South Africa’s gold and platinum reefs are a useful place to start, because they are being worked at depths that would have been uneconomic a generation ago, and depth changes the ventilation equation fundamentally: rock temperatures rise, cooling loads increase, and the volume of air that has to be moved, conditioned and accounted for grows with every level added. But the pattern isn’t confined to South Africa. As near-surface reserves deplete across the continent’s underground precious and base metal operations, the same dynamic is playing out across the globe. Ventilation and cooling now typically account for somewhere between 40% and 60% of a mine’s total electricity consumption – making it one of the single largest controllable costs on any underground site, and increasingly one of the hardest to ignore as electricity tariffs climb across the region.
What the Legislation Requires
South Africa’s regulatory framework is a useful benchmark, because it is among the most detailed and rigorously enforced anywhere, and it shows where the rest of the industry is likely heading. Under the Mine Health and Safety Act’s environmental engineering and occupational hygiene regulations, employers must maintain continuous measurement systems wherever airborne pollutant levels approach defined thresholds – particulates at or above a tenth of the occupational exposure limit, gases and vapours at or above half of it. Where a risk assessment identifies a meaningful risk of fire, explosion or toxic release, an early warning system is mandatory at every affected working place, not an optional extra reserved for the highest-risk zones. Underground ventilation infrastructure is specified down to the duct: polymer ventilation devices used in areas with ignitable gas, dust or vapour risk must meet SABS 1287 and carry anti-static properties. And compliance is not a once-off exercise – employers must report airborne pollutant measurements to the regional inspector quarterly, every year, for as long as the mine operates. This is a standard built for continuous evidence, not a periodic audit, and operators in other jurisdictions are increasingly being held, by lenders and regulators alike, to a similar bar.
The Rise of On-Demand Ventilation
Against that backdrop, ventilation-on-demand (VOD) has become one of the fastest-adopting technologies on Southern Africa’s deep-level mines – ahead of autonomous haulage and digital twins, according to recent industry reporting – and interest is building in other underground operating environments across the continent for exactly the same reasons. The appeal is straightforward: rather than running fans at fixed capacity around the clock, VOD scales airflow to where people and equipment actually are, drawing on variable speed drives, automated regulators and real-time tracking to move air on demand rather than by default. A published case study of a mechanised platinum operation on Zimbabwe’s Great Dyke illustrates what’s achievable: variable speed drives alone cut fan power by 36.5%, worth an estimated US$1.1 million a year in electricity costs, and a full VOD system took total ventilation electricity spend down by 23% – from roughly US$3.3 million to US$2.5 million annually. Shorter post-blast re-entry times, cut from four hours to two, lifted productivity by 6% on top of that, worth close to a further US$1.8 million in additional revenue. Payback on the full system was about 1.5 years. Battery-electric vehicles are compounding the effect everywhere they’re deployed: less diesel underground means less exhaust to clear, which eases the ventilation burden as fleets electrify.
Why This Is an Integration Problem, Not a Fan Problem
The technology to achieve these results already exists and is well proven. What determines whether a mine actually realises them – in South Africa or anywhere else – is whether its atmospheric monitoring, personnel and equipment tracking, ventilation control and reporting systems function as one connected picture, or sit as separate platforms that happen to share a mine plan. A gas sensor that satisfies a regulator’s reporting requirement but doesn’t talk to the fan controller is a compliance system, not a ventilation-on-demand system. This is the space Ramjack works in: integrating environmental and atmospheric monitoring, personnel tracking and ventilation control into a single operational picture, so the same data satisfying a regulatory reporting requirement is also driving real-time ventilation decisions – rather than being captured twice, by two disconnected systems, for two different purposes.
The mines that get the most out of ventilation-on-demand over the next few years won’t necessarily be the ones with the newest fans. They will be the ones that have closed the gap between what their sensors already know and what their systems actually do with that information.
Meet Us at Electra Mining Africa 2026
Ramjack Technology Solutions will be at Electra Mining Africa 2026 from 7-11 September at the Johannesburg Expo Centre, Nasrec. We welcome conversations with ventilation engineers, compliance managers and technology decision-makers looking to move from atmospheric monitoring to on-demand ventilation.