PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Lithium miner Galaxy Resources has successfully installed and commissioned ore sorters at the front-end of the Mt Cattlin process plant, in Western Australia, as part of its strategy to prioritise value over volume to preserve resource life and control unit costs.
The miner told shareholders that operations at Mt Cattlin had resumed on schedule during February after the planned summer outage, with the front-end optical sorters successfully installed and commissioned to upgrade low-grade stockpiled ore.
The stockpiled ore at Mt Cattlin is expected to contribute some 40% of throughput in 2020 allowing mining volumes to be reduced. Galaxy noted that mining costs associated with the stockpiled ore has already been expensed, assisting to control unit operating costs.
Galaxy is targeting a lithium concentrate production of between 14 000 t and 17 000 for the first quarter of 2020, following the restart of operations, which the company said would be sufficient to meet its contractual terms.
Meanwhile, Galaxy on Monday said that 33 000 t of lithium concentrate had been shipped last week indicating that processing facilities in China were slowly resuming activities since the disruption caused by the Coronavirus.
The company said that it was monitoring the situation and was in regular contact with customers.