Copper mine

An unlisted Australian-registered mineral exploration and development company, whose primary focus is on investing in and operating gold and copper mines is looking to raise capital for their Namibian copper project.

NAMIBIA OPERATIONS

• Through their wholly-owned Namibian subsidiary they hold the copper deposit.
• The deposit contains a resource of almost 740,000 tonnes of contained copper metal.
• Plans a two-stage approach to bring project into production:
• Mini Mine - a modest-sized project based on near-surface oxide copper and mixed oxide-sulphide copper;
• Phase 2 - a larger project based on the deeper sulphide copper resource.
• The Company completed a Definitive Feasibility Study for an old Phase 1 operation in late 2013 and has been granted a Mining Licence.

MINI MINE

• The Namibian Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME) requires expeditious mine development now that the Mining Licence has been awarded. To comply with this requirement they are considering initial development of a small “mini-mining” operation, to bring the project into production quickly and at low cost.
• Plans have been approved to proceed to develop the “Mini-Mining” Project. The project is viewed as a “large pilot operation” and they intend to proceed to project development and commissioning without a new DFS.
• The proposal involves mining a modest tonnage (current planning envisages 10,000 tonnes per month) of oxide-only ore in a small open-cut mine to a depth of 16m. The ore grade is estimated at 0.93% Cu. The mine will be designed to have minimum impact on existing infrastructure, particularly avoiding an existing public road.
• Metallurgical tests show that the oxide ore leaches well at low acid consumption. The Mini Mining Project targets oxide copper within the top 16m of the Pan area of the deposit. Mining will be done by blasting, loading, hauling, crushing and placing onto the leach pad. Processing is planned by agglomeration (and/or screening), heap leach, solvent extraction (‘SX’) and electro-winning (‘EW’).
• The planned pit contains 431,000t at 0.93% Cu and 185,000t of waste. This Project Charter assumes copper recoveries of 89%, producing an average of 84.7t of copper cathode per month. The current schedule has a life of mine of 3.5 years. Additional ore exists deeper and in other parts of the deposit but these possible extensions have not been quantified in this Project Phase.
• Spent +/- AUS$ 30 million on the exploration phase;
• In order to develop the mini mine project they currently wish to raise between U$4.8 million and U$5.2 million, which approximately equates to +/- 20% of their initial investment.