Photo by: Bloomberg
PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Junior iron-ore developer Kogi Iron has completed an environmental- and social-impact assessment (ESIA) for its Agbaja iron-ore project, in Nigeria.
The ESIA, which started in January last year, was a key component of the preliminary feasibility study evaluating the technical and economic viability of a five-million-tonne-a-year iron-ore operation.
Kogi said on Tuesday that the overall assessment of the potential and associated social impacts of the Agbaja project was positive, with the study gauging that the project would positively impact the local stakeholder economy and the local government area and communities of the Agbaja plateau, with similar impacts on the Kogi state and Nigeria as a whole.
Kogi would now submit the ESIA to the federal Ministry of Environment, where there would be a mandatory 21-day public exposure period, followed by a panel review of the study by the federal Ministry of Environment and Mines Environmental Compliance Department.
Approval of the ESIA was expected at the completion of this process.
The Stage 1 area of the Agbaja project was estimated to contain about 158-million tonnes of inferred resource, while the Stage 2 area was estimated to contain some 63-million tonnes of the total 488-million tonnes of inferred resource.
The Stage 1 area could provide processing feed for an initial 14 years, while the Stage 2 mining area could provide processing plant feed for an additional six years.