals that positions our company extremely well for the future green energy environment. Thank you. As I said, I would just discuss uranium briefly. We did announce at H1 that we will be progressing our uranium strategy as well. Uranium has been identified, and it's always been a green energy metal. But I think as the world has become more sensitive to CO2 emissions, nuclear energy has emerged as an alternative zero-carbon-based generation option to complement renewable energy, which, as we know, is intermittent. There is growing commitment to nuclear energy, especially in the Asia Pacific region, with 125 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity being planned. We expect the uranium market to move into deficits within about 5 years, and we expect long-term forecast to exceed USD 60 per pound. We have very significant uranium resources. We have 27 million pounds of uranium, U308, 250 to 500 meters below surface at Beatrix West section. We have 52 million pounds of U308 on our cook tailings dams on the West Wits. And we have very significant uranium processing infrastructure, both on the West Wits and at NAFCO. So we have a significant asset base to build our uranium aspirations. Dennis Tucker will be leading this initiative. Dennis Tucker is on the call and will be available to answer questions. The diagram on the right-hand side of this slide really just shows you what is known as Beatrix #4 shaft or Beatrix West. It was originally the Beisa uranium mine, which, after the uranium price collapse in the '80s, was turned into a gold mine. These are vertical shaft was sunk and the Kalkoenkrans reef was accessed from the original Beisa uranium shaft. The Beisa reef, you can see, is in purple. And you can see it is initially a lot shallower than the Kalkoenkrans reef. You can also, on this diagram, on the very right-hand side, see Beatrix 1, 2 and 3 shock, and of course, if there was a need, we could deepen those shafts and access the visor reef below it, but that's not in even the medium-term planning. We have very significant shallow resources of uranium that can be accessed very quickly. So uranium is moving from being unloved for the last decade, but it's now being recognized as a green metal that has a role to play in a decarbonized future. Thank you. There's a lot of debate around whether mining companies are just talking the talk around ESG. You will see from the following presentations that we've already moved on from talking about ESG to having a very crystal clear sustainability strategy, including the capacity and I'm talking about the management resources to continue driving that, and I'm going to discuss that in a little bit of detail in the bullet points below. But not only that, we, as a group, have moved to including ESG measures in our long-term incentives. And it really starts from a unitary board. We have a number of committees and in fact, all of them in a way -- one way or another, have an input into ESG. But as you all know, the social ethics and sustainability committee is where the full responsibility for ensuring proper strategic implementation of ESG and sustainability is monitored by the Board. So it starts with the Board. In the C-suite, I have a strategic advisory office and one of my strategic advisory senior managers is our sustainability executive. And Loyiso, you will meet shortly and Loyiso, together with all of those that are focused on ESG will be presenting this afternoon. The link into operations is done through the Chief Operating Officer and the Chief Operating Officer's primary responsibility is to convert strategy into operational plans. So as I said right at the beginning, it starts with people, the right people, good professionals, well qualified, competent people that are engaged, a strategy, and you're going to see the strategy, and I shared some of the strategy with you at our H1 results. And then, of course, the right assets and, of course, the right incentives. And as I said at the beginning of this slide, our incentives are in place. There are a few companies that have ESG incentives in place. Most of them have overrides. So if you have an environmental issue, it's an override on an incentive. Ours has -- we have an override as well in our short term incentive. But in our long-term incentive scheme, 20% of it is now made up very specific ESG measurements, and you can see the combination there 30, 40 and 30. So embedding ESG excellence is not just a title. It's not just smoke and mirrors. It is a proper strategic thrust, headed up by competent and professional people and embraced by all of us in the group as a core strategic thrust. Thank you. At this point, I'm going to hand over to Richard Stewart and Dawie Mostert to talk to you about our initiatives on safety, health and building a value-based culture. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Neal, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. A real pleasure today, I guess, to kick off this session with what is really our first, second and third priority in Sibanye Stillwater, which is the safety and health of our employees. I think traditionally, when you talk mining and talk safety, very often your mine jump straight to work-related injuries and accidents and statistics. But really, our safety and health strategy is about so much more than that. It's ultimately about in really the holistic well-being of our employees, and not only our employees, but also the communities in which they live. And of course, tackling work-related injuries and incidents is a key part of that, and we really do address our overall safety or underpinned by a risk-based approach. But inhibition, it does go to reducing the exposure of our employees to occupational related diseases, reducing exposure to dust, which obviously leads to silicosis, diesel particulate matter radiation, platinum selves, et cetera. We do look at providing health services that enhance the overall quality of life of our employees. And of course, work together with national strategies to try and manage and eradicate epidemics such as TB and HIV, and as we've seen this year, of course, COVID-19, very difficult to eradicate ourselves, but certainly, we try and manage that as far as we can within our own environments. And ultimately, we look to provide world-class emergency response services, and we subscribe to world-class safety practices and are currently in the process of registering or completing our accreditation of ISO-45001 across all of our operations. I think COVID, in particular, is certainly one we are very proud of how we've handled it, and this has been a testament to our risk-based approach to dealing with health and safety. 18 months ago, when we were designing new operating protocols, there were no rules. We didn't get know how this was going to end up. But through a risk-based approach, we've been able to continue operating throughout most of this pandemic with infection rates that are, in many cases, better, but certainly no worse than the surrounding communities and national average all of the communities in which we work -- which is really a testament to the fact that the risk-based approach and the work practices we put in place has meant that our environment is certainly not a hotspot for COVID infections, something we're very proud of. I think in terms of vaccination, as a company, we certainly believe that, that is the long-term sustainable solution to dealing with COVID. And in that regard, we've invested heavily in our vaccination rollout. We've invested almost ZAR 10 million in terms of setting up centers across our company, investing in cold chain storage. We currently have 4 primary vaccination sites and can roll out multiple satellite sites, of which 3 are operating right now. We've vaccinated in excess of 50,000 of our employees, which is, by far, industry-leading, and that represents over 60% of our total workforce. And in fact, more than 75% have registered to take up the vaccine, and our priority right now is ensuring that those individuals receive the vaccine. And through tens of education processes, we address any hesitancy regarding vaccination that may exist with the balance of our employees. We also took our first steps towards rolling out beyond just our own company on the 1st of September, where we now offer a vaccination to dependents of our employees. And we're working closely with the Department of Health to further roll this out into our doorstep communities and truly contribute towards the overall national vaccination strategy. So just in terms of our safety journey, I think very evident that from the time Sibanye was born, we took over these assets from Goldfields. We made a notable difference in the overall safety trends and statistics. I think like much of the industry in South Africa, we recognized around that 2017, that while we've made some great strides in reducing fatalities, we had largely plateaued. And that led to the development of a new safety approach, engaging multiple stakeholders, and we started our safety culture journey. In 2018, we had 2 very unfortunate and tragic incidents, multiple fatal incidents at Driefontein, a seismic incident, and Cliff where we had colleagues walk into an abandoned mining area. But that really created a platform to truly bring with us all stakeholders and reengage on the new safety strategy and really reenergized the safety culture journey that we were undertaking. That led to world-class results in 2019. I think we broke industry records of 13 million fatality-free shifts. I dare say, that was far ahead of what has ever been achieved before and is testament to the fact that the strategy worked. Fundamentally, the strategy is about teams looking after each other so that's based on team dynamics and looking after the safety of your colleagues, of your friends, of your team members or brothers. And what happened with COVID is those team dynamics were disrupted. And as such, we've unfortunately seen a regression in the last 18 months, which we are in the process of addressing and a regression that again sadly has been seen across much of the industry and one that we do need to arrest and bring back. Very pleasing with the initiatives we've outlined during 2021. We have seen a significant improvement over the year. And certainly, the last quarter, in particular, has been very pleasing, and we look forward to that trend continuing. If we look at the total injury frequency rate, and this is really the measure that we compare ourselves against our international peers. Since Sibanye started, we managed to almost half of the total number of injuries we see in our gold operations. And what we really look forward to is when we have a strategy over the next 4 or 5 years to halve that number again. And if we're successful in that, that will bring us down to injury frequency rate that is in line with our best-performing international peers and certainly part of our strategy we look forward to delivering on. So how do we rank relative to our peers. Well, certainly, if we compare ourselves to our South African or other ultra deep mining peers, we rank very well, but we fully recognize that we are an international company. We do measure ourselves against best practice. And if we are going to be an international mining company, then we need to benchmark ourselves against our international peers, irrespective of the number of employees or operating environment that we are in and that is certainly part of our strategy strives towards benchmarking ourselves and competing with the best practice of our international peers. The way we expect to achieve this is through our zero harm strategic framework, which we'll unpack in the next few slides. As with so many things in our company, it's underpinned by our values, and our engaged leadership, which Dawie will share a bit more details on. But fundamentally, that is the long-term sustainable solution to safety where we have employees making the right decisions all of the time, undertaking the right behaviors all of the time that's pinned on our values. We have 3 core pillars that look to address our safety strategy and enabling environment, which really goes around removing hazards or eliminating hazards. It's engineering out risks, having the right tools and the equipment, designing the right operating protocols and practices or having those in place. Goes around empowered people. That is where the risk management of the business really comes in. You can eliminate the hazards through engineering them out, but the residual risks need to be managed by people and this is about having appropriately trained, competent and resource people in the right places to execute our strategy and then embedding that strategy into the way we do business on a daily basis through appropriate systems. But with that, perhaps I can hand over to Dawie. Thank you.

Thank you, Richard. And good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. And as Richard has alluded to the fact that we have commenced with this program some time ago. This is not a campaign. It's really a detailed, detailed program where we look at context, and we designed with some really appropriate solutions that are very specific per segment and per operating area. So if I can start, we operate really in complex times that we've seen with COVID and the disruptions that would cause, and the impact of the environment on people and leaders in particular, and operating teams. We live in a world that is really unpredictable and ever-changing. We call it the VUCA world, a world that is full of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. And it's within this context where we need to get our leaders to be functional, and our operating teams to take the right decisions. So where the focus are, is really in terms of 3 areas. One is in terms of a value-based culture where the design is topped down and bottom up. So we work at the top of the organization, starting with the executive, going to all of the management structures. And the impact in terms of what we tell mechanics and team dynamics. The team mechanic sessions are really focused on role clarity and goal and value alignment, where we really look at what are those outcomes and how do we ensure that teams are functional. The team dynamic sessions focus more on what is always time the softer side, the behavioral side, the team cohesion sites and how we ensure that teams connect and people have a shared vision and a shared purpose. Leaders are the second important aspect and critical because leaders impact culture. If we can quote some statistics, it said that leaders have a 72% impact on culture and culture, a 24% impact on the bottom line. So what we do is we have a leadership competency framework where we develop all our leaders from the executive right down to the supervisors, and they really focus on 5 key building blocks being: managing self; managing teams; the context; movement; and relationships. And it's with that in mind that we then build our teams. So if you impact on future-ready leaders, leaders that will develop a future-fit organization, operating within this increasing complexity and based on a value set and value system where our values are shared and the understanding in terms of the behaviors, which shared understanding, the outcome is really engaged employees, and it is really focused on safe production. We can move to the next slide, I'll talk to what the impact is at the bottom. So this is typically what we do with our operating teams. This is where the tech is the top. So we start with our teams on a 2 to 3-day program, and each of these teams start with their story, where they come from, what are the issues that they need to deal with, and they really look at the key aspects that will make the team successful. The second step is really understanding what are those key values and how to get the values -- behaviors aligned to the values that we would want the team to underpin. We work with team in terms of development. They present their charter, and there's a lot of biting that happens between the shift supervisors, mine overseas and these teams. The third aspect is really making it real in their context, and that is where we introduced what is termed in Umhlangano process or on the platinum side is called the Tilapia process, and the process is really making sure that the team takes ownership for problem solving. They take ownership for hazard identification and for risk management. And we ensure that at the end of the day, this is systemized and that the team will take control of their future journey. It's a process that is well received, and we have probably, to date, taken approximately 30% to 40% of our teams through the structure. With this in mind, I'll hand back to Richard. Thank you, Richard.

Thank you, Dawie. And just to shoot through the balance of our strategy on a very high level, as indicated, the 3 pillars, the first one was around an enabled environment, which fundamentally went to eliminating risks and hazards. One of the ways that we tackle that is through a leading indicator analysis, which is really a process of trying to identify unwanted events, hazards, high risks before they necessarily lead to incidents or accidents and trying to proactively manage those. This slide provides some of the leading indicator themes that we've specifically identified and been working on this year. Such as around rock mass management, which talks directly to fall of ground, winchers and rigging, mobile machinery and, of course, rail bound equipment. And through that, you can see several initiatives we've undertaken, which really go to engineering out the problem as far as possible, such as through vehicle to person proximity detection devices, many of which are complex and being trialed for the first time in some of our operations. And on our track this equipment, for example, the Level 9 rollout, as it is known, where we are leading in terms of having rolled out vehicle to person proximity detection systems across all of our operations. Many of this revolves around technologies and new learnings such as our seismic road map, which is currently being developed. And the application of existing technologies for understanding rock mass behavior ahead of our current mining phases. The second part of our pillar was around risk reduction is around risk management and empowered people. And specifically, what that goes to, again, is trained people, but being able to implement our operating practices and processes in a way that we can manage our risk. Let's starts off with the fundamental risks we have and we call them our rules of life, which is an initiative we rolled out this year. And that really goes to address the highest energy incidents we can have, which can result in serious injuries and fatals. On top of those fundamental rules, we build the rest of our risk management system as we move through critical controls as we move through group minimum standards. And we do this with many international partners. A good example of that is the IMS Hub, who help us take these operating policies and practices, which, as you can imagine, can be written in the Queens English and the best technical language but how do you implement that underground? And working with our partners here. We look at ways of taking those operating practices into simple, visualized safety systems, such that they can be well understood and easily implemented in the operating environment. And finally, if we move on to our last pillar, which is about our systems and appropriate systems in terms of embedding operating practices. One of the key areas we've been working on over the last few months is around building a significant digital platform. This really goes to utilizing large databases and large sets of information to proactively manage safety, risk management. We have several initiatives, I think, that are leading in terms of, for example, being able to monitor data on rail down equipment and through being able to monitor that data not only understand the operations of that particular piece of equipment, but also how it's being operated, and therefore, the behavior of operators and identify any risks that may exist with that equipment, and therefore, trying to address it prior to an incident being undertaken. This is what feeds into our leading indicator analysis and certainly is a large part of proactively managing safety. We do subscribe, as mentioned previously, to international best practices and are in the process of receiving ISO-45001 accreditation across our systems. And then we have several other systems, which we've implemented across our business, which helped us to implement, to measure, to monitor and continuously improve the various practices that we have on a continuous learning basis. But I hope -- thank you very much. I hope this was shared with you at least on a very high level our approach to safety, which, as I mentioned, is certainly a holistic on to overall well-being of all of our employees and the communities in which we operate. But with that, I'd like to hand back to James, and we'll be happy to take any questions you may have.

Thank you very much. Thanks again, everybody, for attending today. We're going to go into a Q&A session now. So the first questions I'll address to Neal, please. really relating to metal prices and our outlook for metal prices. I think we will cover those in quite a bit more detail in the upcoming Investor Days. But maybe, Neal, would you like to just give a high-level response. First of all, where do we see precious metal prices going in future? And is demand for these metals increasing? And then in order of preference for the metals we list as part of the green metal strategy, are we initially doing a due diligence on all of these metals? And with the aim of filtering out the ones would show the most promise. So maybe if you can give a bit more detail on that. Thank you.

Yes. Thanks, James. And let me start with the back. [Technical Difficulty]

Okay. Sorry, we seem to have a bit of a problem with -- a technical problem with the sound there. As I said, I think, first of all, we will be giving a bit more detail on gold and PGM price outlook as part of the Investor Day. We're generally still quite positive on the outlook longer term. Clearly, there are some short-term headwinds that are affecting PGM prices. But I think, again, let us wait for the PGM. Dan, we'll cover that in more detail. And then on the green metal strategy, we've spent the last 2 years actually doing quite detailed due diligence on those metals. We acquired a group called SFA Oxford in early 2019, who've done a very detailed fundamental analysis on the evolution of batteries and the EV mobility where that's going to progress to and then also looking at which the fundamentals of the metals that we think are going to be critical to that future. So there's no specific order as such. We are looking at those metals, our metals of interest to us. And as that strategy unfolds, we've already made a lithium acquisition and the nickel processing plant acquisition in France. And as that strategy unfolds, we'll probably get involved in more metals than those. The next question from Arnold was about vaccines, which I'll ask Richard Stuart to deal with as do we have enough access to vaccines to fully utilize our capacity, Or are there days when we run short of vaccines? Richard, could you answer that one, please?

Arnold, thanks and good afternoon, Arnold yeah listen, initially, securing vaccine doses was our constraint. Certainly, when we went live in about July, August, it was a challenge and a lot of uncertainty at that time. I do say, over the last month or so, no securing vaccines, in fact, has not been a constraint. And right now, we can get access to what we require. As you probably saw, so we've now vaccinated in excess of 60% of our own workforce. Our original objective was to get to a minimum of 70%. We're well on our way there. And that is why we've now started rolling it out the next step initially to dependence, which is the first step into communities. And we are in discussions with the DOH to taking that further into community. So our facilities already -- the doses are available, and we look forward to administering it and getting feed through the door.

Thanks, Arnold. Thanks Richard. The next question is from Raj Ray at BMO Capital Markets. Again, for you, Richard, if you don't mind, with respect to the ISO certification, 451 and 14001. What's the time line for getting all of the operations certified?

Yes. Thanks, Sara. So that varies across the ops. But in many cases, on the 45001, it's largely in December, -- And listen, there are variations across the operations. But it's later this year, early next year for the majority of that.

Thanks, Richard. Raj, your second question on carbon intensity and the steps we're taking, we're actually going to address those in the upcoming presentation. The ESG presentation Real started at 2:00 South Africa time. So in the next 20 minutes or so. So if you don't mind, can we maybe address it once we've been through that presentation. I'll then move on to the next question from Lee Roamio form HSBC. The biggest safety risk in your portfolio since July was your SA gold operations. Have you considered the disposal of these assets to drive an improvement in your overall group safety performance? I'm not sure we -- if Neal is back online or we've solved that problem or should I pass that on to Richard? And we'll try and go to Neal, please.

Yes. Yes. So Let me say, Leroy, of course, selling is always an option, but that's a cop-out. I think Richard clearly demonstrated the process safety and together with the cultural intervention that Dawie described, we believe that we can make them competitive with the -- our international peers, even though they may not have ultra-deep-level mines. So from a safety aspect, we're very aware of the heightened risk. I want to say there's another thing. You can't just bucket safety on its own. There are 30,000 people who have jobs that are dependent on us owning that business and ensuring it's sustainable. We will not put lives ahead of livelihoods. But these are complex situations that need to be weighed up. But to me, selling because you can't solve the safety problem is a cop-out Thanks, Neal.

The next question is from Adrian Hammond from SBG Securities. I'll direct Richard, if that's okay. How has how has COVID impacted product and costs, for example, absenteeism over time, attrition, et cetera, Richard?

Yes. Thanks, Adrian and a multifaceted question that, I guess, it is quite complex. What COVID has certainly done over the past 18 months has led to an increase in terms of fixed costs to stick to certain protocols. Whether that is increased spacing in transport arrangements where we've got to double up on buses as an example, and there are numerous examples going through that. So it certainly had an increase on the fixed cost base. Obviously, that is something we look to reduce as the vaccination rollout becomes more prevalent. And again, those costs and protocols are done on a risk-based approach. So we will continuously review those. I think what we've seen, Adrian, no doubt, in the first few waves, there's no doubt we saw an impact on productivity, where, as a result, not only of infections, but actually of people needing to quarantine, we saw operating teams going out and that did impact on overall effectiveness. I think the other area where we definitely saw, it was also around the logistics at the end and the beginning of the year. People who traveled home over Christmas coming back, we had significant delays due to logistics around COVID. And certainly, this year, in particular, another impact that has hit us hard has been the -- where we've had a lot of senior personnel, particularly in this fourth wave who've been off as a result of COVID, and that's not only an impact on operations, but a sever impact on safety, and has also meant that a lot of people have had to had to stand in for that. So Evan, I think it's something we've managed to manage reasonably well, but it has definitely had an impact. And I guess one of the big unwritten ones that are so difficult to quantify is, as with all of us, that does create stress on the system. I think people who are suffering from COVID, people who are losing loved ones makes it difficult in the work environment. And when you have 80,000 employees, that inherently has an impact. And hence, our focus on overall employee well-being. It's often those unwritten impacts that sometimes have the biggest one that's the most difficult to measure.

Thanks, Richard. Adrian, your second question on expanding on our plans for recycling. If you don't mind, today, we've got fairly limited time for questions on other things. So we'll try and keep the questions focused on the information that on ESG really and on the gold operations today. We will be able to cover the recycling obviously, at the PGM Investor Day on the 23rd of this month. So following up on the COVID question from Steve Sheppard, there's a question about whether we are thinking of making vaccination compulsory for our employees like Discovery is considering. Neal, perhaps you'd like to take that one?

Yes. Thanks, James. Steve, absolutely. I think Discovery have done what is right. And there is a balance and the debate around people that are resisting taking the vaccine, but we've got to look after the company as well. You've just heard Richard talk about the cost of protocols and so on. I think it's going to become a worldwide phenomenon that work in places where people have to congregate is only going to take place when everyone's been is only going to take place when everyone's been vaccinated, Rich. I know you've done some more work on this. I don't know if you want to add anything to that. But I think in -- as a principle from a company point of view, it is something we are seriously considering.

Thanks, Neal. We're almost at the end of the 10-minute Q&A session. Can I just check on the phone lines, whether there are any questions at all?

No. There are no questions on the lines.

Thank you very much. I'm afraid we'll have to cut it short there. The next session will start in about 10 minutes. So on the hour, so we'll welcome you back at that point. Thank you. [Break]

Welcome back, everybody, to the second session on the Sibanye Stillwater Investor Day. This will be focused largely on ESG, and I'd like to introduce the Senior Vice President and Head of sustainability, Loyiso Ndlovu, who will carry you through this presentation. Thank you. Loyiso.

Thank you, James. As you have heard, sustainability for us at Sibanye Stillwater, is not a function of compliance but rather a strategic imperative to deliberately change the role our business plays in society, the role we also play in economies. We do this by sticking to the knitting and being minus and in supporting the growth of new economies in a manner designed to build legacies. The tenants, of course, of our sustainability strategy are guided by 3 areas: environmental stewardship, which is about our role in promoting sustainable use of resources and making sure that we transition towards the low-carbon future. The second is social and impact outcomes, using our economic and societal influence to co-create positive legacies and lastly, governance integrity. Our commitment to engagement with all stakeholders, but engagement with this , which is undertaken with integrity, doing the right thing even when no one is looking. These 3 areas of consciousness remain relevant and integral to our business. Our workflow over the year has been to mature these philosophies, into application and focus on outcomes to understand how they are applied and to what end. The shift in maturity has led us to develop an integrated sustainability strategy, which, in the end, addresses short-term actions, but these are short-term actions required to achieve long-term benefits. The benefits to society, benefits to the global economy, benefits to our stakeholders, and strengthening our role as an extractive industry player. Our approach towards this has been to recognize interdependencies while creating value and acting on opportunities. Thank you. Our broadening of application of these themes towards ESG has allowed us to not only address the discrete specialities of environmental social and governance. But to provide clear and distinct parts towards economic benefit. The benefits, of course, that accrue as a result of our operations. In particular, due to the areas of our work, in developing economies, in transitional economies, we have found an urgent need to not only build long-term sustainable economic strength, but to link that economic strength to environmental sustainability, social sustainability and to embed governance in our work. Sustainable economies enable participatory decision-making, meaningful transitions towards making ESG valuable to our long-term work. The strategy is divided into 4 distinct areas of focus. Being one, is embedding human rights and ethics inside and out. This team focuses us as Sibanye on aligning our behavior inside the organization and outside, but more importantly, it is a body of work that recognizes that there must be alignment between our internal commitment to how that behavior expresses itself outside. This body of work recognizes that the institution holds an ethical responsibility to both care and protect and support its stakeholders. You have recently heard about our joint responsibility towards employees and the safety and health. We discussed this a little bit more in looking at our diversity and accountability by focusing on women in mining. And 2, is our focus on developing a climate change resilient business, color-coded apple green on the slides. This directs our attention towards the strategic growth opportunities presented by ESG. The Chief Executive, Neal Froneman, has already alluded to the commitments into where we have taken advantage of opportunities. You will hear more later on from our colleagues, Grant and Gavin on our road towards carbon neutral and also our commitment to the reduction of water intensity and demand, the proactive management of tailings and our view of the interconnectedness between biodiversity, rehabilitation and long-term benefits to our areas of work. The third theme we call entrenching long-term economic sustainability, color-coded tan on the presentation. This focuses our work squarely on beginning with the end in mind. My colleague Themba will share with you our work on how we have used our assets of land, our economic and financial capability to co-create visualize modern towns, which are based on the issues of sustainability, of an economy post mining, which is co-created with the communities within which we work. And last but not least, the last theme focuses upon developing data-driven and considered decision-making. This one is color-coated purple in the presentation. This really reflects our commitment to transparency to rigorous reflection and testing and to ensuring that we use a science-based approach towards our detail. They are embedded into the business and do not act outside of the work that we do. Thank you. Moving on a little towards our women in mining and to how we reflect on inclusivity and diversity. I'll start off with a quote from our Chief Executive. Mr. Froneman quotes, "I'm calling on all leaders to champion this change to better our industry, our society. We would not forget the hardships women face every day, especially given the prevalence of gender-based violence in South Africa. I urge everyone, men and women alike, not to be by standards, but to report and stop gender-based violence and harassment, both at work and at home." This area is one of the areas of which we are most proud. It is our work reflective of human rights insight. It is our work to promote inclusivity and diversity, and it focuses specifically on making sure that we build a globally integrated and representative organization in mining. For 2 years, we've been included in the Bloomberg Gender Index. And again, we will submit ourselves to this index this year. It is a testament to our work that we've been included. Our commitment to transforming this industry has currently resulted in 31% of new recruits in 2020 in the South African industry being women. This is a phenomenal achievement given the industry within which we work. It is still our target to have 30% female workforce by 2025. And this, in our view, would place us significantly above our peers in gender representation, in participation and in building a catership of women who are professional and who are skilled. It supports us and our view of how we consider human rights inside out. As mentioned to you before, we will now have an opportunity to move into the detail of the sustainability strategies, and I'll pass you on to my colleague, Jevon Martin to share with you part of our building of a climate resilient business, our road to carbon in trait -- Thank you, Jevon.

Thanks very much, Loyiso. So it gives me great pleasure to give an update on our carbon neutrality strategy. Sibanye Stillwater recognizes that climate change is the most pressing risk facing humanity and our planet today. It also presents numerous opportunities and risks to our business. In doing our part to mitigate climate change, as well as achieve the objectives of the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Sibanye has made a commitment to achieve carbon neutrality by 2040. This commitment wasn't taken very lightly and was underpinned by extensive amount of work that culminated in our energy and decarbonization strategy. This strategy is guided by our climate change and decarbonization position statements, but seeks to achieve the strategic objectives of reducing our overall greenhouse gas emissions, is ensuring security of supply for operations, enhancing sustainability to reduce energy and carbon costs as well as partnering in the transition in the South African context. We've identified 5 implementation levers that will allow us to deliver on these strategic objectives. And without going into too much detail, just at a high level, the first one is really creating an enabling external and internal environment for decarbonization. The second is our traditional demand side NMG management where we focus on eliminating energy waste, as well as improving energy efficiency. Thirdly, we're focusing on sourcing low-cost renewable energy. Renewable energy is part of our broader energy mix. We're also looking to leverage new technologies that are emerging in the market, predominantly looking at the likes of digital, storage and hydrogen technologies to ensure that we go 100% all the way through to carbon neutrality. We're also looking to take ownership of those emissions that incur upstream and downstream of high value chains effectively our Scope 3 emissions and ensuring those 2 move through to net zero. And those hard-to-abate remnant emissions, we will also take accountability for those and ensure that we put in place offset strategies that will allow us to achieve a complete net zero. Looking at our emissions profile, Sibanye has one inherent advantage in that the predominant operations are predominantly electrified. And as a result, 88% of our operational emissions being Scope 1 and 2 are electricity. As a result, renewable energy is going to feature very strongly as our -- in order to reach carbon neutrality. Thanks. The execution of the strategy is already delivering very positive results. We've initially focused very strongly on the governance aspect of the strategy, ensuring that we have strong position statements in place to guide the strategy. We've also dotted science-based targets to guide a pathway and show adequate disclosure through CDP and TCFD align reporting. We've recently linked through executive remuneration to decarbonization and conducted group-wide initiatives to promote decarbonization through the operations. Last year, through energy efficiency opportunities, we were able to reduce our carbon emissions by 165,000 tonnes of CO2. We're also looking to displace low coal use within the group, starting with the replacement of the Beatrix boilers with electricity binders. And we also have our flagship Beatrix methane's power project that has reduced carbon emissions by 14,000 tonnes of CO2 per annum. This is also registered as a UN clean development mechanism project and to date has generated just short of 300,000 carbon credits. We're actively deploying digital twins across our operations to enhance our energy management. And we're also promoting the decarbonization of the suppliers as part of our broader value chain. Thank you. Looking forward, there's a number of other initiatives currently under development that will allow us to deliver on full carbon neutrality. On the advocacy side, Sibanye Stillwater continues to play a significant advocacy role in the South African electricity supply industry where we engage extensively with governments, the national regulator as well as the local utility Eskom. We're looking to set Scope 3 emission targets to ensure that we take accountability for those emissions outside of value chain. As mentioned, we're looking to eliminate all coal use throughout the group. As part of our strategic energy sourcing plan, we plan to deploy extensive renewable energy, which I'll talk to shortly, whilst, within the U.S. operations, we are preparing a request for proposal to ensure that we secure renewable energy within our Montana operations. From a technology perspective, we look at the trialing of battery electric vehicles within our operations to displace the diesel tractors mobile machinery currently in use. We also extensively analyzing different storage technologies in order to ensure that we can reach our goal of 100% renewable energy, including a prefeasibility study currently being conducted for the underground pumped hydro. We're also in discussions with a leading global OEM in terms of incorporating battery energy storage systems as part of our renewable energy projects. We're also progressing a carbon offset strategy, which will include the likes of nature-based solutions, carbon trading and carbon capture storage. Our renewable energy projects are quartile decarbonization strategy as well as our ESG strategy. In 2020, in the beginning of this year, we took -- undertook a comprehensive study to understand our energy requirements as well as our greenhouse gas footprint associated with each of our individual shops and processing plants. Together with an understanding of South African regulatory environment, the renewable energy market and the technologies available within, the natural resources in terms of wind and solar available in South Africa as well as a good understanding of available sites across our operations as well as remote sites across South Africa, we are able to put this information together and develop a comprehensive portfolio of renewable energy projects approved for execution. This includes a 50-megawatt solar PV project for our gold operations, with the site secured and permitted and close to our sea of operations. The process is currently underway to appoint the project developer that would execute this project on a PPA basis. We are targeting to achieve commercial operation of this project in 2023. Earlier this year, we also issued a request for information out to the market for up to 250 megawatts of wind to identify several ready projects that we could bring into operation as quickly as possible. We got a overwhelming response and we identified a number of projects across the Northern Western Eastern Cap. And based on the economics put forward, and our understanding of the regulatory environment, we are now progressing and request for quotation for 250 megawatts of wind to secure these projects, as part of our broader energy mix. Based on the preliminary time line, we anticipate we will bring these projects online in 2024. Considering our expanded footprint across the Northwest potent in South Africa from Opium, Crundale and Marikana, we've also identified our long-life assets and their requisite energy requirements. These assets can support -- collectively 175 megawatts of solar PV projects. At as we completed a feasibility study, which identified suitable sites, demonstrates the economics and the decarbonization potential of these projects, which have now been approved for execution. We have commenced the site permitting processes, including the environmental authorizations and rezoning. These projects, in terms of time lines, are driven by these long-lead items, but we plan to have these commercially operational by early 2025. Collectively, these projects have a capital cost in the order of about ZAR 8 billion to be funded through off-balance sheet PPA financing on a 15 to 20 year basis. As a result, there's a minimal capital outlay from a Sibanye perspective, and we gain access to electricity at a 30% to 50% discount for solar and a 20% to 30% discount on wind from day 1 escalating CPI. The projects will also generate further offset from a carbon tax liability perspective. Collectively, the projects will enable a 24% reduction in our Scope 2 emissions in 2025 and 100% by 2038, including the likes of storage and balancing marketing mechanisms. It also allows us to partially derisk our South African electricity supply and the cost thereof. As part of our strategy, we're looking to maximize the socioeconomic development impact of these projects for our infrastructure impact program. We're also looking to link these projects with our closure projects to show that we can supply those communities and those social projects that we are developing with electricity beyond life of mine. Together these projects will create multifaceted benefits across environmental and social. I'll now hand over to Grant Stuart who will take us through the balance of the sustainability presentation.

Thanks very much, Jeff, and good day to everybody. Global warming is expected to reach 1.5 degrees between 2030 and 2052 at current rates. These rising temperatures and accompanying hydro climatic phenomena, including changes in precipitation, will lead to disrupted water supplies and amplified flood and drought disasters, impacts that we felt across communities, ecosystems and economies. We and our communities have been exposed to these risks, and we, therefore, recognize the need to invest in good water management and governance as those that don't will certainly suffer the most. Regional participation in integrated catchment management forums is an area where we, as industry, regulators, civil society, local and national government must align on a common purpose much like that of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal, which is the clean water and sanitation for all. We as a vocal participant in these forums are demanding accountability and forcing a move away from just simple talk shops. If we are to make a meaningful difference, we must hold each other accountable and there must be consequence. It cannot be that we can continue to accept local municipalities' inability to main wastewater treatment works, the flow of uncontrolled seat discharging to our river systems without consequence. Key to building a climate resilient business is an understanding of the complexities of the areas within which we operate. Our U.S. and SAP -- sorry, our U.S. and SA Gold operations are located in water-rich areas, with our U.S. PGM operations operating in water scarce environments. 65% of the SA PGM operations are supplied from external third parties, and therefore, aligned to water security strategy to secure and sustain safe operations. A key driver of water security is self-sufficiency and to reduce reliance on third-party suppliers. Some of the initiatives that we have in place at the moment include water harvesting, unlocking large volumes of additional storage capacity through the desilting of dams and the utilization of pits. The integration of Marikana's water balance into the SA PGM footprint has introduced a great deal of flexibility and the ability to marry East with West, the water ridge areas and the water poor areas within that footprint. A focus on tailings and density management and control with a target of 1.6 tonnes per cube by 2025 is also a key focus. And then sustainable use of boreholes and gray water from wastewater treatment works. These initiatives will serve to reduce the overall reliance on the integrated water river system, and our target is by 25% in 2025. Water use management at the gold operations in the water rich areas, as I alluded to earlier, are resilient -- are reliant on external suppliers for some 30% of the water requirements. Yet this charge quite excess of those requirements, making independents a realistic achievement. As in Cooke, are already water independent, the Driefontein operations, which currently consumed 22 million liters of water a day with an existing 20 million-liter per day treatment capacity -- facility, those as well to become water independent completely by the back end of this year. The first phase of Kloof to achieve 33% independence is also well advanced with the plant likely to be commissioned also by the end of this year. Another exciting initiative is the study on our wastewater treatment works across our various footprints. Not only is this a source of gray water supporting our water independence and security drives, but it also is a subject of closure plan supporting the infrastructure for impact philosophy and development of our local communities post mining. As part of our drive to water security and independence and responsible water management, we have planned on board and have very clear targets in place and support transparent disclosure. And that's why, this year, we reported for the first time on our water CDP. Thank you. We recognize the importance of our role in the protection and preservation of all life as part of our broader ESG strategy. This is also highlighted in our ESG policy available on our website. Our aim is to play a positive role in the management of our biodiversity, not only in the areas in which we operate, but also within the regions within which we operate through catchment management forums, as I alluded to before, and the Good Neighbors Agreement in the U.S. As our U.S. operations as part of our Good Neighbors Agreement, we have commitments in place and playing active role in monitoring the trouts in Stillwater river as well as the conservation efforts to monitor populations of the big horn sheep. By diversity, like water conservation and water to mine management plays a critical role in mitigating the risks of climate change and supports our focus on building a climate-resilient business. Our wetlands and ecosystems are a lot of the catchments within which we operate. The fauna and the flora within the wetlands, their critical role in water quality control through removal of heavy metals and but also play a role in pollutant trapping. They also play an important role in reducing erosion, the impact of floods and droughts in the presentation of fertile soils, which are important for our agricultural development and support sustainable post-mining socioeconomic development. The use of these natural systems and our future costs and focus on expanding the use of artificial wetlands, improve our engineering solutions and reduce our operational costs as responsible miners. Whilst biodiversity is a relatively new and emerging theme, we believe we are well positioned to drive ecosystem resilience by targeting a net gain in biodiversity for existing operations and no net loss for new projects. As a member of the ICMM and an active participant of the biodiversity working group, we have set targets to have scientifically based plans that embody the mitigation hierarchy for all catchments supporting a net gain for these existing operations. We have partnered with the Endangered Wildlife Trust as part of the national business and biodiversity network and had a hand in the development of the biological diversity protocol. We will be one of the first companies to report against this protocol internationally. Disclosure, as I've mentioned before, is a principle that underscores and embeds our commitment to ESG. Thanks. We have matured our approach to the way we manage waste on our footprint. Our waste management initiatives are dependent on data integrity and the collection of meaningful data at asset level. We are committed to reducing nonmineral waste to landfill as well as developing circular economies that benefit local through job creation and sustainable secondary industries. High levels of methane gas and carbon dioxide are generated by waste decomposition. Methane is 84x more effective at absorbing the sun's heat than carbon dioxide, making it 1 of the most powerful and potent greenhouse gases and has a huge contributor to climate change. Our management focus to reduce waste to landfill is further outlined in the published waste management position paper that demonstrates how we plan to play a role in fighting climate change, again, published on our website. The production of calcium sulfite at both our U.S. and Marikana operations is an initiative where we are looking to convert the calcium sulfite into commercial gypsum, and, thereby, avoid 4,000 tonnes per month of hazardous waste to landfill, which is both a significant cost at both our U.S. and SA PGM operations. Our U.S. metallurgical complex continues research into drying and pelletizing gypsum to cement additives, whilst our SE PGM operations are looking into commercial gypsum into the cement and board industry. Other examples of circular waste economies include the generation of compost from sewage sludge. In 2020, we generated 17.6 tonnes of compost, anticipated -- and we anticipate an increase of 300 tonnes once these composts are fully scaled and operational. We also have diverted some 2,200 tonnes per month of liquid hazardous waste to landfill for recovery of PGMs and in so doing made our precious metals refinery some 50% independent of portable water supply. We also have a focus on the reduction of mineral waste tailing, where our acquisition of DRD Gold is anticipated to reclaim and rehabilitate vasts stretches of land, and these typically encumbered through the decade old tailings storage facilities. We've also progressed a number of other opportunities, including the deposition of our tailings into old pits for backfill and reducing closure liabilities. Our U.S. East Boulder mine targets an -- for example, 55% of tailings to backfill from 48% in 2020. Local job opportunities where local partnerships have been created to utilize the waste rock for pit closure is also an example of how we demonstrate socioeconomic closure and development. The Middle Flat pits recently closed was a community-driven and led initiative executed on the -- executed to rid ourselves of the social ills more specifically in the hot rate conditions where young children like to get intrigued and like to play in and around those pits. Thanks. When Jevon spoke earlier, he articulated how we are going to decarbonize as part of our commitment to carbon neutral by 2040. Outlined in the slide before, our plans to minimize nonmineral waste to landfill and the impact that the decomposing waste has in respect of its contribution to global warming. Just as important in our fight for climate change is against -- is air quality management. Whilst carbon dioxide is recognized as the largest contributor to climate change, a comprehensive approach to tackling climate change can't simply just be on decarbonization. Other gases like sulfide oxide as I mentioned in my previous slides, must also be a focus. Whilst we are proud of the levels of the SO2 emissions emanating from our facilities in the U.S. and our SA PGM operations, we are a leading the benchmark in peer group when it comes to the U.S. operations. This aligned to the strategic objectives of continuous improvement in technology deployment to reduce emissions further below the regulatory compliance levels as a key objective. As such, we have set clear targets with our overall SO2 capturing and cleaning efficiency to be 90% by 2027 and 99% by 2030 from a base of 80% in 2020 at our SA PGM operations. Another key dimension on what air quality management is, of course, the impact of air quality on our local communities. Dust mitigation measures include the implementation of netting, chemical dust suppressions and planting a tamarisk to ensure that the dust emanating from tailings dams and roads does not impact our local communities who live in and around those footprints of tailings dams and the roads that I've just spoken about. We endeavor to monitor and proactively manage these dust levels through careful dust bucket placements. The group environmental focus is twofold, a crusade against global warming and supporting the development of Climate Resilient business. Our tailings storage facilities remain vulnerable in the eyes of climate change unless stringent standards and protocols are enforced. Ross Cooper, our Vice President, Tailings Engineer, is a custodian of all things tailings. Ross, over to you.

Thank you, Grant, and good afternoon, everybody. Sibanye's acquisitions included the associated active and dormant tailings facilities. Historically, South African facilities were managed in accordance with related legislation, in particular, SANS 10286, Code of Practice for mine residue deposits. All South African tailings facilities are constructed in the upstream direction. Facilities in the United States are managed according to the state of Montana regulations or facilities are constructed as line empowerments with engineered waste drop and maintenance. In line with our commitment to zero harm and as a member of the ICMM, we have committed to manage our tailing facilities in accordance with the global industry standard for tailings management. These commitments include providing public disclosures related to the safety of our tailings facilities, which are available on our website and will be developed further as we continue our journey to full compliance. In terms of governance requirements, we've appointed our Chief Technical Officer in the position of accountable executive is responsible for the C-suite -- individual responsible for the safe management of our tailing storage facilities. And appointed myself with 28 years' experience in the tailings industry as the group's Vice President for Tailings Engineering responsible to the accountable executive. In terms of independent governance, we have engineers of records appointed for all of our operations. And have established an independent tailings review Board comprised of 3 internationally renowned tailing specialists for our South African operations. The ITRB has reviewed our group tailings management system and are currently busy with the review of selected gold and operations, and in October, will undertake a review of selected PGM operations. An independent review panel has been in place in the United States for a number of years. To coordinate efforts across the group, we established a tailings working group, chaired by myself, and comprised of senior managers within operations. The working group developed the group tailings management system, and we remain responsible for the implementation of the system across the operations. Historic practices in South Africa resulted in a large reliance on technical and operational support from external parties such as our engineers of record. And internal tailings course has been developed and presented to raise competence within our operations and support divisions as part of our drive to retain ownership of the management of our tailings facilities. To ensure compliance to the global standard, within the committed deadlines, formal monthly audits have been initiated at operation level with the identification of actions required to resolve any nonconformances. These audits and actions are consolidated and managed centrally using the digitalized platform. Progress against compliance is reported to the accountable executive on a monthly basis. Key initiatives we are currently undertaking to elevate earnings management include implementation of the K2fly tailings management solution. This includes satellite information monitoring and is placed across the group. The solution serves to consolidate tailings facility performance parameters as well as environmental and social data to enable proactive risk management. We're currently undertaking detailed stability assessments based on specialized institute and laboratory testing to evaluate the geotechnical status of our facilities as well as to update the consequent classifications utilizing the global standard classification metrics. Thank you. I now hand over to Mr. Niel Pretorius, the Chief Executive of DRDGOLD.

Thank you, Ross. Yes, so we're proud to be included in this presentation, and we're also pleased by the way in which we've been portrayed in the presentation. DRD embrace development as its primary consideration and the allocation of resources and capital more than a decade ago. And it's become, as a consequence, a technology-based mechanized operator for whom its environmental and social dividends are as important as its financial dividends. Our environmental value-add lies in rolling back the environmental legacy of mining by removing and retreating mine waste and restoring land in the process. We've cleaned up in this way just over 900 hectares of land in and around the Johannesburg area, which is an area of roughly 16x the size of the Johannesburg Zoo or 2.5x the size of Central Park in New York. Closely related to this and, in fact, overlapping in value contribution is the social value to affected communities of no longer having to live next to a mine dump. Then in instances where a waste facility is permanent, we limit the nuisance of dust to surrounding communities by cladding and vegetating the surface area of the dump. And you can see in the picture on the slide what that vegetation looks like, and it comes at a price. Last year alone, we spent just over ZAR 110 million on the vegetation and cladding. We also keep all the water in and on these facilities in a closed circuit for reuse. And in fact, most of the water that we use in our process is grey water. Two other important social investments we make are aimed at poverty alleviation and youth education. In terms of the former, more than 4,500 families have taken the first steps out of abject poverty and breaking the cycle of dependency through our broad-based livelihood program. And in terms of the latter, our youth education teachers on the full-time employee of DRDGOLD offer extra classes in math, science and accountancy at 8 high schools in our area of influence with remarkable results, as I said. We are primarily a business though. And entrusted with the capital of our shareholders, we expect a return. And in this regard, we continue to offer exposure to the gold price by being unhedged. And we remain very serious about our dividend yield of 14 years in a row of paying dividends, and we're pleased that the total [ purchase ] Sibanye Stillwater to date has been just over ZAR 0.5 billion. A new theme to our investment proposition is growth and to the next slide that explains this. We are explicitly aligning ourselves with the broader strategy of Sibanye Stillwater and building a portfolio of green metals. Wherever Sibanye Stillwater goes in this regard, there is likely to be mine waste or stockpile as we prefer to call it. See, on this slide, how tailings retreatment features side-by-side with recycling uranium as part of a broader strategy, and we're very pleased to be taking up this phase in the group. We find the prospect of producing the metals used in the generation and storage of clean energy by retreating mine waste or through environmental cleanup very appealing, especially if recycled water and PV also come into play. Who would have thought that by rehabilitating mine dumps, one could be delivering into the demands and requirements of the green economy, and we're very keen and also excited to play a role in that regard. And with that, I hand you over to Themba Nkosi to talk about entrenching socioeconomic sustainability. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Niel. Our history of structured industry in most regions has unfortunately brought up high levels of distrust among stakeholders. This is mostly prominent in South Africa with its unique past. This creates context for our operating in South Africa and our socioeconomic environmental impacts. We are, therefore, inspired by our intent to become a trusted economic partner, a nation building and to those communities where we operate. This, we intend to do playing a three-pronged role: one, being a catalyst in the economy; second, being a participant; and thirdly, as a patron. And these are going to happen in various stages of our maturity capital for operations and they will be timed. However, some of the actions are brought forward by the changing environmental context wherein we find ourselves. Our aim is to embed stakeholder relationships that are effective and at fast pace. We will, therefore, take lessons from the best practice case study of the good neighbor agreement principles from our U.S. operations, whereby, we create cooperative models with stakeholders as we operate across regions and across the districts. Secondly, we will, therefore, strive to create modern mining tonnes, ensure that we operate within a sustainable environment conscience, we are to empower the people that we work with particularly local government and traditional authorities. And then lastly, ensure that we facilitate and catalyze economic growth where we operate. Grant has spoken about strengthening the flows of trade from our activities in the local economy. And this we will do, operating and acting with the end in mind. So along our life cycle of our operations, we'll find ourselves intervening firstly via our social and labor plans, ensuring that the social and labor plans deliver improvement and a positive impact in our social asset base. The second one, we'll leverage our land for high-impact projects and ensure that where we operate, we do not only leave the previous legacy of the mining industry. However, we leverage our land to integrate that special development, working with the various stakeholders. We will also strive to build capability institutions such as the traditional authorities and leverage our economic activities to empower local SMMEs. We also are cognizant of the housing and living standards of our employees, and we will strive for partnerships, which we have we are doing in South Africa already with human settlements and the housing development agencies to catalyze and to create special developments. For example, the project we are doing in Marikana extension 13 in our SA PGM as well as the proposed township in West Rand, which is to [ compress ] extension 4. We also have got various agricultural initiatives, which we believe that will leverage and unlock parallel economies such that when we leave the mining operations, we don't leave ghost towns as has happened in the past in South Africa. This, we believe, will strengthen our reputation through effective secular engagement, tangible socioeconomic development, which impacts sustainable livelihood beyond the life of mine. Thank you. Moving on. We are focusing on entrenching sustainability through economic, environmental and social transformation. As you know, social transformation is very critical in our industry, as I have just spoken about the legacy of the mining industry particularly in South Africa, but I think it's prevalent in most regions where extracted industry happens. We'll leverage our assets to ensure that we boost job creation. We also will operate within our social performance model with a social performance toolkit that keeps us honest within our compliance. Firstly, in the South African context, but also keeping up to standard with the voluntary codes of -- well, code council, ICMM, the TFS as well as the King Code IV of governance in South Africa within that perspective. Loyiso spoke earlier on about embedding human rights inside out. We do believe that the mining industry firstly needs to acknowledge its past, work towards improving lives as it is our imperative and purpose, but also create sustainable livelihoods that are going to last beyond the life of mine. This, we will do by delivering tangible value within our operating context, but also ensuring that we leave ZAR 0.20 of every rand spent in the districts where we operate, which will ensure that those districts thrive beyond the life of mine. For example, we will use our infrastructure to create socioeconomic development where we operate, and we will talk later on about the Bokomosa Ba Rona project that we are doing in the [ West Rands ]. However, that will create the benchmark for how we leave post-mining economies going forward. We will do this in collaboration with our stakeholders and ensuring that also our stakeholders are heard and listened to, and we implement grievance and complaints procedures that are aligned to regional and international best practices space. Our mining has the power to play a critical role in society to close daily quality gaps. This, we will do through various flows of value which we will create for our stakeholders. So we do believe that we have the power to drive socioeconomic transformation. And this value will be demonstrated via our shared value efforts. As you know, that our shared value is about creating superior value for all our stakeholders, which is a major shift from pure shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism. This slide demonstrates the value that we have created since the founding of Sibanye in 2013 up until 2022. Key numbers, there's highlights. Revenue has grown by almost 560%, salaries and benefits have grown by about 290%, and our socioeconomic development impact initiatives have grown by 90%. We do not only stop there. We also believe that our presence in the economy impacts the skills base for -- especially the mining industry, but secondly, the entire value chain across the mining industry. We also invest in socioeconomic development in CSI, again operating with the end in mind, ensuring that we also build portable skills for communities so that they can have meaningful participation in the economy where we operate. Lastly, we also paid taxes and royalties to the ZAR 6.5 billion. As seen in South Africa this year, this has come in handy for treasury as the mining industry collectively enabled some social relief fund. As we work with the end in mind, we believe that we can do more as a trusted stakeholder in social and economic partner, and this was demonstrated by interventions of business during the COVID pandemic last year as well as within the recent unrest events in South Africa. As we rebuild the economy, our business is starting to play a permanent role. We believe that this should be the ethos that embraces all the stakeholders in South Africa towards lasting socioeconomic impact. Beyond this, we also are mindful of leveraging our supply chain for local economic growth and ensuring that we use our SLP spend to optimize service delivery and leverage value flows through the various committee trust that we hold for meaningful and lasting social impact. Thanks. As we all know, South Africa has had an unfortunate event of Marikana, which led to a loss of life. We were not there in 2012 when the Marikana tragedy happened, but we believe that it is something that should not be associated with the industry. It is wrong. It has to be condemned with all the content it deserves. Going forward, we believe that this creates an opportunity for stakeholders to forge a new path and work together. So we have launched a program that is called the Marikana renewal, supported by the Archbishop Thabo Makgoba of Cape Town as the patron. We believe that this is a structured program that calls for all stakeholders to come together to achieve renewal and restitution. So this basically is based on an African concept of cycles of conversation, which we will call the Letsema engagement process effectively calling for all stakeholders to come together and shape the new legacy of Marikana. When we took over in Marikana, we made commitments to do 4 things. One was, having spoken to all the widows, we've acknowledged their pain. We have made certain commitments around finding an institution and closure for them. This was about ensuring that they all have got their houses. We also noted that the compensation from government had only gone to the 34 widows that -- whose husbands died to the hands of the state and some people that got injured and some others that got wrongfully arrested. There are 10 widows that have not found closure and restitution, but purely because the various cases are at various stages and the wheels of justice are grinding slowly. We have committed to support the pursuit of justice for these 10 widows and their families. And that we will do working together with like-minded institutions, NGOs and the legal fraternity. We also have set out the Sixteen-Eight Memorial Trust, which we had found in place at the time that we took over at Marikana. We've enhanced that. We've ensured that it is fully endeavored to see through all 141 beneficiaries until they finish education level as they wish. I think the flagship staff of that front has been Mandla Yawa, who this year, will be graduating with his PhD in agriculture. And we also have got 10 other graduates that have come through the system. We also have made a commitment to support the Bapo Ba Mogale in 3 ways. One is, we believe, in line with this sustainable development goals in creating functional institutions, and we will support capacity building for Bapo Ba Mogale to ensure that the [ acts ] and conduct themselves like a professional institution and a traditional authority. As some of you would know, Lonmin has actually gotten into an arrangement where certain business opportunities were given to Bapo Ba Mogale, and we had found that there was a lot of maladministration in some of those businesses with the flow of funds that was misused and has disappeared. We also know about the famous -- the account where 460-odd million have gone missing. We have committed to hire a forensic company that will do a forensic audit. To an extent that some of the moneys are recoverable, we will recover those monies and some of the monies that are not recoverable, we'll ensure that the institutions of justice go after those people that maladministered those businesses. We also have a lag of social restoration, which is about creating social programs that bring about change, visible change, in that community. I think one of those flagship projects is the clean project where we've got some systems, agricultural initiatives that have not only assisted in alleviating poverty and hunger in the area, but has got some income-generating capacity. We also have found that there's been lots of gender-based violence and we've launched a gender equality program, which has got various facets such as access to institutions for support and psycho-emotional support as well as ensuring that the victims are finding justice and closure that they require. Our SLP projects are supposed to be an add-on to functional municipalities with basic services. So we will focus on social infrastructure. We are mindful that if we want to make a lasting legacy, some of the add-on projects would have to be over and above SLP to make sure that basic services and basic amenities are taken care of. And we are committing at least ZAR 100 million this year over and above our SLP to deal with some of those social infrastructure and social amenity projects. And lastly, we believe that the recognition of the Koppie where the Marikana tragedy has happened needs to bring close and healing and reconciliation to all participants. So we've called all participants to get into the Letsema process to ensure that we do the 3 steps of -- on engage and create where we will create a socioeconomic path to create -- to bring about closure around Koppie and create a Koppie memorial. And ensure that as we go forward, we move forward together and ensure that the legacy of Marikana never ever repeats ourselves in this industry and under our watch. This lag will also bring about district development model participation, which is a stakeholder collaborative process that we focus on agriculture industrialization. As we reduce our footprint, we will also leverage our assets to support agricultural initiatives, the value chain, the logistics hub in Marikana and surrounding areas. And lastly, we'll develop sustainable enterprise-supplier development initiatives for the local SMMEs. Key to leveraging our assets for social closure is the flagship program, which we call the Bokomosa Ba Rona, which is about 3 phases. One is about program mobilization, which is where we are today. There's medium-term impact and there's long-term value creation. This is a partnership between Sibanye Stillwater, Far West Rand Dolomitic Water Association with strategic partners, being the Gauteng Province, West Rand Development Agency and the program managers, which are [ Talma ], [ CDH ] and [indiscernible]. The critical success factors of this program are about: us, beginning with the end in mind; and changing long-term economic sustainability; and integrating post-mining economies for sustainabilities. We believe that in doing this, we will create large-scale catalytic development with the 30,000 hectares of land that both Sibanye and Far West Rand Dolomitic Water Associations are contributing. This will facilitate entry for other industries. It will facilitate agroindustrial and commercial value chain, and it will develop an overarching post-mining closure blueprint for mining areas where we operate. The benefits of this project, just talking about key numbers, and medium-term and long-term development will create about 18,000 potential new jobs, which will be -- we will develop into full scale. We believe that it is potential to bring in about ZAR 1 billion wage deal, ZAR 7.6 billion potential CapEx in various activities from bio and ag to animal husbandry at integrated animal farming value chain. We also believe that this project will be a well- adding partner for ultimate success if all partners come together. So effectively call about all like-minded institutions like direct investment from developmental agencies as well as the banking industry. And some conversations are at advanced stages with potential partners for funding Sibanye Stillwater as to date putting funding of close to ZAR 20 million, and also some partners such as the AFDB has gotten on board with potential funding. And this keeps a good usage of our land as we plan for post-mining economy. I thank you. And I'm going to close here and hand over to Loyiso. Thanks.

Thank you, Themba. We've discussed in detail our commitment to sustainability through our portfolio of programs. It is the consolidation of all of these actions that will provide us with the greatest value and provide benefit directly for all of our stakeholders. The development of the environmental, the social and the governance outcomes are economically impactful. These design principles have been essential in our drive towards moving towards sustainability rather than the discrete actions of environment only, social only and governance only. Our commitment in sustainability is, of course, supported by robust protocols and an openness to setting significantly higher standards of rigor and accountability for ourselves. Our membership of ICMM is an example of this. We implement the International Council on Mining and Metals principles as a condition of membership, but also as a mechanism to lift significantly our work. ICMM has a global membership of 28 mining and metals companies and 28 regional commodity organization -- 38 apologies, regional commodity organizations. What it has allowed us to do is to undertake a deep introspection of our work and also to ensure that with the introspection comes an ability to obtain independent external assurance, in line with the global reporting initiative, the GRI and other principles. This commitment is applied across the group. As a result of our membership of ICMM and our commitment to other standards, thank you, [ Henrika ], we have been awarded a CDP rating of A on our climate change disclosure. In addition to this, we have, this year, entirely submitted ourselves to responding to the water CDP. For those of you that aren't aware of the CDP project and program, know that the level of disclosure that is required by bodies such as the CDP is extensive and, not only is it about reporting, but it is about to what extent has there been intrinsic understanding of the impact of the work we have undertaken. We believe that both on climate change and on water, we have progressed greatly. We align and are a member of the United Nations Global Accelerator Program and, of course, include our commitment to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The global accelerator program is aimed at activating the inclusion of SDGs into business priorities. And for us, our commitment has been significant. The presentation given earlier on, on our support of women in mining and to what extent we've been able to support diversity and inclusion is an example of how we've been able to lift those SDGs. We are a constituent of the FTSE (sic) [ FTSE4 ] Good Index Series. And FTSE, of course, is aligned to the Financial Times Stock Exchange Russell, the FTSE Russell. And we confirm -- and it confirms that Sibanye Stillwater has been independently assessed according to the FTSE Good criteria. And of course, we've satisfied the requirements to become a constituent of the Good Index Series. The importance of accolades is really to show and to evidence our commitment towards transparency, towards self-reflection and towards growth. We understand and we are committed towards a growth mindset, but that growth is underpinned by meaningful impact in respect of our work. The Task Force for Climate and Financial-related Disclosures (sic) [ Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures ] for example, has been in discussion since 2018 in the market with application and confirmed requirements only coming through this year. As of 2018, we had already included the outcomes and the recommendations coming out of TCFD. Those recommendations drove our understanding of our responsibility on the environmental impact and outcomes. So they've already been included within our work. What it remains for us to do is to commit to a time line within which we will be fully reflective of TCFD commitments. We have now matured at work, and we believe that by H1 2022, we will have been fully committed and aligned. Our sustainability maturity has been about our commitment to a process that improves and to a process that achieves meaningful outcomes for all of our stakeholders. And I'll pass you back to our Chief Executive, Mr. Neal Froneman, to conclude. Thank you.

Thank you, Loyiso. And I'm sure you would all agree with me that the people aspects have come through very clearly in today's delivery. As I said, I was excited to see the competence, the professionalism and the deep depth that we've got in our organization. So let me try and conclude without summarizing everything that was said. So as I said right at the beginning, ESG is, I think, pretty well understood today in terms of the components that make up ESG, environmental, social and governance. We've really moved forward to develop a sustainability strategy. And in fact, the value-creation strategy that is derived from that in terms of the growth in the company, and that is really designing and building a climate resilient -- a climate-change-resilient business. So you can see our central, sustainability has become to our business. So any suggestion that the mining industry is paying lip service to ESG, I think is completely wrong. I know all our peers are putting in a lot of hard work to doing the right thing in terms of ESG. I would like to think that we have presented a class-leading transition building on ESG to sustainability. So to me, that is one of the key highlights that I hope you all saw from today's presentation. As I've said, climate change resilience as an anchor is critical and no longer is M&A or value creation driven as a separate strategy. It is driven as part of our sustainability strategy. Our operations have clear roads to carbon neutrality that was well developed and presented in detail by Jevon. And I think you can see our organization is morphing into a resilient business when it comes down to climate change and our green metals strategy. In terms of water and airborne pollutants, we continue to show good progress. Of course, we haven't arrived -- I don't think we'll ever arrive in the metrics of environmental health and safety. It is a long journey of continuous improvements. But we have clear metrics, our targets are clear. And we've displayed a track record of delivery, and I believe Grant displayed that extremely well. In terms of social compacting, that remains our aim. Not all our stakeholders are there. We've made significant progress. We stepped up to the plate at Marikana, and I think you saw good examples of that. And it's one of the competencies and the qualifications that I think allow us to operate in the environment in South Africa and elsewhere in the world. It's not just South Africa, but South Africa is a pretty tough environment in terms of social compacting. But you can see we've taken that on and we're right at the front end of that, and stakeholder inclusivity is right at the core -- right from our ethos, our tree. We recognize that superior value creation for all stakeholders is an absolute necessity. And of course, we promote stakeholder capitalism. And we are not shy of saying a business needs to be profitable if that is going to be delivered on. Building on that point, the purposeful injection of economic into social and environmental balances the portfolio. I have made it public. We are not social partners. We are economic partners. We have very high social ideals, but we are economic partners that interface with our social partners and provide sustainability because of our economic contribution. And we must not forget that is the primary role of business. We are committed to increasing transparency around ESG issues. And as one of our Board members said, it's about radical transparency. It's tough. It is very tough, but we certainly have no hidden agendas. And we will continue to build on providing increasing transparency through our commitments to CDP declarations. Our commitment to TCFD. And of course, I did in one of my slides, highlight deeper governance and accountability. Ultimately, the climate-change-resilient business has resulted in a green energy metal sigmoid curve, which I believe is class-leading in terms of the combination of metals, the combination of recycling, the combination of tailings retreatment. And as we build that portfolio, I believe we will be very well positioned as we move into the 2030s with our base of PGM's morphing into the hydrogen economy. So we're well positioned. We're not scratching for ideas in terms of building a climate-change-resilient business. So with that, thank you very much. And we will now move into Q&A. And of course, I want to make sure that you all know there's another set of investor days on the 23rd of September. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Neal. We'll proceed with Q&A, the next set of question and answers. First one is from Bruce Williamson at Integral Asset Management for Loyiso. This applies to all countries, but concerning SA in particular, have you had any discussions with government to ensure that regulations and policy does not prevent you from achieving your targeted outcomes? Loyiso?

Thank you for that question, Bruce. Much appreciated. I think you would appreciate that at Sibanye, we have really taken a proactive approach towards engagement on both regulatory matters and policy matters around our industry. I'm assuming that when you're talking about regulations in this regard, you're talking about the Scope 3 emissions around energy generation. And yes, we have. You would note that the recent agreement by the minister on allowing organizations to generate up to 100 megawatt, I think, is an example of where we have actively engaged, of course, we didn't do that alone. We did that with industry. But we've always taken a view that where we believe there is something to be done and where the regulations and the policy framework doesn't allow you to do what's correct, we would always engage with a view to finding a positive outcome for all. So yes, we have engaged. In the South African framework, your question was also, is it only specifically about South Africa? Have we made the same engagements in the U.S.? We take that approach across all of our areas of operation. But to your view around whether there's limitations, for example, in the U.S., you would know that the U.S. and the Biden administration have recently made a commitment to moving across to solar-generated energy by 2050, which, of course, has an impact upon our commitments in the Montana area to move across to renewable energy. So have we experienced challenges? We don't think of them as challenges, we think of them as opportunities to find a better way to do things.

Thanks, Loyiso. The next question is from Chris Nicholson regarding carbon neutrality. So the question, I think I'll direct to Jevon, if I can. Why do you target carbon neutrality rather than net zero? The [indiscernible] says that based on existing reserve lives, many of your SA operations will either be closed or significantly depleted by 2040. So is being carbon neutral really that ambitious? Jevon, could you deal with that one, please?

Thanks, James, and happy to jump in here. True, some of the depletion of our emissions will result from natural mine closures. But we've been very careful in terms of our commitment in terms of the specific wording we've also chosen not necessarily to try to keep the system, but it's really around standards and common definitions available in the market. So carbon neutrality and net zero are used interchangeably by the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Net carbon neutrality is defined in terms of as to 2060. But however, there's no formal framework or standard in terms of net zero yet. There is one under development by the Science-based Target Initiative that's likely going to come out at COP26, and we are very aware of what that's likely going to include, and we will consider adopting that formal standard around next zero when it's published. However, what we will commit to doing is ensuring that our carbon emissions' pathway declines with -- the pathway required by science and to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees above preindustrial times. What we will continue to also do is adopt science-based targets. So in that respect, we really do have a science-based target initiative approved target for 2025. And then in terms of the other requirements around net zero is the use of offsets. We only intend to use offsets to really neutralize our ruminant hard-to-abate emissions, not necessarily to substitute our emission decline. So we're very cognizant of the definitions and the differences between them, and we will consider the adoption of the standard once it's published, but we thought it would be premature to do that at the moment considering that it's not publicly available yet. Thanks.

Thanks, Jevon. That's a very interesting response, thank you. The next 2 probably are directed to Neal, I think, at a high level. Following the recent announcement from the ANC government in South Africa regarding the 100-megawatt cap. What actual progress has been made in enabling Sibanye to proceed with its long-standing plans to build renewable generation capacity? Is there some government action to match the talk? Or has Sibanye encountered further bureaucratic obstacles?

Yes. Thanks, Chris. And I'm going to ask Jevon to come in on this one as well. Jevon is the Chairman of the Energy Intensive Users Group, so well positioned to discuss it in more detail. But certainly, as I said in the H1 presentation, you will remove 3 to 6 months of the current time line of projects. Probably more importantly, it reduces the risk. And therefore, you can use a slightly lower discount factor in terms of your commercial assessment. I think the other thing is there is commitment. There is no doubt, as set in recently a BUSA and a BLSA engagement, and there is no doubt that the government is trying very hard to remove obstacles and even try and implement some reforms. So absolutely no doubt there. It's still a difficult environment. And Jevon, perhaps you can pick it up there.

Thanks, Neal. Happy to jump in. Yes, I think we can view the lifting of the generation license threshold as very positive. It's indicative of where government's mindset is. It's open to private power generation in the South African context. Behind the scenes, there is movements in terms of updating the national wheeling framework. Eskom is embattling and establishing the independent transmission and system market operator, which will really open the market. We're also receiving a lot more support from Eskom through engagements with their executives and even at a ground level and their support of our renewable energy projects. Where we have engaged further with government is around the likes of updating of the integrated resource panel on a more regular basis, streamlining of government processes and then also just capacitating the likes of NERSA and Eskom to process the number of new private power generation projects that are going to go into the pipeline very soon.

Thanks. The next -- some of these, I'll just read them together. Why build a solar project with a 20-year PPA when none of your gold assets have 20-year life of mine? And what happens to these power plants post mine closure? And then secondly, if all SA miners increasingly move off the Eskom grid, will this not guarantee the collapse of Eskom? Maybe if we can deal with those 2 questions first, please.

Okay. Let me say that, first of all, I've been in the industry a long time and when you see a life mine of 13 years, it's probably not going to be 13 years, but be that as it may, let's park that. That's the underground life of mine, so you need to consider the fact that the Far West Rand Gold tailings retreatment business is going to be going a long time thereafter. So essentially DRD will benefit from that plant. But of course, there's wheeling, and I think that's becoming far more acceptable to the powers that be. And also, I want to say there's something else. I think that in the national interest, we should see this as a contribution to the future power constraints or the current power constraints, I should say. In terms of the collapse of Eskom, look, I don't think that every company is trying to become independent of Eskom. But as I've said publicly before, if Eskom doesn't clean up its act, irrespective of power shortages or power prices, those that manufactured products that get used in the rest of the world will not be able to sell those products, and Andre de Ruyter has taken that very clearly on Board against what is clearly very stiff opposition from the minister. But correctly so, we have to clean up our act. And I think we are not going to compromise our company with dirty energy, which doesn't allow us to prosper and have sustainability in terms of this new very green environment. But the intention is not to see Eskom collapse. I think the restructuring of Eskom will go a long way to ensuring that doesn't happen again. Let me just see, Jevon, if you've got anything to add to that.

Neal, just 2 things to quickly add there. I think beyond life of mine, we'd also look to use these projects to the benefit of the communities and our social development projects. So we're looking at the synergies in that respect. And then secondly, just in terms of the Eskom question, we are engaging with Eskom directly with Andre de Ruyter and his executive team as part of the industry, looking at how do we ensure Eskom sustainability as a partner beyond, beyond once we implement these large-scale projects. So we're in discussions with them to ensure their sustainability, ensure that we have the right mix of technologies such as they can control the grid. So that type of planning is going on in the background really.

Thanks. While we're on the topic, I'll just ask the last 2 questions and then I'm afraid we'll have to take a break for now. I'll answer or I'll ask the rest of the questions at the end of the next session. So the first one from Chris Nicholson is, what is the payback or breakeven in years on the solar and wind PPAs? Given that we talk about, we will be -- the electricity will be at a discount to forecast Eskom tariffs, what time period does the forecast relate to? And then the question from Leroy Mnguni. Again, the challenge with renewable energy seems to be the cost of storage capacity. Have you considered fuel cell power stacks where you produce hydrogen from the renewable energy as a way to reduce your reliance on Eskom power when wind or solar energy is not available?

James, it looks like we might have lost Neal there -- I've seen your --but I'm happy to jump in here.

I think so. Okay. Sorry.

So just in terms of payback, we're executing the projects on a PPA basis. So we all appoint project developers to finance, build, own and operate and later transfer these projects back to us. So in terms of capital out there, there's limited capital outlay on our part. We do need to sign up to a long-term offtake agreement in order to facilitate the project. But from day 1 of operation of these plants, we get electricity at a discount to our grid supplier. And that then allows us to generate returns from day 1 without having to expand that capital. Just in terms of the second question related to storage. We have assessed a multitude of different storage technologies from battery energy storage systems to hydro, to gravity, et cetera. And what we found is the most advanced technologies are still slightly capital restrictive in terms of -- we're seeing a decline in capital, but it's not quite yet there yet. So in about the next 2 years, I'd say we will definitely deploy battery energy storage systems as part of our renewable energy project. In terms of hydrogen, we view hydrogen as beneficial to our broader corporate strategy, but also in terms of our decarbonization pathway. We are investigating a number of hydrogen technologies, and we'll definitely deploy it when the timing is great and makes commercial sense. We are likely going to initiate a number of small proof of concepts in the interim just to understand that technology is better, et cetera. I hope that answers the question.

Thanks, Jevon. I think at this point, we'll take a break. The next session is going to start at half past 3 our time in South Africa. So we've got about a 5-minute break before we start with the next session. I'll carry over the rest of the questions to the end of that session. Thanks very much. [Break]

Welcome back everybody to the last session in today's Sibanye Stillwater Investor Day today. In this session, we'll be covering our South African gold operations so we're in the home stretch now so I hope you find this interesting. Thank you.

Good afternoon again, ladies and gentlemen and to all of our listeners online. It's a real pleasure to kick off Session 3 looking at our South African Gold operations and I hope to share with you some of the passion we still have for these operations, some of the real value that they've delivered over the years and the value that they can still deliver over the years to come. So thank you very much. I think as with any presentation of this nature, forward-looking information is contained as a safe harbor statement which I'll quickly take you through. The information in this announcement may contain forward-looking statements with the meaning of [indiscernible]. But, if I could please request you to read this in your own time. It does include some important information. Thank you. Okay, so moving on to our gold operations. I think as many of us know, this was really where the company started 2013 from some of the less known assets that were unbundled from gold fields and back then as it was known, Sibanye Gold. And our first task as a management team was to take these assets and enhance the sustainability of them. That was really achieved through aggressive cost cutting. We were able to cut about 25% of total costs out of these operations. That increased our flexibility in terms of our mining operations, increased our reserves and, therefore, increased our life of mine. And it was really off these core assets that we've been able to build our business, so not only our gold business through the acquisition of Wits Gold which included Burnstone, the Cooke operations and, more recently, DRD. And also the rest of the business which has put into PGMs and, more recently, into green metals. So this really has been a solid foundation on which Sibanye Stillwater has been built.But I daresay these assets in their own right have delivered significant value. For anybody who was a shareholder at the unbundling or who invested in the company in our early years, I daresay, you got back half of your value just in the first 4 years from dividends out of these assets alone. That excludes any of the significant capital appreciation and growth that you would have experienced as a shareholder. So substantial value from these assets, and over the coming slides, I hope that we can show you and share with you that we still believe that there is significant value still to come from these assets in the years to come. So a question we are often asked is why gold and how does it fit into our portfolio, and then fundamentally, there are 2 parts to that. I think the first one is that gold is countercyclical. We know during tough economic times, whenever metals [ back off ], gold thrives, and anybody who questions the safe haven status of gold only needs to look back over the last 24 months to see that it still fulfills that function. This gives us the opportunity to live our vision of delivering value to all stakeholders through essentially having exposure during tough economic times to gold cycles which tend to behave better. Secondly, I think we are fundamentally bullish on the long-term outlook of gold. There are some short-term headwinds in terms of rising interest rates and tapering of stimulus packages,but fundamentally, the unprecedented amount of lending and stimulus packages we've seen over the last decade inevitably will underpin gold as we see a more inflationary environment and heading towards sustained low or even negative interest rates in the time to come. Supply side we see peaking in the next couple of years. There have not been any significant gold discoveries over the last few years, so fundamentally, the long-term outlook for gold remains very positive. If we move on and take a look at our business as a whole, I think as we highlighted before, we started our operations back in 2012 with a total reserve base of 13.5 million ounces. That was fundamentally underpinned by our 3 core assets being Kloof, Driefontein and Beatrix. And if we look at where we are today, after 9 years, having already mined over 10 million ounces of gold, today, our reserve base stands at 15.5 million ounces. So in fact, higher than when we started back in 2012. A significant portion of those additional reserves have come from our 3 key assets, but also a portion through the addition of the acquisitions we've made specifically including Burnstone, which has recently been turned to account as well as DRDGold. I think this is best displayed in the graph here, which shows that when Sibanye Gold as it was then called was created by this stage of our lives, we were due to be a 500,000 ounce gold producer with less than 5 years of life left. Today, our gold business alone is still producing at about 900,000 ounces, and we're forecasting to be able to sustain that for at least 5 years out of the initial operations, which we were formed upon. We also have a long life with many of our assets well beyond 10 years. And I think we'll share with you how that positions us well relative to many peers in the industry. We have also created additional optionality through some of the acquisitions we've undertaken. Burnstone is a project that has now been approved, a long-life project that will add value to the overall gold business. That's been approved by our Board, and we commenced capital expenditure this year on that project. And in addition, in the Southern Orange free state, we have the De Bron and Bloemhoek projects which as has been discussed before, the opportunity to sustain the lives of the Free State operations through the inclusion of uranium, and these projects will certainly add a lot of option value in that event. So how do we stack up against our peers? Well, on a reserve and resource and life of mine basis, I think so often our larger assets, Kloof, Driefontein and Beatrix are perceived as being at the end of their life in decline and that is seen negatively. Well, yes, it's quite right. They are at the end of their lives, and they are in decline. They are never going to produce what they did in the hay day. But given the size and the status of these assets, even in decline, they still compare very favorably to many of the smaller assets that are being developed today by our peers. And these assets alone with lives extending well beyond 10 years is highly competitive to the assets of many of our international peers are mining and our projects that we are commencing in our investment in DRDGold are certainly among some of the longest life assets that exist in the industry. Overall, as a company, Sibanye Stillwater, when we look at ourselves as a combined precious metals producer. We are in the top 3 of precious metals producers. Now that gives us a substantial base to deliver off. But looking at our gold industry alone, it still remains a substantial business and in terms of production, still within the top 13 or 14 companies. And likewise, in terms of reserve, it's still got a substantial base. I think look forward in the coming slides to the team unpacking for you a bit more details about this business. And as I say, why we still believe it can add significant value in the years to come to all of our stakeholders. So with that, I'll hand over to Richard Cox, and thank you very much.

Thank you, Rich. Hello, everyone. My name is Richard Cox, and I'm the Executive Vice President of the South African gold operations. So our operations are located in what we call the Witwatersrand Sedimentary Basin. This is the greatest source of gold in the world. The basin largely extends along a long axis from the east of Johannesburg to the southwest of Welkom for more than 400 kilometers. We have 6 high-quality long-life assets with unrivaled production history. Kloof, Driefontein and Cooke operations in the West Wits near Carletonville; Beatrix operation in South Free State opportunities in the Free State near Welkom; and Burnstone project in the South Rand Goldfield near Balfour in Mpumalanga province. We also own just over 50% of DRDGold. However, our team does not manage these operations. So all in, when we take everything into account, the gold business has a resource base of just over 80 million ounces and a declared reserve of 15.5 million ounces. And today, we will speak about much of the 15 million ounces, but our team relishes in the opportunity to bring to account much more of what remains. Our workforce, including contractors, numbers 31,000 staff residing in different accommodation models very close to the operations. And clearly, given our size and impact where we operate, we are a significant economic contributor to provinces and regional economies, and we improve lives. I'd like to present the members of the South African gold team; Koos Barnard, our Senior Vice President for Mining Operations; William Osae, our Vice President of Technical including metallurgical operations and surface operations; Pieter Henning, our Senior Vice President for Finance; and Thusanang Moepeng, our Senior Vice President for Human Resources. I'm very proud to lead this team. This team is very experienced and up through the ranks. Managing the assets at this time of their life and our lives has great appeal to us and we see new possibilities. We see new opportunities for our operations and we are excited about adding value from our assets and today is about sharing with you how we are still able to create value. Here, we have our 3 core producing assets, Driefontein, Kloof and Beatrix. All of them are assets that have been built over a very long time. Look at Driefontein, for example, commissioned in 1952 and production to date of over 110 million ounces, impressive and significant. All of them underground assets with ore bodies at various depths and access through several vertical shaft systems. The shaft systems form an interconnected matrix that has endured over time and extracted predictably the gold from the reefs. The trend has been increased levels of extraction over time or expansion and now sustaining the operations by extracting remainder reserves from much fewer shafts. This requires new skill sets, and we have those skill sets. So you would be correct to observe that it is a lot to maintain with many moving parts. However, we see opportunities for value. Some of these opportunities are, for example, at Driefontein reconfiguring the 13 shaft operations to support D1, D4 and D5. And I must tell you that within previously thought low-grade blocks spanning 200 meters by 200 meters or 40,000 squares within the VCR, we are now discovering high-grade channels that can sustain opportunity-specific mining. We've had to change our readiness horizon, the speed between discovering and exploiting these opportunities from existing infrastructure. We see these channel opportunities at D1 and D5. These opportunities are not yet in plan, and we look to bring them into account quite quickly from existing predeveloped infrastructure. In addition to the success at the Kloof in transitioning to secondary reefs, now I'm talking about the Middelvlei Reef compared to the VCR. We are busy with the drop-down project at K4, providing access to fresh ground between the levels 45 and 47. And at Beatrix, we also highlight the [ buyers ] of reef uranium deposit, and this holds possibility for life extensions beyond 2025. We own significant amounts of vacant occupation land that lends itself to solar power generation. And 1 such example is the 50-megawatt solar project being [ dusted off ] for eventual construction at the Kloof operations. And finally, I'd like to mention water. And so water we pump from Kloof, Driefontein and Cooke operations. Quantities are significant and in excess of 200 million liters per day. We can see a time when this water will be the next prized commodity, and we hold a valuable resource. Stuart and the team have plans for value creation, and they will share a little later in the presentation. So you may ask, what is it that we see. What we see are world-class assets, we see a team able to deliver promised value to stakeholders, and we see opportunity. We present here our 10-year plan of production and cost. Notably, the last few years have been tough with safety-related stoppages weighing in 2018, labor stoppages in 2019 and COVID-19 impacting both '19 and '20. We are happy to say that our production has normalized, and we forecast a steady production profile for the next 5 years of approximately 1 million ounces per year, and that includes DRDGold. And I must add that 1 million ounces per year of production is a significant gold producer over the coming 5 years. And we look forward as well to the contribution from the Burnstone project as from 2024. We are forecasting a gradual planned decline in production when the Beatrix operation reaches end of life in 2025. We highlight 2 cost trends, operating cost; and within the operating costs, this has a component of overhead that we are tackling through our Project 3B in particular would highlight the opportunities we see a little later. And also in the all-in sustaining cost and contained therein is the ore reserve development costs as well as sustained business capital costs. We are seeing opportunities to reduce operating cost. And we are taking a much closer look at the overhead structure through our 3B project and with some clever reconfigurations by the team, we can see opportunities that will deliver value. Our predevelopment costs will reduce as ore bodies become fully developed with reef horizon extraction being the main cost. Same business capital will reduce over the maintained assets as they are no longer required, but also, we will spend smartly in areas of infrastructure optimization and renewable energy and receive a good return. I would also like to see the upside from the channels I was mentioning earlier in the Driefontein area that the team are discovering within the VCR horizon at D1 and D5. We see in the slide the head grade and recovery percentages per operation for the next 10 years. Both Kloof and Beatrix operations head grades are largely in line with the life of mine reserve grades and also highlighted is our highest grade recovered gold from the Kloof-KP2 metallurgic plant. Kloof grades will remain or benefit from increased volumes from the K4 deepening project and the timely mining of the K3 pillar from K4. We're also looking forward to rolling out the gravity concentration circuit at Beatrix and that will improve recoveries going forward at that operation. Driefontein's head grades increased from the eventual extraction of the large pillars protecting current shaft infrastructure. Example is the mining of the D4 pillar, which will significantly increase grade and offset lower extraction rate in the mine and lower throughput rate in the metallurgical plant. I must reiterate, as highlighted by Rich, is that we are extremely discerning when it comes to capital expenditure. And the focus is on cost discipline across the business. and this includes our capital expenditure profile over the next 10 years. There are significant cost and cash flow benefits from our planned reduction in capital expenditure, aligned to our slowing need for predevelopment going forward and aligned to our reduction in operating infrastructure and associated running costs. The project capital will peak in 2022 and 2023 with a lot of work that needs to get done in next year for which we are preparing our readiness. So ore reserve development will also peak in next year and then steady decline by ZAR 1 billion by 2025. And the reason for the decline is from the slowdown at Driefontein from 2025 and the end of life at Beatrix. Note that the ORD also includes the Burnstone expenditure expected from 2023 and 2024. Same business capital declines to 0 at Beatrix and includes the expenditure forecast from 2023 at Burnstone. Our infrastructure optimization project expenditure driven mostly at the Kloof operations will peak in 2022 and the bulk of the work to be completed in 2024. The Kloof deepening project scheduled for completion in 2023. Burnstone growth capital also peaks in 2022 and scheduled for completion in 2026. So in summary, the capital expenditure peaking in 2022 with expenditure of just shy of ZAR 5 billion at ZAR 4.9 billion and reducing to ZAR 2.1 billion in 2025. This sets our business up and with significant flow through to cash flow relative to 2022, and we see that will have a margin enhancement expected to be approximately ZAR 60,000 per kilogram by 2025. Thank you very much, and I'll now hand over to Pieter Henning.

Thank you, Richard, and good day, everybody. If we look at our performance over the last 3 years, it's fair to say that the business has been severely impacted by business interruptions from 2018 with the safety incidents that we experienced at Kloof and Driefontein. In the latter half of 2018 and 2019, the business was severely impacted with the industrial actions on the back of wage negotiations. Rolling into 2020, we've had the impact of COVID-19. While we still had significant free cash flow in 2020 on the back of higher gold price, it's evident that the business is highly geared to the gold price, which is also evident in 2016. Richard Stewart has also highlighted that from 2014 to 2017, this business did generate free cash flow, helping to the growth of the bigger business. If we look at our unit cost measures at the bottom graph, it is evident that these 3 years has played in heavily on our unit cost. As we will discuss a bit later, we've got a high fixed cost base. And as a result of those high fixed costs in the short term when we have business interruptions, these -- our unit costs are inflated because we obviously divide the high cost base with the units produced within that period. If we look at 2021, which was presented a couple of weeks ago. Our unit cost is also a bit higher on the back of -- as a result of some safety incidents that we experienced this year, but mainly on the -- as a result of higher capital spend, which we will also touch on later on in the slides. If we look at our main cost drivers, [ 61% ] of our cost basket consist mainly of labor and electricity. These 2 baskets have increased 2% to 3%, respectively, over the period from 2016 to 2021 while the other cost baskets contractors, stores and others have actually reduced over the same period. If we get to mine labor and the average and therefore, looking at the average cost of employee over this 5-year period, this cost has increased by approximately 18% above inflation if we assume a 5% per annum inflation rate. When we look at electricity, our average cost -- total cost basket has increased 32% over this 5-year period, while we actually achieved a 13% consumption reduction over the same period, working towards that CO2 carbon emissions going forward. On the left-hand corner that we talk to our total working cost, which is approximately ZAR 20 billion. As is evident from 2017, 2018, when we had to restructure the business on the closure of Cooke and even in 2019 on the back of restructuring Driefontein, it is evident that we are able to reduce our total cost basket when we get to restructuring the business. We will discuss a couple of the fixed/variable cost ratios on the next slide. If we look at our fixed/variable cost ratio, 65% of our cost base is deemed fix in the short term. We have to discuss this fixed/variable ratio with caution because this is not a real representation of the ZAR 20 billion, as discussed at the previous slides. This is a representation of our current cost profile and will be seen as variable as we effectively have to close infrastructure or operations in the long term. This 65% of our cost base is being driven by mainly labor and electricity as shared on the previous page. We unfortunately have to incur that cost when we have lower production, hence, the high unit cost reduction that I've talked to in the earlier slides. If we start reviewing our cost per activity, we will notice that 81% of our cost base is driven by operational costs, whereas 19% of our cost base is driven by overheads. We've recently, not that operational cost is not important, but we've recently started a project referred to as Project 3B with the objective of reducing our overhead cost profile 5% or from ZAR 3.8 billion to ZAR 3 billion. This overhead cost basket contains mainly of insurance, security, training, employee accommodation and employee transport. The initiatives that we will embark on in reducing this cost basket is by consolidating accommodation facilities, consolidating our office space. as a result of COVID, more people work from home and are effectively selling more houses. We also then will optimize transport associated with these footprint reductions. These reductions and the reviews of our cost base have other consequences and benefits to the business. Concurrent rehabilitation is enabled, and we can also obviously reduce electricity, water and secure associated security costs and associated that comes with these footprint. We start looking at the capital on the next slide. As highlighted by reduced cost, our capital profile is declining over life. But it is important to note that our capital investment in the first -- in this year and over the next 2 years, are a bit inflated as a result of 2018, 2019 and 2020 business interruptions we had. We effectively had to defer some of our capital spend over these 2 -- from 2019, 2020 into 2021. If we look at ore reserve development, the left-hand top, our ore reserve development is reducing the line -- the life of mine. It's actually reducing with our life of mine profile as we have 24 to 35 months -- 25 to 32 months of ore reserves already predeveloped. If we look at stay-in business capital, again, elevated in 2021, but thereafter reducing to a more stable position but no way reducing our capital spend on this critical basket, as can be seen from Kloof being a constant number over life of mine. Also driving to the higher capital expenditure in 2021 and 2022 and '23 is the investment that we're doing in optimizing our infrastructure, especially on the growth operations. Koos will -- Barnard will share more detail around the benefits and the detail of the investments that we're making on Kloof. Exciting that we've announced at the beginning of this year, the investment and the project investment into Burnstone. Burnstone, with Kloof 4 deepening project. It's also resulting in an elevated capital spend, especially in 2022 and 2023, whereafter it will reduce in line with the project development and delivering on its project completion. Ralph Lombard will share more detail on Burnstone, also in a later couple of slides. Thank you. On that note, I hand over to Koos.

Good afternoon. I'm Koos Barnard. I'm the Senior Vice President responsible for the mining in the gold segment. The slide that you see is outlining a transverse level plan on the mining area of the Kloof complex. Shafts can be seen on the plan as Kloof 1 shaft, it's a mine shaft. There is 2 sub shafts. And to the right of that, Kloof 3 shafts, which is outlined with the rectangular box, the red one. And then to the far left Kloof 4 shaft with its subshaft infrastructure. Not visible on the plan is Kloof 7 and its subshaft to the left of Kloof 4 shaft. I will explain the rectangles as we discuss the content, all of which delineate ore reserve, which potentially can be mined from alternative infrastructure. The objective of the infrastructure optimization is a planned reduction of fixed infrastructure and associated costs and then also the optimization of capacity of the remaining infrastructure. This whole process was already started back in 2019. It further involves development of our long-life shafts, extraction of remaining reserves which facilitate the closure of the shorter-life shafts. The Kloof infrastructure project is primarily focused on the early orderly closure of the K3 complex. The extraction of remaining Kloof 3 shaft reserve. Well, therefore, we facilitate the Kloof 1 shaft, the 24 to 31 levels, 2 larger rectangles, the blue and the green one outlines that area on the plant. And then also Kloof 4 shaft, which is from 39 to 42, and that's a smaller rectangle at the bottom of the plan. The closure of the Kloof 3 shaft complex will therefore result in the reduction in overhead costs and result in lowering paylimits. In this case, from above 1,700 same grams to below 1,670 grams per tonne, ensuring the economic viability of the low rate secondary to reduced output of the Kloof reefs, supporting a higher throughput and production over the life of mine. Optimization of the capacity utilization of Kloof 1 and 4 shaft, ultimately hoisting capacity is taken up, and it will improve productivity at a long-life Kloof 4 shaft. Additional reserves from Kloof 3 will also be mined from Kloof 4 shaft. And as I said, that's the green -- the little green rectangle at the bottom of the plan. Thank you. Some key statistics in '20 to '21 terms. The paylimit reduction, as mentioned earlier, increased the Kloof mineral reserves by 1.1 million ounces to 4.6 million ounces by enabling economic extraction of the secondary reefs. Kloof reef, which is sitting approximately 40 to 60-meter above the VCRs, we're currently mining, it's been targeted at Kloof 1, Kloof 7 and Kloof 8 shafts. This will result in the Kloof average steady-state production maintained a 350,000 ounces per annum over the life of mine. If I look at elements of the Kloof integration project. Kloof 8 shaft expansion project is designed to increase the production of the shaft by 40%. This shaft historically mined extensively on VCR and Middelvlei reef to a lesser extent, now targeting and mining essentially on the Kloof reefs, which is a steep dipping secondary reef above the VCR at an average grade of about 1,000, 2,500 centimeter grams per tonne. It's a single shaft with good infrastructure. And the current exploration development is done on 3 levels, which is 14, 15 and 16 level. Kloof 4 to Kloof 3 shaft integration designed to access to Kloof 3 sub-vertical shaft reserves on the longer life Kloof 4, reduced infrastructure cost by closing down the K3 infrastructure and improve capacity utilization. That is purely to fill up the Kloof 4 wasting infrastructure and capability. These mining targets remain in deep level ore reserves previously mined from Kloof 3 shaft on the VCR. As I said, that's the small little rectangle on the plan. Kloof 4 development reached the Kloof 3 boundary and is ideally positioned to mine 39, 40, 41 and 42 level. I then look at Kloof 1 to Kloof 3 shaft integration. It's designed to access Kloof 3 sub-vertical reserves from Kloof 1, reduce infrastructure costs by closing down Kloof 3. And then better capacity utilization, that's to fill up the Kloof 1 wasting, rock wasting capacity and infrastructure. Those mining targets, the 2 larger rectangles in the Kloof -- between Kloof 1 and 3. Opening up is progressing on 24 to 31 levels. In doing so, Kloof reefs between Kloof 1 and Kloof 3 is also targeted to eventually mine out the remaining VCR reserves previously mined from Kloof 3. Kloof 4 to Kloof 7 Shaft. This is designed to improve productivity at Kloof 4 Shaft through increased face time. Kloof 4 is the deepest operation and extends its mining below the current infrastructure of Kloof 7. By setting up declining infrastructure from 43 level to 40 level, the material can be transported via K7 to this mining area. This reduces traveling distances extensively and increases face time for the mining crews, which we'll be mining in this area. All tonnes produced in this area will still be hoisted at the Kloof 4 infrastructure. Kloof 3 surface closure. Establish a refrigeration system independent of Kloof 3, all the other clear shafts once the Kloof 3 subshaft closure is affected. Kloof 3 refrigeration machines will be relocated to Kloof 7 Shaft. The cooling capacity dependency from Kloof 1 will then be provided from Kloof 7 shaft. This will result in total closure of the Kloof 3 complex. Some provision made for the closure of Kloof 3 surface and all the integration projects discussed in the slide. Kloof 1,2, 3 opening up will continue over the life of mine. And then lastly, the Kloof 4 to 7 project will continue up to the end of 2024. The integration project together with the drop-down project will result in a steady state production profile of approximately 350,000 ounces per annum over the life of mine. The Kloof 4 shaft deep link project. This project extends the mining of VCR below infrastructure at Kloof 4 to 46 and 47 level. Project involves the development of a 10-degree trackless decline, related infrastructure for ventilation, chairlift and the rock climbing facilities to facilitate access to the planned levels. Conventional mining is planned on these levels and the decliners have already been developed to below 46 level, and horizontal development is already progressing on 46 level. Most recently, permission has been obtained from the DMRE to perform full cooperations on this development and together with multi-blast conditions established will now speed up the development of the decline. Peak funding for this project is in 2021 as well as in 2022 and includes refrigeration infrastructure and trackless mining equipment. The estimated capital cost to completion of the project is ZAR 687 million over the next 3 years. The mining below infrastructure adds significant ounces to the mining life of Kloof 4 as well as to the Kloof complex. Steady-state production will be above 150,000 ounces per annum over the local mine. I will now hand you over to Ralph Lombard, the Senior Vice President responsible for Burnstone project.

Thank you, Koos, for introducing me, and hi, everyone. So Burstone is a greenfield project, which will ensure a long-life shallow to intermediate depth mine. The 1 thing you must note about Burnstone, it has already been extensively redeveloped. And this includes vertical shafts for material rock wasting ventilation, a decline for access for TMM machines, a metallurgical plant and its associated infrastructure, surface workshops and other offices. The project will insure a life of mine of -- in excess of 20 years. And it must be noted that we already have 9.1 million ounces of resources available at Burnstone and also 2.2 million ounces of reserves. Burnstone is lined next to the small town of Balfour. This region has quite a lot of challenges with socioeconomic issues. And it must be noted that the unemployment rate in this region is more than 30%, of which youth is standing at more or less 44%. Both the Burnstone project and mine will enhance the socioeconomic stability by creating 2,500 jobs in the long term, but it also will create meaningful opportunities for procurement, SMME development and skills transfer. At Burnstone, we'll be mining the Kimberley Reef at an average depth of 550 meters, going up to 1.05 kilometers by utilizing mining methods, which is well known to Sibanye-Stillwater. Project capital of ZAR 2.3 billion will be spent over the next 6 years. This will establish a sustainable mine and the capital includes the finalization of infrastructure, the acquisition and the refurbishment of TMM fleet as well as equipment and setting up the required ore reserves. An additional ZAR 1.5 billion preproduction capital will ensure that there's enough inventory to start commercial production by 2024. And by that stage, we will have a fully operational metallurgical plant and associated infrastructure. We expect to produce around 138,000 ounces of gold when we reached steady state with an average incremental operating cost of ZAR 419,000 per kilogram over the life of the mine. This will result in a net present value of ZAR 0.9 billion and an IRR of 20%. Using the commodity prices assumptions of USD 1,500 per ounce for gold and an exchange rate of 15%. It must be noted that at spot that the NPV is more than ZAR 3 billion. Thank you, I am handing over now to Jevon, which will take you through sustainability.

Thanks very much, Ralph, and pleasure talking to everyone again. It gives me a great pleasure to deep dive into our energy and decarbonization strategy by SA gold operations. If we look at our South African gold operations, as a result of their structure and debt, they are inherently energy-intensive, accounting for 51% of our group energy requirements. As a result, there are also very carbon-intensive. One inherent advantage that they have relative to peers that operate open cast remote gold mines is that they are largely electrified. And as a result, 83% of the current greenhouse gas emissions stem from electricity, specifically Eskom's coal-fired power stations. 5% of that is associated with the care and maintenance of the Cooke operations, which really just highlights the importance of finding a permanent closure solution to not only reduce associated emissions but also to reduce the fixed cost components that Pieter Henning mentioned earlier. If we look forward, we anticipate the greenhouse gas emission profile of these operations will decline in line with their production profile and as renewable energy increases penetration at a national level. We, however, have a number of active interventions that we're currently proceeding to accelerate the decarbonization. One of the key contributors -- contributions is our advanced energy management, which not only reduces fixed cost to the business, but last year achieved 105,000 tonnes of CO2 reduction in 2020. One of the key enablers was the deployment of digital twins to energy-intensive infrastructure that allows the identification of both energy waste and energy efficiency opportunities. Last year, we also replaced the Beatrix coal boiler with an electrode steam boiler and heat pumps, which has allowed the reduction of just over 14,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent. I'll shortly speak to our solar project for these operations, but these operations also enjoy the benefits of our wind strategy, where the remote wind projects will allow us to yield renewable energy to these operations. An existing flagship project is our Beatrix methane to power project, which currently produces nominally between 1 to 2 megawatts on a continuous basis and displaces about 20,000 tonnes of CO2 per annum. This is also a UN team development mechanism project that has generated just short of 290,000 tonnes -- sorry, tonnes of CO2 or 290,000 carbon credits to date. We are also exploring some technology opportunities to displace the remainder of our diesel on these operations, including on Ralph's projects deploying battery electric vehicles at Burnstone. Going forward, the focus remains on electricity with also exploring opportunities related to fugitive mine methane and diesel. As a result of the structure of the mine, as I mentioned, largely electrified, renewable energy will be the strongest decarbonization lever we can pull. On this basis, we initiated a solar photovoltaic project back in 2014 on sites adjacent to our Driefontein and Kloof operations. That project was, however, historically delayed due to regulatory and Eskom constraints. However, those have now been alleviated and we've elected to reprogress these projects. Currently, the intent is to develop a 50-megawatt PV project and will directly supply the Kloof operations by a 132 kV overhead line. The site is in close proximity to the Kloof operations and is currently permitted for up to 200 megawatts with the majority of key consents and approvals already in hand, including the environmental authorization, the rezoning, et cetera. The project will be executed on a power purchase agreement basis where a third party will be appointed to finance, build, own and operate the plant on a 20-year basis, and sell us the electricity through the agreement. This will afford us electricity at a 30% to 50% discount to grid-supplied electricity escalating at CPI from day 1 with minimal outlay from the business. Beyond life of mine, given that life of mine extends to 2034, the power will be used for the care and maintenance pumping, local tailings projects and then wheeled to our other long-life assets across South Africa. From an accounting perspective, this will be recognized as a lease liability and a right-of-use asset. However, due to the structure of the PPA, there are no minimum payments due, so it's effectively represented as a value of zero. Concurrently to the final permitting processes, we executed an expression of interest earlier this year, where we got an overwhelming response from the market in terms of willing project developers. We've now progressed this through to a request for quotation that's underway, where we intend to appoint the preferred project developer in the next 2 months. In the current plan, we plan to reach financial close by midyear next year, beginning construction shortly thereafter and then bringing the plant into commercial operation by 2023. One of the key benefits we can potentially link these projects with some of our social projects in the Bokamosa Ba Rona, an agri-industrial project in the area. And I'll hand over now to Grant Stuart, our Senior Vice President of Environmental who can talk to this.

Thanks, Jevon, and good afternoon to everybody. The gold operations pumped some 250 million liters of water a day and discharge 200 million liters per day thereof. The operations also purchased in some 20 million liters of water a day at a cost of ZAR 130 million per annum. This is in itself an opportunity to become potable water independent. We have made some significant inroads into this endeavor with our Cooke plant and our Ezulwini plant completely water independent of potable sources. We are well on our way with Driefontein which is currently approximately 90% independent and Kloof will be 33% independent by the end of this year. Recognizing the pressure on the current potable water systems, we are seeing increasing pressure on the integrated Vaal River system with Rand Water imposed volume curtailment initiatives and increasing phenomenon. One base drop that we consume from the potable water system is water available to a developing town or needy community. As indicated in the ESG presentation earlier, our water conservation and water demand management drivers to ensure efficient and effective utilization of our water resources with minimum impact on the surrounding water resources and ensure availability of water resources for effective ecosystems surrounding communities and our operations. To support our effective and efficient water utilization drive, we have a total consumptive specific water use target, which we measure in kiloliters per tonne processed. Performance against this indicator is formally measured and reported on quarterly with monthly tracing and monitoring. Fundamental to reporting on our total consumptive specific water use target is the ability to monitor, measure and report water flows at site level. Site level accounting and assessment is intended to help develop comparable and material information as the foundation for accurate and consistent external reporting. This technology also supports 2 critical management tools: one, our predictive water balance models to assess future water balance movements and the variable climatic change imposed scenarios; and two, 5-year water conservation water demand management plans, driving initiatives to improve water management on each of our sites. Alignment with ICMM and transparent disclosure is an important part of how we operate. This is why we have recently for the first time disclosed the Water CDP. Our gold operations in the West Rand are overlain by dolomitic aquifers with the result of very significant water ingress. Continued pumping of ingress water from deep workings has placed an enormous financial burden on these mines that are, in some instances, no longer revenue generating. On the other hand, it is a well-established fact that improved water supply and sanitation boost economic growth and contribute greatly to poverty eradication. Something that South Africa and the West Rand desperately need. Notwithstanding economic opportunity, we have regulatory hesitancy failing to lead the region to prosperity, hiding behind incompetence and the 1 environmental system inefficiency. This is not the only factor that compromises regional growth and development. Fading municipalities and the inability to maintain basic infrastructure, resulting in uncontrolled sewage discharge into our river systems and resulting sink holes are illustration of further missed opportunities, failing law enforcement, the ability -- the inability rather to control the swell of illegal mining, sabotage of infrastructure and theft of cables, powering infrastructure to pump and treat acid mine drainage, yet more of our reality. I paint a grim picture, but these are not complex problems to solve when there is a willingness to make a difference and align on a common regional vision. Investing in water is a sound opportunity. Improved water resource management significantly improves productivity with economic sectors. This is certainly true for our envisaged post-closure scenario for the West Rand, where we see Bokamosa Ba Rona, an agri-industrial socioeconomic solution energized through the reliable supply of water. Yes, there are green shoots. Our collaboration with Rand Water, where Rand Water have stated the need to augment their current volumes from between 400 million to 600 million meters per day by 2027 and also the draft mine closure strategy. That speaks to the heart of collaborative regional closure. But who will lead this? Who's the competent authority to deal with this? That's the question. Of all the uncertainty, 1 thing is clear, maintaining deep level pump stations and shaft infrastructure to continue to pump in perpetuity at huge expense, and at risk to human life is not the solution. It is not going to support economic growth and development of the region. Rewatering and the natural reestablishment of the dolomites with access to water closer to surface has to be considered. Let's drop down into the case study of Cooke. Cooke is not unique when you look at closure from a sector perspective. There are 4 similarities that are evident, especially as mines move to close. A decommissioned mine following a depletion of resource, contiguous interconnected mines, aggressive water, unsafe illegal mining. Comprehensive studies, both engineering and environmental support closure applications, all very similar scenarios across our mining region. Yet the authorization for closure, despite following the applicable legislation, is not forthcoming. In fact, I'm not aware of any closure certificates having been awarded in the mining environment. This can't be good for an economy begging for investment. Clearly, we need our regulators to deal decisively with the elephant in the room. Back to the closure of Cooke where we pumped some 100 million liters of water a day at a cost of around ZAR 500 million per annum. Cooke 4 is interconnected with our own Cooke 3 and our neighbor -- and the neighboring mine who ironically commissioned the plugs between the mine and Cooke 4 for the purposes of rewatering, again, with sound engineering and environmental specialist studies and support. We, ourselves, have studied extensively the risks associated with the solution over the past 4 years and have the support for rewatering from a number of corners, including conditional support from the Department of Water and Sanitation and the Federation for Sustainable Environment, whose perspective is to manage rewatering whilst the mine is still operational and can be held accountable as opposed to a liquidation and the movement of the liability to state. We will continue to protect our stakeholders' interest and ensure learnings from Ezulwini mine. And those learnings are embedded into our future operations at Driefontein and Kloof and Beatrix as we close. We constantly carry on with the same process and expect a different outcome. Things must change, and that requires bold action. We must start with the end in mind for us to achieve an agreed safe, stable, nonpolluting regional post mining solution supporting sustainable post-mining communities and conservation areas and ecosystems. I had mentioned earlier, Bokamosa Ba Rona and will elaborate on this in the slide coming. The development of this blueprint is a critical success factor and a key outcome that gives meaning for our closure plans. All initiatives, including concurrent rehabilitation are costed in accordance with our closure strategy and plan. The gold operations have an annual assessed closure liability of some ZAR 4.6 billion, of which 83% is funded. Those costs will go towards the closure of the end state. We have also significantly advanced our concurrent rehabilitation strategy aligned to our closure plans with the transaction with DRDGold, where we elected tailings assets and plant infrastructure for an equity interest into DRDGold. The transaction was key to our service -- is key to our service remediation strategy and environmental rehabilitation program and more importantly, to address the impacts of tailings dust on local communities and the environment. We're also advancing our footprint reduction exercises. The processing of waste rock, the filling of pits as in the Middelvlei pits that you can see on your right-hand side where we've utilized and leveraged the skills of local communities to fill those pits and eradicate the social ills associated that keeps playing in and around, especially in hot summer rainy conditions. We've also looked at the donation of infrastructure where appropriate to local communities and municipalities as part of our infrastructure for impact. Bokamosa Ba Rona means future in Setswana. This is our blueprint of a deliberate transition from a mining economy to a post-mining economy through regenerative agriculture. The BBR program, as we call it, aspires to build a globally competitive inclusive environmentally sustainable and diversified economy with communities on the West Rand through facilitating large-scale development and socioeconomic empowerment. This will be achieved through large-scale agro-industrial and renewable energy projects that create and sustain thousands of jobs and enabling environment for the entry of previously disadvantaged entrepreneurs into the West Rand District Municipality of Gauteng. The program expiration will be achieved through the consolidation of supply and demand, aggregated resources within the integration of renewable energy. The program will achieve this by establishing early stage economic development enterprises to prove the concept followed by large-scale regenerative catalytic agricultural projects with expert operators that bring skills, networks, infrastructure and supply chains with capacity to create an enabling environment for the entry of small and emerging farms. A venture capital fund that is currently in the process of being established and capitalized will manage and host the capital used for the implementation of the program. The investment vehicle will invest in early-stage catalytic operations with a long-term investment horizon and high potential for good returns. The large-scale nature of the BBR program will allow the venture capital fund to diversify its interest across a range of operators and subsectors, producing different agricultural products, enabling it to mitigate some of the inherent risks within the agricultural industry. I'll now hand back over to Rich for the conclusion. Thank you.

Grant, thank you very much and to Rich Cox and the rest of the team, thanks very much for sharing that with us. So if I could try and I guess, just wrap up what has been said and shared with you over the course of the discussions. I think, hopefully, the first point that you've taken away out of these discussions is that we still have substantial assets. We have great assets. We have a world-class management team and that together means that we have a combination that can continue to add value for a substantial period still to come. Now then critically important, these are high-grade operations, and that gives us flexibility to manage them appropriately during the inherent downturns. I think we've heard a lot from Grant and Jevon and the team around embedding ESG and some of the real low-hanging fruit and opportunities we have around the environmental possibilities that we have. From my side, a significant point is the social side as well, which these operations do impact on. As we know, in the mining industry, the dependence to each 1 of our employees prior to COVID was roughly 10:1. I daresay today, that number could well be higher, which means these operations sustain the livelihoods of over 300,000 people. And when we've been faced with a tough task as we were in 2018 around the sustainability of these operations, I'm very proud to be part of the team and pleased that we've been able to turn them around get the operations back on to a stable footing and to be able to contribute significantly to the surrounding communities and economies in which we operate. I think thirdly, operational excellence, as has been highlighted, we have had a tough few years. We've had several significant operational disruptions. And it's very pleasing that despite the difficulties of operating under COVID, we've now had a few quarters of consistent, steady operation, and we are starting to see that coming through to the benefit of the operations and being able to get back to a steady-state position, which is critical in operations of this nature to be able to be sustainable going forward. Cost management is key. I think we are completely aware and open to the fact that these operations are high cost or fixed cost operations in the short term, as Peter shared with you. I think we're also very open to the fact that while the team is doing some very smart things around continuously improving operations and finding areas of new ground to mine, we are not going to get significant growth out of these assets in the years to come. Certainly not significant growth that's going to impact on unit costs. Therefore, cost management becomes absolutely critical to being able to survive those tough times and put, just off in a position to have real leverage to gold during the good times. And that is an aspect that requires input and support from all stakeholders. As you have seen through the presentation, we are actively addressing our footprint, looking at ways to increase the efficiencies in which we mine, addressing our overhead costs, looking at new aspects around ESG and Power Solutions, all of which contribute to reducing that cost base. But to truly get the sustainable, all stakeholders need to come to the party, and that will position us well to leverage off these assets for a period of time to come. In terms of capital allocation, we have heard about the Burnstone project, and that certainly is a project we believe will add value in the years to come. And hence, the reason we're investing in that. But also very key to get the capital discipline right in our core operations that, that remain, invest appropriately to ensure the efficiency over the remaining lives of mine, but also manage that capital in a responsible manner that will have a positive impact on our all-in sustaining unit costs as we move towards the end of those lives, as Peter shared with you. And I guess finally, as Grant has highlighted, I think planning for responsible futures, we again are a company that has led in this regard. As Grant mentioned, we're probably one of the ones that are ahead in terms of going down the process of looking to close operations. And what we've taken from that, there have been some learnings. There have been some school fees and no doubt that will hold us in good stead going forward. I think a key learning, not just for ourselves, but for the industry as a whole, is that if we want sustainable closure going forward, it will take the buy-in and support of all stakeholders. We have all benefited from this industry, and we should all support the responsible closure of this industry for the communities around us. I dare say, and I hope that what you have been left with through our discussions, though, is that mine planning and closure for that planning is something we understand. It is something that technically can be done confidently. It is not something that we fear or that we see as a threat. In fact, contrary to that, I dare say, closure is something we embrace as it is a true opportunity to leave our legacy, to leave communities and environments in a better way than what we found then prior to our mining, which is ultimately the legacy we would like to leave. And we look forward to working with all stakeholders to deliver on that to the benefit of the communities in which we operate. So ladies and gentlemen, once again, I think, thank you for your time today. I truly hope that we've managed to share with you why we are passionate and excited about our goal business and believe it's still got a lot of value for the future. And we look forward to sharing that same passion and excitement around our PGM businesses, both in South Africa and the U.S. in roughly 2 weeks' time. Look forward to engaging with you then. So thank you very much. And on that note, we will gladly, together with Rich and his team, take any questions, and I'll hand back to James to coordinate that. Thank you very much again.

Thank you, Richard, and thanks to everybody for listening. We now enter the final session. So Q&A for the next half hour. I do have some, as I said earlier, some carryover questions from the previous sessions. So I think let's deal with those first. A couple are similar, so first dealing with water. Grant, if I can pass this on to you, if you don't mind. How have we approached the potential cost of treating polluted water subsequent closure. Is this included in your rehabilitation provisions? And do you allocate funds for water treatment in your rehabilitation trust funds? I'll just read them all out first, if you don't mind. Cooke incurs significant pumping costs as part of ongoing care and maintenance. What is the quality of this water and what is done with it? What options do you have to offset these costs with respect to gold recovery from tailings and management thereof? Are you in compliance with 2025 -- okay, this is slightly different. So now we're on to SO2 emissions. So I'll just carry on, on the water theme. I think that's -- Grant, if you don't mind answering those. I think that covers most of the questions relating to water.

Good. And James, I think that was from -- the question was from Leroy. So thanks very much for the questions. I'll try and unpack them and hopefully, if I don't address all of them, I'll ask James for help where I have left some out. I think first and foremost, we have a considered approach to closure. So all of the costs that we are associating with closure have been well backed up by scientific and environmental studies. In other words, those plans are supported by those environmental studies. We do not go and just simply make a statement to say that we're going to go and literally rewater where it isn't backed up by science. So in terms of the closure plans, as I say, supported by well-considered studies. In terms of Cooke and its closure study, we -- those studies have supported a rewatering strategy. And as such, the cost associated with rewatering is included into our plans. We've also made very clear understanding, in terms of the financial provisions that we've put forward, that should the water that emanates following the decant or the daylighting of that water when it eventually flows through the [ eyes ] back into it, let's call it, the pre mining state, that, that -- if there is a poor quality water associated with that water we've made and dedicated the surface treatment plants that we do already have on surface in support of cleaning up that water. But as I say, all the scientific evidence and support in terms of the studies that we've done suggests that we will not get a poor quality water emanating. As far as the water that is currently pumped, we currently pump in excess of around 100 million liters of water from the Cooke 1, 2 and 3 and 4 complex. 75% of that or 75 mega-liters of that is discharged under water use license in -- with the cooperation of the Department of Water and Sanitation. As I mentioned in my presentation, we sit on those catchment management forums where we, in detail, discuss the water qualities. I think what's probably more disturbing to understand is that, that water is actually diluting the other impact of, let's call it, other industry and poor or failing municipalities who discharge their sewage uncontrollably into the Vaal -- integrated Vaal River system. And that's the point that we need to be very clear on and very clear actions in place to address those [ ills ]. But in terms of the water quality, the water quality is good, and that's why it's forming part of the conversations that we're having with the Board to, as I say, invest in water to support post mining economic growth. In terms of other opportunities to support that or support the cost of pumping, the cost of pumping are exorbitant, as Peter mentioned earlier. Probably just for the Cooke complex, we're looking at about a ZAR 500 million per annum. But when we decommission those pumps, those costs will disappear. There's no need to have any additional sustaining costs. So any other opportunities in terms of reclamation of tailings or other supporting costs will go into other bits or other parts of our operation where we have overheads. James, have I addressed all of the questions that we've -- that you put forward to me?

Yes, Grant, thank you. I think, listen, while we're with you, there is an additional question that's linked to that regarding the environmental trusts and the funds associated with rehabilitation. The question is, are they fully funded to meet future obligations at the SA Gold and PGM operations? And there was a follow-up one, which is similar, just give me one second. Yes. I think that will cover both of the questions. Grant, if you can answer those.

Okay. Thanks, James. So let me maybe outline very quickly the process that we follow. As I mentioned earlier, carefully considered closure plans in respect of all of our operating footprints. Those plans are then costed independently and a closure provision put forward in respect of closure. As far as our gold operation is concerned, we've got a ZAR 4.6 billion closure liability of which 83% is funded currently, and we look to the balance with guarantees. Those funds are located in trust funds and are well -- on ring-fenced. But I think, also, to the point is around concurrent rehabilitation. Obviously, as we move towards the end of the life of mine, we fund those trust funds to be fully -- well, to be 100% funded and reduce, obviously, the reliance on guarantees. But further than that, the concurrent rehabilitation of shrinking footprints, which, as Peter also mentioned in his presentation, is important to reduce the overhead costs associated with that, like security, et cetera, et cetera. So an important part of our journey to closure is not only the funding of the closure plans, but also the concurrent rehabilitation. Thanks, James.

Thanks. Thank you, Grant. The next questions, I think I'd like to post to both Neal Froneman and potentially Neil Pretorius as well, regarding DRD operations and surface tailings on the West Rand. So first one from Chris Nicholson. Could you comment on the possibility of expanding DRD's operations? Firstly, the West Rand Tailings Retreatment Project, how this links into the Cooke uranium strategy or, too, to the PGM dumps, I guess, at our PGM operations. And then the second one from Adrian Hammond, which is associated is, does our surface uranium strategy fit together with a larger gold recovery plant as we previously envisaged with regards to the West Rand Tailings Retreatment Project? And what permits are needed to remind cocktailing for uranium? And what options do you have to source a new deposition site and CapEx related to this? Perhaps I could ask Neal Froneman to maybe start with that.

Yes. Thanks, James. Thanks, Chris and Adrian. And again, I'll just deal with it at a high level. And Neil, if you remind just picking up where I leave off. So let me start, strategically, in terms of DRD. The block that it is part of in terms of the green metal strategy is not just gold. Tailings retreatment is about producing green metals, in this case, gold, down the line. Of course, where it makes sense in the PGM sector. We've said that publicly before. And more recently, I think you've heard us talking about other metals from a Tailings Retreatment point of view. And I'm now talking completely separate to recycling. Of course, recycling is a different activity that will bring to the 4 other metals. And DRD is our chosen vehicle business to accomplish the tailings retreatment that we are exposed to. We would like to -- we would like DRD to move into other metals. Uranium, there's clearly an interface, and Neil can explain how that slots in the sharing of infrastructure, the mega-tailings facility that's being planned in -- on the West Wits, which is part of the gold tailings retreatment strategy, but it complements the uranium as well. So let me stop there and say that we will grow together. And certainly, I think, into other commodities as well. So Neil, you pick it up there and add what is appropriate, thanks.

Thank you, Neal. I think you pretty much said it all. The planning of infrastructure in the Far West Rand, the second phase of the Far West Rand project, the design is such that it will facilitate not just a regional consolidation of gold in the area in terms of scale and in terms of size, but it's also designed in such a way that it does not close any of the options in terms of other metals, and particularly uranium, in that particular area. So our design is extensive to be large enough to accommodate all of these things as and when they develop. Implementation, however, would be incremental. So we're sitting, at the moment, with a 250 million tonne resource and initial steps in implementation would be to accommodate that, but in such a way that it's scalable, that it can be expanded. But that applies to the Tailings facility. In terms of the design of the plant. Now obviously, you're looking at 2 different products and each one has its own specifications or requirements. There too, that the design would be such that nothing, in terms of future expansion, is excluded. So if uranium comes into the into the picture at some point in the future, then there would be a place for that and the design would be such to accommodate that. I think what's important to maybe note is how, in terms of just the discussion on developing these resources, how our infrastructure synergy is integral in those discussions. So to talk to Cooke, for example, Cooke and the Cooke 4 dump which are the major uranium dumps in that area. Now if you want to build pipelines connecting those dumps with the rest of the infrastructure on a stand-alone basis. And clearly, your cutoff in terms of -- or your hurdle in terms of uranium price, on a stand-alone basis, is fairly high. But by integrating it with the gold circuit, for that matter, you're basically diluting the CapEx by distributing it amongst all of the possible configuration. So that's really how we -- I think, how we've come together and we're having our conversation along those lines to ensure that to the extent that we can develop synergies to just open up these things as soon as possible. And at the same time, also position them such that as much of the rehabilitation associated with that footprint can be absorbed and taken care of, that's also brought into the conversation. So a broad synergy exercise.

Thank you. Thanks for those answers. Just for Neal Froneman again, some questions which, again, on a similar type of topic relating to broader strategy with regard to the gold portfolio. Given the increased push towards battery and green metals, should we assume that we are not looking to grow the gold portfolio outside of South Africa, at least in the near term? Similar questions of that nature from some of the other analysts.

Thanks, James. And absolutely not in the near term. We have said it numerous times that at the moment, it's very difficult to find value in the gold sector. I don't see the gold price doubling or tripling. I see battery metals doing that in the not-too-distant future. And I think as Richard Stewart pointed out, we've got a very good gold base. And yes, we, in the longer term, do want to grow it, not in the ultra-deep sector because it is part of the combination of precious and industrial metals, gold plays a role. But in the near term, that is not a focus. I said it at H1 results. But we like gold in the long term. So nothing has changed. Our focus right now is on growing our green metals portfolio and more specifically, in battery metals. James, I just wondered if Neil wouldn't want to comment on his appetite for other metals. That was one part of the question where I thought he could add a bit of his view as to where the DRD sits with that.

Certainly. Thank you, Neal. No, I'd love to do that. I think the opportunity for DRDGOLD and considering that we represent a group of other shareholders, too. The opportunity for DRDGOLD in terms of near-term growth really is to -- as far as we're concerned, align ourselves as closely as possible with the strategy of Sibanye Stillwater and to sort of slot in behind Sibanye Stillwater into that slip stream. Our core skill is the retreatment of tailings and configuring infrastructure in such a way that we can deliver tailings at the requisite throughput rate at the requisite -- in the requisite condition in terms of densities and so forth. And then also set up management systems to treat that material and to monitor it very closely on an ongoing basis. Importantly also to dispose of the tail in a responsible fashion and in line with contemporary standards. So that's the skill. We want to leverage that skill and we certainly want to follow Sibanye where it goes in terms of its foray in to other metals. But what we liked about the story, really, is that at the moment, we are mining gold by cleaning up the environment. So it's mining by way of rehabilitation. We're using mostly gray water in the process. And one of these days, we'll be using -- we'll be substituting a lot of the electricity that we use with PV. And I think it just has -- it just completes that loop, if through that same process of mining through rehabilitation, one's producing the metals used in the storage and in the generation of green power and contributing in that way to the green economy. So I think values-wise and strategy-wise, we're 100% aligned, and we most certainly want to just make sure that we don't fall behind. We want to stay in that slip stream and follow Sibanye Stillwater into this venture.

Thanks, Neil. Perhaps for Neal Froneman, again, last 2 on the ESG side. You may -- I'm sure you can respond to these 2. The first one is, as we progress towards more reliance on clean energy sources, do we intend to make use of green funding instruments in future? And then the second one from Bruce Williamson regards, this move towards more ESG or the focus on ESG and your view on whether global institutional investors are putting unrealistic pressure targets on the mining industry.

Thanks. Thanks, James and Bruce. The -- certainly, green funding forms a very integral part of our consideration of funding things from new projects to even recycling because of the benefits of that type of funding, so absolutely. I think in terms of ESG and unrealistic pressures, I must tell you, I think that it's absolutely right to put the pressure on business to up its game in terms of ESG. I don't think there are unrealistic pressures. I think global warming is absolutely real. And we all have to step up to the plate. We are extremely fortunate that the current metals we positioned in, our exposure to Tailings Retreatment, our exposure to the circular economy of recycling, the PGMs underpinning the future hydrogen economy, our move 2 years ago to consider battery metals has really positioned us extremely nicely in terms of many of the ESG principles. Not only that, I think the completion of the process of understanding ESG and moving it into sustainability in terms of how it impacts the entire business, not just those buckets of E, S and G is something that has taken us further forward. And certainly, we don't perceive the push from investors or very specific shareholders or funds as being unrealistic, because we've got real solutions. We -- It's not smoke and mirrors. There's no hidden agenda. There's no buying of time. So no, I think if you are in some other commodities such as coal, perhaps you don't have plans that are, let's say, as easy to achieve. Maybe they're financially stretching. You might find those pressures unrealistic, we don't. We are going to participate. We're going to be class-leading in this very rapid change that's occurred over the last few years. And more specifically, the acceleration post COVID in this area has been enormous. But we've embraced it. We're very well positioned and I don't find the pressure unrealistic at all.

Leave that one, yes. Thank you, Neal. There's a couple of questions from Adrian Hammond on the gold production graphs that we showed in the presentation, the last session. So first of all, then I'll direct this at Richard Cox, please. Could you expand on your plans to grow production from the core gold ops as you show in the slides? Slide 15, I think, is the one he's referring to. And how do we reconcile that growth with declining ORD CapEx.

Richard?

Thanks, James, and thank you, Adrian, for your question. So in the gold ops, we've -- our objective is to have stable delivery. So other than K4 drop-down opportunity, there is no gold growth. And what we have done is we put together a 5-year production plan and that does show stability. So for us, it's just delivering predictably over the 5 years, those 800,000 to 900,000 ounces. And then we do see the ORD decline. So different facets of ORD, a lot of horizontal development that's coming to an end as we develop to the boundaries of the ore body and expose the reef horizons and what remainder is the marginal development on the reef horizon. So naturally, that would come to an end and decline. So that's where we are seeing a lot of opportunity in having fully developed those ore bodies and now exploiting the reef horizons. And then out of preexisting horizontal development, getting a repurposing of that same infrastructure, again, over newly discovered or identified parts of the ore body for exploitation in a bit of a different methodology, more scattered mining, more going after smaller opportunities. So that's what our production strategy entails over the next 5 years. So stability, predictability and a lot of focus on cost containment. Thanks, James.

Thanks, Richard. Adrian, regarding your question on Slide 15 on AISC, exceeding ZAR 25,000 an ounce. And whether we would need to use our -- or are prepared to use our balance sheet to fund capital, given we're [ spotters ]. So first of all, I just think that just looking at that, 2021 is the only year where it's at about ZAR 25,000 per ounce. And as we said, I mean, this year, we're carrying over CapEx from last year when we had the COVID lockdowns where we were unable to do all of the ore reserve developments and maintenance that we'd planned. We also are still carrying the infrastructure projects at Kloof, which will now -- CapEx will reduce over the next few years. So it's only really 1 year. And to be honest, ZAR 25,000 per ounce is effectively ZAR 805,000 per kilogram and the gold price has averaged well above that this year, and we're currently sitting at spot of 8 to 12. So it's at a marginal point at this stage at current spot price. But certainly, there's no real impact on our balance sheet from having 1 year of slightly elevated costs. And the profile going down in future will obviously alleviate and create some margin in the future. Then just -- and maybe Richard Stewart would want to answer this was -- is the current state of labor relations, or Richard Cox, perhaps, given the wage negotiations that we're currently going through in -- at our gold operations and what the state of relations with labor is, particularly with AMCU, AMCU leadership.

Do you want me to take it?

Go ahead.

Thanks very much, James. Look, I think in terms of those relations, as we've always stated, and I don't think much has changed, we maintain very credible relations and we are, of course, engaged in wage negotiations, as we speak, at our gold operations. Those are carrying on. And I think as you've heard today, these are operations that require very strict cost control, that has to be our focus. And in the interest of all stakeholders, we have to be able to manage our business during the tough times so that all stakeholders can benefit during the up cycles and when times are good. If we don't manage and survive through these tough times, then there's nothing to share when the good times come. And I think those are the critical discussions that are being had with all stakeholders. And I think, as always, they are credible, and we're having good robust discussions. Thank you, James.

Thanks, Richard. Perhaps for Neal Froneman, a question around the uranium and Beatrix. So first of all, from Mudiwa Gavasa at Business Day. Uranium prices are currently at the highest level since 2014. Do you expect this momentum to continue? And then secondly, from Leroy at HSBC. In the event that Beatrix' life is extended, are there any challenges around mining gold and uranium simultaneously?

Yes. Thanks for those questions. And let me just say, in terms of the uranium price, and I think this is somewhat a duplication of a previous answer that I gave around gold. I think any metal that is part of, let's call it, the low carbon or 0 carbon emission energy base is going to be in short supply. And I'm talking over 10, 15 years. And again, there was an earlier question, James, and I just want to link the same answer to that. In terms of the future of PGMs, I think if there's a perception that the internal combustion engine has come to at the end of its life, and therefore the question mark around the demand for PGMs in the short or medium term, that's completely wrong. There is such a shortage of these green metals. And that's why I predict very significant price rises for things like lithium, nickel and so on. And uranium is part of that. I think we're being very conservative talking $60 a pound. If you can produce the greenest uranium and of course, tailings retreatment is going to be very much part of that, you're going to have a real edge. And I think we're looking forward over the medium term to much higher uranium prices. I think that the second part of that question relating to additional gold production. Absolutely, it can be done together. And the acquisition of Wits Gold and some of the projects that came with it in the free state are the type of projects that could come to fruition. A lot of work has been done on modern mining approaches. And perhaps Dennis, this is where you could just step in and give everyone an overview of that in the Free State. So James, I think I've covered the 2 questions. But I think, Dennis, you can add a bit to that. Thank you.

The Free State uranium assets are key. They've been mined before. They are shallow. There are some really exquisite new age autonomous mechanisms out there that will allow us to access those ore bodies fairly rapidly. The [ buzzer ] project is ready to roll. And we are busy with the cost analysis of the companies, of Beatrix itself, to see what impact adding another project or 2 or 3 on to the back of that we'll make. In the Southern Frees State mining right, there are a couple of really good, interesting gold projects that will add value to the company under a different cost structure. And that detailed work is happening at the moment. There is a serious life in the Free State, and it's our intention to fully unlock all of that and then take this to another level. Having said that, it is important to understand that the uranium price is in a completely different place. It's green energy now. It's not the old uranium of the past that everybody was afraid of. It's going to become the baseload of the planet and on the back of that, I think we're going to see some surprising price moves. I think that covers it, Neal.

Thanks, Dennis. Just further to that, I guess, consistent with that theme, there's a question from Raj Ray, BMO about the visibility on Southern Orange Free State, projects which we acquired through Wits Gold with 2014, 2015 Bloemhoek declined, and where the work is continuing on the DFS. So yes, Raj, we have allocated capital that's in that capital profile for 2021 already. And we expect to conclude those studies towards the end of the year. So we'll then take it further and make a call on whether we continue with that depth extension, which would then increase the life of the Beatrix 3 shaft quite substantially. And I think that's it for now. Can we just check on the lines, whether there are any calls on the phone lines?

No, sir. There are no questions from the lines.

Thank you very much. On that note then, I think we'll conclude with the Q&A. Perhaps I'll hand over to Neal Froneman for some last words. Thank you, Neal.

Yes. Thanks, James. And thank you to everybody that took time to join us for this session. I also want to thank my management team for really delivering what I thought were excellent presentations. And it's not so much the delivery, it's really the content of the presentations. And just to conclude, again, I think the theme of people through our business, a, the people that presented the deep knowledge base, the deep experience and competence base that we have, coupled to our ability to create economic value which is really an underpin to sustainability and the pivoting into a much greener future was important. I think, to me, it was nice to sit back and hear our gold team and Richard Stewart talked about our gold business. It's a really decent business. And I know that it's overshadowed by the PGMs. But as I said, from the challenges we have, specifically on the safety side, it's a copout to walk away from these assets. If we can't solve the safety problems, I'm not sure who can and I back us to solve the safety problems or challenges. I also back us to make those cost differences that we're alluded to. And somewhere in the future, we will have a bigger gold business, but it's not now. That is not our primary focus. But it's a highly leveraged, well-run business unit. It's important to us. It is part of the insurance that you need with a large exposure to industrial metals. So James, I think, all in all, I hope it's been a good session for our listeners. It was certainly a good session from our point of view. Thank you to everybody, and we look forward to seeing you in a few weeks' time where we'll discuss, I think, a lot of other interesting aspects to our business. Thank you very much.