RE: Copper Oxides and Sulphides part 110 Nov 2023 19:19
Edzi..... the description when Project Elephant was announced was "Hydraulic mining of the tails before a proprietary pre-concentration step followed by milling and conventional flotation. Flotation will produce a separate copper oxide (mostly for transport to Sable) and copper sulphide concentrate (for sale to third parties). With regards flotation, liquid is added to make it a slurry. The slurry is a mix of valuable copper ore minerals and “worthless” rock sediments, called gangue (pronounced “gang”). The slurry is placed in a tank and a process of froth floatation is used to separate the copper minerals from the gangue. Now, as a result of the new glycine process under commercial test in 500t batches, the recovery percentage of the copper is much higher (up to 80%) than using the flotation method.
"The Northern Copper project specifically targets the processing of historical tailings generated by the processing of ROM materials. Zambia holds vast quantities of such historical tailings estimated to be in excess of 600 million tonnes at surface. These tailings are low-grade processed waste and contain a concentration of various copper-associated mineralogies which have been discarded by the various processes deployed at the time. Jubilee’s technical and development centres have been running an active programme to determine a commercially viable process solution to extract these complex copper associations. The latest laboratory scale work has shown encouraging results that exceeded Jubilee’s initial expectations in recoverable copper. The results achieved at laboratory scale have motivated the upscaling of the trials into both continuous process runs to confirm the results as well as the implementation of larger pilot scale trials on the processing of the historical tailings to validate both the engineering assumptions and commercial robustness at scale. This key step in the development cycle offers the potential to unlock the metal value contained in the vast low grade surface tailings assets. If successful, Jubilee will have the unique ability to target these tailings for the entire copper industry in Zambia. The Jubilee development team is driving to present the results from these trials before calendar year end 2023."
If you note the phrase "commercially viable" I think there was an element of "we know the old methodology will extract some copper so they acquired the dumps (which even at 0.3% copper contain tens of BILLIONS of dollars of metal) just to secure them as the interest in tailings processing was hotting up, taking a bet we can find a better method to be more efficient ..which has been done in partnership with the Czechs. They have been working on this for a couple of years... I can understand why they wouldn't have disclsed the relationship because its a competitive market, commercially sensitive, and first mover advantage is important.
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