Katanga Mining today announces that it has successfully completed the hot commissioning of the core of the first train of its new whole ore leach (WOL) processing facility at its subsidiary Kamoto Copper Company’s (KCC) copper and cobalt mine in Lualaba Province, DRC. The Luilu site where the WOL and electro-winning plants of KCC are located, successfully produced its first copper cathode on December 11th, 2017.

Copper and cobalt production at KCC has been suspended since September 2015 pending the construction of the WOL project. A progressive ramp-up and commissioning of the remainder of the first train is expected to follow over the ensuing three months, with the objective of achieving full capacity on the first train by the end of Q1 2018.

Johnny Blizzard, Chief Executive Officer of Katanga, commented: “We are very pleased to have met our anticipated budget and timetable for commissioning the first train of our new plant and are optimistic that the tangible improvements from using a whole ore leach processing circuit will be seen in the near future. We look forward to ramping up to full production capacity of the first train. The construction of the second train of the WOL plant is also on schedule and budget and hot commissioning is still expected to commence in H2 2018.”

Separately, the company announces today that its board of directors has approved capital expenditure budgets for the engineering and construction of an upgraded cobalt processing plant (the Cobalt Debottlenecking Project) and a sulphuric acid production plant at KCC.

The board approved $15.8 million in capital expenditures to engineer and construct a facility designed to reduce throughput bottlenecks in its existing cobalt processing circuit at KCC to align with the life of mine cobalt production plan of 30,000 t/y average annual cobalt production. The board also approved $49 million for cobalt product dryers as part of the cobalt production circuit. The hot commissioning of the projects are expected to commence in Q4 2018.

The board also approved $237 million in capital expenditure spread over 2018 and 2019 to construct a sulphuric acid and sulphur dioxide production plant at KCC. This will improve the reliability of the supply of these reagents to the WOL processing circuit.