Eight facilities, one governance structure, and a legacy dam we will not call conformant.

Why tailings sit above everything else on the risk register

Most mining risks are individual: one person, one shift, one failure. Tailings failure is different in kind. When a tailings dam fails it can kill hundreds of people in minutes, destroy a river system for decades and end a company. The industry has demonstrated this repeatedly and recently enough that no operator can claim to have been surprised.

Quintel therefore treats tailings governance as a matter reserved to the board rather than delegated to operations. The appointment or removal of an Engineer of Record for any facility requires board approval. No general manager can vary a tailings design, deposition plan or monitoring regime. This is one of four things in the group that cannot be decided at site level.

The governance structure

Each facility has a named Engineer of Record, an external chartered engineer personally accountable for the design and for confirming that the facility as built and as operated matches it. The Engineer of Record has a direct reporting line to the board committee and cannot be replaced by site management.

Each facility also has an Independent Tailings Review Board of three specialists with no other commercial relationship with the group. They inspect twice a year, review all monitoring data and issue findings that go to the board committee unedited. In FY2025 the review boards raised 34 findings across the eight facilities; 29 were closed within the agreed timeframe and 5 remain open with revised dates.

Each facility has a named Accountable Executive at group level — the Chief Operating Officer — and a named Responsible Tailings Facility Engineer on site. Both appointments are documented and communicated to the workforce, so that nobody at an operation has to work out who to call.

Tailings facility disclosure

Consequence classification follows the Canadian Dam Association framework as applied under GISTM. Dam break analysis summaries for all High classification facilities are published in the Tailings Management Disclosure.

The legacy facility we inherited

TSF1 at Mbengwe is an upstream-raised facility built by a previous operator between 1971 and 1996. Upstream construction is the method implicated in the majority of catastrophic tailings failures worldwide, and it is prohibited for new facilities in several jurisdictions and by group standard.

Quintel inherited it in 2004. The facility was decommissioned in 2016, the beach was capped and re-profiled, drainage was installed and it is now 94% vegetated with indigenous grass species. It holds no free water. It is instrumented with 41 piezometers and 12 survey monuments reporting to the same live dashboard as the active facilities, and it is inspected by the review board on the same schedule.

It is classified as being on a closure-specific conformance pathway rather than as fully conformant, because full GISTM conformance for an upstream legacy structure requires either a buttress or relocation. A buttress design is under study with a decision due in 2027. The group states its status honestly rather than describing it as conformant on a technicality.

Water: three different problems

The group’s operations sit in three genuinely different hydrological settings, and treating water as a single group metric obscures more than it reveals.

Water scarcity. Gamagara operates in the Northern Cape, one of the driest mining districts in the world, where every cubic metre abstracted is a cubic metre not available to farmers and towns. Erongo, in Namibia, is drier still — which is why exploration water is trucked in rather than abstracted locally. In these settings the group’s objective is minimum abstraction, and success is measured as cubic metres taken from the environment per tonne produced.

Water excess. Asankran and Fatala operate in high-rainfall tropical settings where the defining problem is having too much water and keeping it separated and clean. Asankran is a net water exporter in the wet season. Here the objective is separation of stormwater from contact water, storage capacity sized for extreme events, and zero uncontrolled discharge.

Water quality. At Lubumba, the inherited issue was acidic drainage from legacy waste dumps. That drainage is now intercepted, neutralised with lime and treated before discharge, and the receiving stream has met national water quality standards continuously since 2018 after failing them for most of the preceding decade.

Group water balance

Water-stressed catchments are defined using the WRI Aqueduct baseline water stress classification of high or extremely high. Gamagara and Erongo fall into this category.

The target we missed

The group target is 85% of water recycled or reused by 2030, with a 2025 interim of 80%. The group reached 79%.

The shortfall is attributable to Lubumba, which reached 71% against a site target of 78%. Two causes were identified: evaporation from the leach pads ran materially above the design model in the 2024 and 2025 dry seasons, and the return-water pipeline that recovers solution from the lower pads was delayed by fourteen months.

The pipeline was commissioned in November 2025. The evaporation issue is being addressed with pad surface management rather than by revising the model to match the outcome. The 78% site target and the 85% group target are both retained.