Almonty Industries Inc says that plans are now well advanced to reopen the Los Santos former tungsten producing mine in Spain, which has been in planned care and maintenance since 2020.
Since that time, Almonty has been undertaking studies into the re-commencement of production from Los Santos via the retreating of tailings, utilising the company’s flotation technology developed for the Sangdong Tungsten Mine in South Korea.
Almonty estimates that re-opening will be effective from Q3 2023 depending on the delivery times of some flotation plant items adding that under normal conditions these items are readily available. The company intends to retreat the tails to capture the more than 800,000 tons of W03 contained within sands and torta. The overall average grade of the tails is 0.14% and was published in its latest JORC report.
It is expected that earnings from reopening of the Los Santos Mine will be similar to the earnings at the existing Panasqueira producing mine in Portugal. Capital expenditure is expected to be <$1.3 million.
Almonty’s Chairman, President and CEO Lewis Black commented: “We have spent a number of years refining our process for the Sangdong Tungsten Mine with the use of our pilot plant. What became apparent was the technology that we had developed that sat alongside the traditional flotation techniques could be adapted to our other sites, especially in dealing with finer material which is normally the inhibitor to treating tails commercially.”
He adds: “We have now successfully established that our Sangdong process can commercially treat the Los Santos tails, and with a minimal amount of adjustment to the already existing flotation circuit at Los Santos, we will now begin to plan for bringing the Los Santos Mine back into production. This re-opening will not distract us from the build in South Korea, as all key members of Los Santos are still in place. We expect this plan, once enacted, to generate similar earnings to our existing Panasqueira production mine in Portugal and therefore will have a material effect to our current revenue and earnings as we continue to construct Sangdong.”
