Canadian Critical Minerals Inc has entered into an ore characterisation and sorting trial with MineSense Technologies Ltd for mineralised material currently stockpiled at its Bull River Mine (BRM) copper-gold-silver project near Cranbrook, BC.

MineSense’s ShovelSense® system utilises X-Ray fluorescence based sensing technology that is mounted directly to digging equipment such as front-end loaders and shovels to accurately characterise and grade with each bucket, and differentiate between low, medium and high grade mineralised material.

The objective of installing the ShovelSense system at the BRM project is to segregate higher-grade mineralised material from an existing 180,000 t surface stockpile that could be transported by truck and/or rail to an existing permitted milling facility in southern British Columbia for final processing.

Through pre-concentration of higher-grade mineralised material at BRM, the company may be able to generate sufficient revenues to offset transportation and processing costs resulting in economic advantage to the company. It adds: “The ShovelSense system is most effective characterising material that is heterogeneous in nature, in that it can be separated into ore and waste based on grade. The first phase of the trial is to assess the heterogeneity of the stockpiled material and the second step will be to build a calibration model using a sampling program.”

Ian Berzins, President and CEO commented” “We are excited to test the applicability of the ShovelSense system at our Bull River Mine project. The ShovelSense technology has already been integrated into grade control strategies at three Western Canadian copper mines including Copper Mountain Mining Corp, Teck’s Highland Valley Mine and Taseko’s Gibraltar Mine. If applicable, it could be integrated into a strategy to monetise some of the value of the current stockpile while the company is waiting to receive permission from the BC Ministry of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation and the BC Ministry of Environment for the restart of the past-producing Bull River Mine.”

The announcement was made on March 31 with the company planning to initiate the trial within 30 days.