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Kamoa-Kakula PEA to be completed by year-end

GOOD TIDINGS Ivanhoe reported excellent metallurgical results from tests conducted on drill core samples from the Kakula discovery

GOOD TIDINGS Ivanhoe reported excellent metallurgical results from tests conducted on drill core samples from the Kakula discovery

2nd December 2016

  

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Canadian miner Ivanhoe Mines subsidiary Kamoa Copper has retained Australian consultancy OreWin to prepare a preliminary economic assessment (PEA) for the development of the Kakula deposit, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The PEA is expected to be completed before the end of the year.

The Kamoa-Kakula copper project, located about 25 km west of the town of Kolwezi, is a joint venture between Ivanhoe Mines and Chinese nonferrous metal producer Zijin Mining Group.

The PEA will concentrate on establishing the economic parameters of potential mining operations at Kakula, including capital and operating costs for an underground mine.

It will also analyse process facilities, mine planning and scheduling, including capital costs and operating costs for both mining and concentrator operations. The PEA will draw on recommendations from the Kamoa 2016 prefeasibility study (PFS), including the potential to increase production to four-million tons a year from the proposed initial mining area.

The PEA follows last month’s announcement of excellent metallurgical results from tests conducted on drill core samples from the Kakula discovery – the southerly portion of the Kamoa-Kakula copper project.

Bench-scale metallurgical flotation testwork was carried out at metallurgical engineering business XPS Consulting & Testwork Services’ laboratories in Falconbridge, Canada.

The results achieved copper recoveries of 87.8% and produced a concentrate with an extremely high grade of 56% copper using the flowsheet developed during the Kamoa PFS. The material tested was a composite of recent, chalcocite-rich Kakula drill core, assaying 8.1% copper.

“These new Kakula metallurgical test results are highly positive as they indicate that, by employing a conventional milling and flotation process, Kakula should produce an extremely high-grade and clean copper concentrate that would be highly coveted by copper smelters around the world,” says Kamoa’s senior process engineer, Vongani Nkuna. “The XPS metallurgical results further demonstrate the high quality of the Kakula discovery.”

The XPS bench-scale testwork findings will be used in the ongoing preliminary economic assessment now under way for Kakula. The XPS results corroborate the results from testing of a Kakula drill core composite sample that was conducted at Zijin’s laboratory in China in July.

The initial metallurgical results achieved copper recoveries of 86% and produced a copper concentrate with a grade of 53% copper. The results also indicated that material from Kamoa’s Kakula and Kansoko zones could be processed through the same concentrator plant, which could yield significant operational and economic efficiencies.

Zijin’s tests of the Kakula sample also used the flowsheet developed during the Kamoa PFS. The material tested was a composite of drill holes assaying 4.1% copper. In comparison, testing of a previous development composite sample from the planned, initial mining deposit at Kamoa’s Kansoko Sud zone and the adjacent Kansoko Centrale zone, assaying 3.61% copper, achieved an 85% recovery and a concentrate grade of 37% copper.

Additionally, earlier metallurgical testwork indicated that the Kamoa concentrates contain extremely low arsenic levels by world standards – about 0.02%. Given this critical competitive marketing advantage, Kamoa’s concentrates are expected to attract a significant premium from copper-concentrate traders for use in blending with concentrates from other mines. The Kamoa concentrates will help enable the other concentrates to meet the limit of 0.5% arsenic imposed by Chinese smelters to meet China’s new environmental restrictions, explains Ivanhoe.

In October, Ivanhoe released the initial resource estimate for its Kakula discovery. Highlights of the initial estimate, prepared by Ivanhoe under the direction of engineering firm Amec Foster Wheeler, comprise an indicated resource of 192-million tonnes at a grade of 3.45% copper, containing 14.6- billion pounds of copper at a 1% copper cutoff grade, with the average true thickness of the selective mineralised zone at 14.27 m.

The initial Kakula mineral resource was defined by drilling covering 8.7 km2 within the larger 60 km2 Kakula exploration area. The Kakula high-grade mineralisation remains open for significant expansion along trend to the north-west and the south-east, while the remainder of the Kakula exploration area remains untested. The mineral resource estimate was based on the results from about 24 000 m of drilling in 65 holes.

With the significance of the Kakula discovery now firmly established, the Kakula exploration programme has been significantly expanded by a further 60 000 m. The expanded programme is planned to run through to the end of the second quarter of 2017 and will consist of infill drilling, resource expansion and exploration.

With the addition of Kakula’s mineral resources, research by prominent research and consulting group Wood Mackenzie has independently demonstrated that the Kamoa-Kakula project is the largest copper discovery in Zambia and the DRC, making it the largest copper discovery ever made in the history of mining on the African continent. In addition, research by Wood Mackenzie also shows that Kamoa-Kakula already ranks among the ten largest copper deposits in the world.

The combined Kamoa-Kakula indicated mineral resource is 944-million tonnes, grading 2.83% copper, containing 58.9-billion pounds of copper at a 1.0% copper cutoff grade and a minimum true thickness of 3 m.

Edited by Tracy Hancock
Creamer Media Contributing Editor

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