Novamera Inc has announced that Hochschild Mining PLC has joined its Preferred Partner Program. The program gives priority status to its members, which entitles them to certain privileges, monetary discounts and advance insight into the development of Novamera’s surgical mining technology, Sustainable Mining by Drilling (SMD). As a first step, Novamera will perform a conceptual evaluation to determine if the use of SMD as a mining method is economically viable for certain narrow vein deposits located at Hochschild’s Inmaculada gold-silver mine in Peru.
Novamera says it is developing “keyhole surgery” for mining, an innovative clean technology and process that will be able to mine the numerous small-scale narrow vein mineral deposits found worldwide more safely, economically and sustainably using pilot hole diamond drilling and downhole directional sensors with machine learning algorithms to to identify vein/host rock interfaces. Then it will use industry proven drilling technology – a variant of conventional Pile Top RCD drills used successfully by the construction industry followed by a form of reverse circulation drilling to extract the ore.
“We are excited to work with the team at Hochschild, a leader in the mining industry. They are an innovative group willing to contemplate cutting edge solutions to mine mineral deposits in a safer and more sustainable manner. We appreciate their support during the development phase of our technology and look forward to being able to help them mine more of Inmaculada in the long-term using SMD,” stated Dustin Angelo, President and CEO of Novamera.
Ramon Barua, CFO of Hochschild stated: “At Hochschild, we are committed to a better world, which must include responsible and innovative mining solutions. The Novamera team is introducing a technology that fits our values and we can see the potential of its expected capabilities. The economic evaluation will give us important preliminary insights into how we can integrate SMD into our core asset, Inmaculada.”
Several juniors have also expressed interest in using the SMD technology including Korean Metals Exploration which has secured the mining rights to what it calls “forgotten brownfield assets” in the Uiseong and Haman mining districts, located in the southeast of the Korean peninsula.