After being retrenched from her job as a quarry manager in 2001, Shirley Hayes struck a deal with the owner of the nearby Blesberg mine: she would rehabilitate the abandoned site for free and he would buy back whatever minerals she was able to extract.
With only a clapped-out Nissan bakkie, a rented front-end loader and 50l of borrowed diesel, she and her team of eight started sifting through the trash heaps in 40˚C heat. “At the end of the first day we had enough feldspar to buy another 50l of diesel,” says Hayes, now 55. “And so on.”
After 25 years Hayes’s now heads up an emerging copper giant. She has a controlling stake (58%) in Copper 360, a listed entity formed after a reverse takeover transaction where SHiP acquired Big Tree Copper and Cape Copper Oxide.
Hayes hopes to breathe new life into the Northern Cape by revitalising an industry that was central to the region for centuries. Copper 360 will use an innovative cluster-mining model to extract premium copper from a dozen mine sites in the Concordia block before processing it all at a centralised hub. The model doesn’t just cut costs: it also drastically reduces the mines’ environmental impact.
Born near the spot where Simon van der Stel first scoped the region’s copper mining potential in 1685, Hayes grew up between Springbok and Pofadder. Working as an admin clerk at a granite mine in the 1990s, she volunteered to train as the magazine master (the person responsible for the explosives) because “no-one else wanted to drive out to the magazine in the Kalahari sun”. Next she qualified as a permanent blaster — a skill which would come in handy after her retrenchment.
Recovering feldspar — an industrial mineral used by the glass, ceramics and paint industries — with that rented front-end loader allowed her to “put bread on the table” for a few years, but the business soon “hit a roof”.
The obvious next step was to open her own feldspar mine. In the early days at Altemooi mine, she and her workers spent every lunchbreak hiding from the sun under her pickup truck. But soon enough the business had grown to a point where she employed 18 people and had basic offices (but no running water).
Hayes wanted to take things to the next level by buying her own crusher, but the reserves didn’t justify the expense. Instead she took a punt and applied for the exploration rights at Concordia, an old copper-mining hotspot near Springbok. At the time no-one was interested in copper. “Everyone thought I was mad,” she laughs. “But for me it was common sense that the area would have copper.”
Hayes was finally granted the mining right 15 years after applying for the prospecting right
Not only was Hayes’s hunch vindicated, but the global appetite for copper soared. The price of the mineral — vital to the green economy — has almost trebled since December 2008. Better still, little actual drilling was required on Hayes’s concession, which had been extensively explored by big guns Newmont and Gold Fields in the second half of the 20th century. Copper 360 CEO Jan Nelson puts the value of the data and infrastructure she inherited at a cool $100m.
Which is not to say getting to the point where she can finally start mining copper has been easy. After loads of ups and downs, Hayes was finally granted the mining right 15 years after applying for the prospecting right. “When you’re starting out as an explorer you’re always looking for money and you don’t have anything to show,” she says. “You’re always negotiating from a position where you are the weaker one.” Not everyone she partnered with was entirely scrupulous, but she got through it all and, she says, came out stronger on the other side.
Rietberg will be the first mine to come online later this year. The mine holds 25,000t of copper worth R1.4bn. The company has also just discovered an area of 150m by 100m running at an average grade of 5% copper on surface. All told, Nelson says Copper 360’s combination of new and abandoned mines offers 100-plus years of resources.
“I always wanted to list a copper-mining company on the JSE,” Hayes tells the FM. “It took me 15 years to achieve that. The next goal is to go from being a junior mining company to a major mining company. Will it take another 15 years? I have no idea. But I won’t stop till we achieve it.”
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.