PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Junior Havilah Resources has restructured the revenue stream at its Portia gold project, in South Australia, allowing the company to focus on its copper growth strategy.
Havilah has reached an agreement with its mining partner Consolidated Mining and Civil (CMC) to amend the mining and processing agreement at Portia.
Under the new agreement, all aspects of the day-to-day management at Portia will be undertaken by CMC, and the current 50:50 revenue sharing arrangement will revert to an 85:15 gold revenue arrangement, with all the mining, processing and capital expenses of the operation to be met by CMC.
Havilah said that the new arrangements would significantly release capacity across the company’s management and technical teams, as well as other resources to allow greater focus on the company’s copper strategy.
“This arrangement will be beneficial on many fronts, it will not only allow CMC to be more responsive, giving us the flexibility to plan and recover more ore on the run, but it will also offer the opportunity to reduce and consolidate operating costs,” said CMC MD Steve Radford.
“This means that we have the prospect of not only planning and mining the Portia pit to a much deeper and larger profile, but it will give us opportunity to potentially process already mined, previously un-economical lower grade ore as well as re-processing the tailings, subject to permitting, which have been kept separate.”
Radford said that CMC was planning to re-design the process plant and make modifications by adding new circuits to accommodate not only the re-treatment of the current Portia tailings, but will also look at the opportunity to integrate these processes into the copper/gold concentrate processing circuits that will be a huge advantage to both Havilah and CMC.