RE: Buy the Rumour6 Feb 2025 21:12
Dai,
When it comes to copper the average commercial grade the miners are looking for over the past couple of decades is 0.6%+
0.6% Cu Ore and above its considered 'commercial' (especially if there are some Au, Ag & Zn credits) as from this it's possible from fairly easy flotation and heap leaching processing to produce a saleable copper concentrate between 30-40%.
This is then sold via contracts to the smelters.
If you also have Silver and Gold this will also be leached from the ore and form part of the saleable concentrate and the smelters will pay the miners an additional payment known as credits for the gold and silver content.
The concentrate is then smelted and refined into the finished product.
Now there are some recent example of 100+ Mt discoveries getting ramped when the grade was c. 0.3%.. whilst it might be possible to process this into a sellable concentrate, it's not really commercial as the additional ore sorting and add
extra processing steps required would likely result in a loss making operation.. especially if the copper price is suppressed.
Whereas 0.6% Cu and above is where you want to be for simple low cost processing into copper concentrate.
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What you have in those assays is commercially viable starting at 20m from surface.
It's very early days and Anglo American can finally let their drill crew get on with the job after the resolution over the licences which probably set matters back 2 years.
Well worth you checking out the terms of their JV
At present there isn't any other aim listed junior with a JV with a major with that size of drill spend commitment that is only just embarking on a phase 1 program.
What they now need to identify is the potential for SCALE.
If they keep hitting those types of grades all over their licence area they could be onto something big as their land sits in between two existing tier 1 discoveries and when Anglo initially ranked the whole district many decades ago they had the ARCM licence ranked no1. And that was proir to the other Tier 1 discoveries being made.
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