Photo by: Prominent Hill
Name: Prominent Hill mine.
Location: Prominent Hill is located about 650 km north-west of Adelaide and 130 km south-east of Coober Pedy in South Australia.
Holding and Controlling Company: OZ Minerals.
Brief Description: Prominent Hill is a high-grade copper/gold resource.
The operation comprises an open pit mine, underground mine, a grinding and flotation processing plant, a permanent village and a haulage road, power line and bore field.
Prominent Hill is a fly-in, fly-out operation that employs about 1 200 employees and contractors.
Brief History: Prominent Hill was discovered in 2001.
Prominent Hill was brought into production in 2009 and had a successful ramp-up period.
In 2012, OZ Minerals expanded its Prominent Hill operation beyond the Malu open pit to include underground mining at the Ankata underground mine.
A second underground mine, Malu, was commissioned in 2015. The underground operations were subsequently integrated to form the Prominent Hill Underground Mine.
Products: Copper concentrate containing gold and silver.
Geology/Mineralisation: The Prominent Hill iron-oxide copper gold deposit is located in the north-eastern portion of the Archaean to Mesoproterozoic Gawler Craton, in South Australia. The Gawler Craton covers about 600 000 km2 of South Australia.
Outcrop is sparse and most of the current understanding of the geology of the Craton is derived from exploration drilling and geophysical datasets.
The Gawler Craton hosts Prominent Hill, as well as Olympic Dam, Carrapateena, Moonta and several other smaller and sub-economic copper/gold deposits. Most of these deposits are thought to be genetically related to the Gawler Range Volcanic-Hiltaba magmatic event, which affected the central and eastern portions of the Gawler Craton.
Copper/gold/silver mineralization at Prominent Hill is most hosted within hematitic breccias of sandstone, shale, dolomite and volcanic lithologies.
Mineral Resources: Total measured and indicated, and inferred resources as at July 1, 2016, were estimated at 148-million tonnes grading 1.2% copper (Cu), 0.6 g/t gold (Au) and 2.9 g/t silver (Ag).
Reserves: Total proven and probable reserves as at July 1, 2016, were estimated at 75-million tonnes grading 1.0% Cu, 0.6 g/t Au and 3 g/t Ag.
Mining Method: Open pit and underground.
Major Infrastructure and Equipment: Ore processing at Prominent Hill uses conventional crushing, grinding and flotation processing plant.
Prospects: The Prominent Hill processing plant will continue to operate at the current capacity until 2023 by processing stockpile and underground ore, prior to running full time at a milling capacity of about 3.5-million tonnes a year to four-million tonnes a year until 2028.
The mine life extension to at least 2028 directly benefits local communities and shareholders, and will boost the region’s economic developmente.
Contact: OZ Minerals Group Manager – Investor Relations Tom Dixon
Contact Details:
OZ Minerals
Tel + 61 8 8229 6600
Email tom.dixon@ozminerals.com
Website https://www.ozminerals.com