RE: Was 10,000 tonnes even technically possible in 2022 & 2023?21 Oct 2025 22:53
You seem to be confusing guidance with target. They were saying that the long term target was 10,000 tonnes when the 3 phase expansion was completed. Was that ever completed? Who knows. Thats when they started running into power and water problems in Zambia and the plan started to evolve into something else. I don't recall them issuing guidance for 10,000 tonnes, maybe I'm wrong but I can't be bothered to search the RNS's to prove it.
The capacity of the Roan circuits isn't a fixed number, it depends on the type of material that you are processing. They started processing tailings, mainly producing sulphide concentrates. With tailings you can push more material through the plant. I believe the milling and flotation circuit can process something like 70,000 tpm of tailings. The amount of copper you get out obviously depends on the throughput but also on the copper grade of the tailings. Absolutely they could produce 10,000 tonnes / year from tailings if the grade is high enough. What grade were they basing the calculations on? I don't know.
At some point it was decided to change tack, they announced in an RNS that there had been a breakthrough in processing transitional mixed oxide / sulphide ores and that's what they were going after. The problem is that you can't push the same tonnage of rock through the plant as you can tailings, hence why the plant capacity was stated at 45,000 tpm when processing the RoM rather than the much higher capacity with tailings.
In reality that 45,000 tpm is currently only 30,000 tpm, so they are pushing much less material through the plant than expected. They are going to have to find a way to increase the throughput to increase the copper tonnes produced.
So what was the point in switching from tailings to RoM in the first place? Most of what they produced initially from tailings was sulphide concentrates which sell for a much lower price. What they are producing from the transitional RoM is mainly oxides (>85% according to the RNS) which go to Sable to make cathode, selling for full LME price.
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