Lots of news in this edition from Cía. de Minas Buenaventura in Peru, which is making progress at its Trapiche copper project and Tantahuatay gold project. It is also expanding its silver, lead and zinc mine, Uchucchacua. Rio Tinto continues its relentless expansion in iron ore with approval of a $475 million project to increase the Iron Ore Company of Canada’s (IOC) annual production of iron ore concentrate. There is also an update on the company’s prefeasibility and feasibility studies at La Granja (copper) in Peru.ZincOx Resources plc and its partner Ansan Wikfs (Jabal Salab) have completed the financing of Jabal Salab’s zinc oxide mine in Yemen, details of which were announced in January 2008. This is the first large scale mining project to be developed in Yemen.
The Mongolian government has delivered the official mining license certificate to QGX for the development of an open-pit mining operation at its tungsten-molybdenum project at Undur Tsagaan, eastern Mongolia.
Among the expansions in this issue, BHP Billiton has approved the Douglas-Middelburg Optimisation (DMO) project, with an expected capital investment of $975 million. The DMO project scope includes using reserves across the Douglas and Middelburg Mine Services (MMS) collieries and development of new mining areas with low strip ratio coal.
Lihir Gold is to proceed with a major upgrade of its Lihir Island operations in Papua New Guinea, lifting gold production capacity to approximately 1 Moz/y from 2011.
Codelco has submitted an EIS to environmental regulator Conama for a $300 million project to expand the mining areas of the Radomiro Tomic mine in Chile’s region II.
Dundee Precious Metals and the Bulgarian Government have entered into an agreement-in-principle concerning the proposed expansion of the Chelopech copper-gold mine.
There is of course much, much more within the latest project news from around the world.
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