Tharisa's Apollo underground portal on track after first blast

Tharisa reported that its underground transition project remained on time and within budget as of July 2026, with the Apollo portal having achieved its first blast on 31 March. Apollo is on track to deliver first run-of-mine ore in the fourth quarter of Tharisa's 2026 financial year, with a second portal, Orion, following later, targeting first ore in the fourth quarter of its 2031 financial year.

A ten-year, $547m commitment

Total transitional capital across both portals is estimated at $547m over ten years, split between $363m for Apollo and $184m for Orion, with peak annual funding of $173m. Apollo is designed to reach steady-state throughput of 255,000 tonnes a month by the third quarter of Tharisa's 2029 financial year, while Orion is targeted to reach 210,000 tonnes a month, with designed capacity of 255,000 tonnes, by the third quarter of 2033. Combined monthly capacity is capped at 510,000 tonnes by the plant's processing throughput rather than by mining capability.

Buying decades of extra mine life

The project's purpose is to replace the production that will be lost once Tharisa's open pits are exhausted, expected around 2035, with underground output that the company says could unlock more than 60 years of further mining. Management pointed to an internal rate of return above 25% for the combined underground investment, a return profile management judged attractive enough to commit despite the scale and duration of the capital programme required.

The steady, on-schedule progress reported in July stood out against a backdrop in which several other South African PGM producers were explicitly avoiding large new capital commitments in favour of returning cash to shareholders. Tharisa's willingness to fund a decade-long underground transition, on top of its simultaneous financing of the Karo Platinum project in Zimbabwe, reflected a company positioning itself as one of the sector's clearer production-growth stories, backed by the five-year open-book mining contract it had struck with Cementation Africa to manage execution risk on the underground works themselves. Management said regular progress updates would continue as both portals moved through their multi-year construction schedules toward first production. Management said regular progress updates would continue as both portals moved through their multi-year construction schedules toward first production, with the Cementation Africa contract intended to keep execution risk on the underground works themselves as low as possible.

Sources

• Mining Weekly: Tharisa PGMs underground project, South Africa – update, 17 Jul 2026

Photo: Underground reef ore of the kind Tharisa's Apollo portal is being developed to access. James St. John, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.