PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Graphite developer Black Rock Mining has signed an offtake agreement with China’s Heilongjiang Bohao Graphite Company for natural flake grahite from the Mahenge project, in Tanzania.
The three-year agreement would see Black Rock supply 30 000 t in the first year, 50 000 t in the second year, and up to 90 000 t in the last year of the offtake agreement.
The ASX-listed Black Rock said on Monday that the 90 000 t offtake was the largest offtake agreement signed by any graphite developer, underwriting the company’s proposed three phase construction strategy at Mahenge, and accounting for around 37.5% of the proposed steady state annual production of 240 000 t/y.
“The signing of this offtake agreement vindicates our pilot plant strategy that saw us producing around 8 t of graphite concentrate from a 90 t run, which enables us to deliver meaningful volumes of product to 24 potential customers around the world,” said Black Rock CEO John de Vries.
A 2017 prefeasibility study estimated that the project will require a capital investment of some $159-million and will deliver a post-tax net present value of $624-million and a post-tax internal rate of return of 48.2%.
The project will be developed in two stages, with Stage 1 consisting of a processing plant and infrastructure with a design capacity of one-million tonnes a year, to produce some 83 000 t/y of graphite in concentrate over the first two years of production.
The Stage 2 development will see a second one-million-tonne-a-year plant and associated infrastructure, doubling throughput to two-million tonnes a year, and production to 167 000 t/y graphite concentrate from year three of operation.