How platinum ore is mined

Platinum is so thinly spread that at Sudbury it makes up only 0.5 parts per million of the ore.

stations: 4
things downstream: 3

The short version

Platinum ore lies in reefs that can be under half a meter thick. In South Africa's Bushveld Complex, crews drill low stopes along a reef, sometimes more than a kilometer underground, and scoop out the broken rock. A concentrator crushes it, mills it to powder and floats it, usually twice, before the thickened concentrate leaves for a smelter and refinery.

Stope along the reef

The Merensky Reef is only 46 cm thick, so crews work narrow breast stopes held up by strike pillars. Low-profile drills bore the rock, and load-haul-dump vehicles clear it. At the Amandelbult complex the workings run down to 1.3 km.
Crush and reject waste

One Bushveld plant crushes Merensky contact reef to under 16 mm and sends it through a dense-media separator that throws out waste before crushing it again. Chrome-rich UG2 ore gets coarse crushing and goes straight to the mills.
Mill and float twice

Ore is milled until about 40% of it is finer than 75 microns, then floated. Tailings from that float go to a second mill, reaching 80% below 75 microns, and float again to catch what the first pass missed.
Thicken and dispatch

Concentrate is thickened and filtered, then shipped to smelting, converting and refining plants. Tailings are pumped to a dam, though they can be rich enough in chromite to reprocess.

End of the linePlatinum ore Next it goes into platinum, iridium.

Worth repeating

Most known platinum lies in the Merensky and UG2 reefs of South Africa's Bushveld Complex.
Hans Merensky, a geologist, traced a huge store of platinum in South Africa's Bushveld Igneous Complex after a discovery there in 1924.
In the Sudbury Basin platinum makes up only 0.5 ppm of the ore, and it is recovered because huge amounts of nickel ore are processed anyway.