JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Midtier Perth-based engineering company CPC Project Design has been selected as the engineering contractor to deliver a definitive feasibility study (DFS) for the Mahenge graphite project in Tanzania, project owner Black Rock Mining announced on Thursday.
CPC was selected in a tender process, which involved five bidders, Black Rock stated, noting that the company had extensive experience in graphite and in Africa, with previous projects under its belt including Syrah’s Balama project, in Mozambique.
The engineering study would start early in January and is timed for delivery in the third quarter of 2018, to enable Black Rock to start production in late 2019.
The full completion and delivery of the study is subject to Tanzania putting in place its new mining code and regulations. “We are increasingly confident that we will see legislative clarification from the Tanzania government in the not too distant future, and are positioning the company to progress the Mahenge project to deliver a DFS in the second half of 2018,” said Black Rock executive director and CEO John de Vries.
A previously completed prefeasibility study estimated that the project could produce some 167 000 t/y of high-purity graphite over a mine life of 32 years. 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.