Tag Archives: cobalt

Capital Drilling wins contract at Yepleu nickel-copper-cobalt-palladium project

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Capital Drilling has been awarded a contract with Canada-based Sama Resources at its Yepleu base and platinum group metal deposit in Côte d’Ivoire.

Drilling is anticipated to commence in November with the initial programme being 6,000 m of diamond core drilling, targeting semi-massive and massive polymetallic sulphide targets for nickel-copper-cobalt-palladium between 600 m and 900 m from surface.

The contract is Capital Drilling’s first in the country following its strategic expansion into West Africa where the company now has 31 rigs – a third of its fleet.

“This contract will initially utilise two diamond drill rigs, sourced from the group’s base in Yamoussoukro, which was established in H1 2018 as part of the group’s strategic growth focus into the West African market,” the company said.

Commenting on the contract, Jamie Boyton, Executive Chairman, said: “It is very pleasing to see our increased presence in the high-growth West African region continue to deliver results and we look forward to starting our first contract in Côte d’Ivoire.

“With the increased fleet and new infrastructure in place, we are well positioned to continue to secure additional work in the country in the future.”

Sama said the drilling programme will test high-conductivity targets defined by the Phase 1 Typhoon™ electromagnetic geophysical survey carried out earlier this year.

“It is at the Yepleu area that Sama made the first discovery of nickel-copper sulphide mineralisation at surface in West Africa with material grading up to 1.39% Ni and 2.26% Cu sulphide (tested using a hand held Niton XRF analyser),” the exploration company said.

The Yepleu area is 18 km southwest of Sama’s Samapleu nickel-copper deposit.

Vale Canada set for Sudbury emissions cut with Clean AER operation

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Vale’s Sudbury, Canada, operations are set for an 85% reduction in sulphur dioxide emissions after the Brazil-based company completed its C$1 billion ($792 million) Clean AER (Atmospheric Emission Reduction) project.

The project is the largest single environmental investment in Sudbury’s history and, on top of the sulphur dioxide emission cut, will also see metal particulate emissions come down 40%, according to Vale.

Work began on the project in 2012 and included the construction of two new converters, a wet gas cleaning plant, a new secondary baghouse and fan building and reconstruction of the smelter converter flues. Due to close coordination between the project and operations, this construction took place safely while the Copper Cliff smelter continued to operate.

Ricus Grimbeek, Chief Operating Officer of Vale’s North Atlantic Base Metals Operations and Asian Refineries, said: “The completion of our Clean AER project is a historic milestone that demonstrates how far we have come as a company in reducing our environmental footprint.”

Emissions are set to come down so significantly with the project that Vale’s Sudbury operations will no longer require its iconic “Superstack”, according to Dave Stefanuto, Vale’s Vice President of North Atlantic Projects.

The Superstack is the tallest chimney in Canada and the Western hemisphere, measuring in at 380 m. It entered full operation in 1972.

Two new 137 m stacks are currently being constructed in the Copper Cliff smelter, which will require far less energy to operate than the Superstack and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the smelter by some 40%, Vale said. Following construction of the concrete shells, steel liners will be installed in the new stacks in 2019.

In 2020, the Superstack’s steel liner will be removed and the Superstack will be taken out of service and placed on care and maintenance. It is expected that removal of the concrete shell will begin thereafter and continue over several years.

Vale’s operations in Sudbury are home to one of the largest integrated mining complexes in the world with five mines, a mill, a smelter and a nickel refinery.

Former Talvivaara nickel mine on the rebound under Terrafame

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The former Talvivaara nickel mine in central Finland is back in the black and looking to new developments four years after the previous owner went bankrupt.

Operating under Terrafame, majority owned by the Finnish government through the Finnish Minerals Group, the mine is finally making good on its early promise.

On a site visit to the mine this week, part of the Finland Mine Safari programme for analysts and investors, CEO Joni Lukkaroinen talked about getting back to planned capacity of 35,000 t/y of nickel, 75,000 t/y of zinc, 1,400 t/y of cobalt and 5,000 t/y of copper.

The company hasn’t set out to change any major part of the process flowsheet to do this – it is still using a two-stage bioheapleaching process to produce a nickel-rich pregnant leach solution that is precipitated as sulphides in the plant – but it has refined the operations Talvivaara started up almost a decade ago.

On top of this, the company is looking to bolt on a hydrogen sulphide line that could see the company produce 170,000 t/y of nickel sulphate and 7,400 t/y of cobalt sulphate for the emerging electric vehicle battery market, in addition to 115,000 t/y of ammonium sulphate for fertilisers.

And, it also has a near-completed uranium plant that could potentially produce yellowcake in the medium term should it receive an environmental permit from the relevant authorities.

Talvivaara may be best known for the gypsum pond leak that occurred in late 2012 and saw nickel, uranium and other toxic metals go into the nearby environment, but even before this event led Talvivaara Sotkamo to eventual bankruptcy, it was struggling to achieve the production numbers it had previously forecast as the bioleaching process that justified mining the low-grade ore got the better of it.

Terrafame, which was formed in 2015 specifically to turn the operation around, has already surpassed the former owners’ production record and, earlier this year, started generating postive earnings.

EBITDA excluding work in progress (ore within the leaching pads) came in at a slim €1.6 million ($1.85 million) in the March quarter and more than doubled to €3.3 million in the most recent June quarter.

This is some change from the -€33.3 million and -€24.2 million the company posted in the same periods a year earlier.

Improved year-on-year metal prices have helped this recovery, but the company has also gone from producing 9,791 t and 4,787 t of zinc and nickel concentrate, respectively, in the March quarter of 2017, to a record 15,008 t of zinc and 6,421 t of nickel in the same quarter of 2018.

While these numbers are still some way off full capacity, they are significantly more than the circa-14,000 t per quarter Talvivaara produced at its peak.

There was at least one obvious change to the process Talvivaara set up when IM visited – Terrafame is now using Wirtgen surface miners to improve the material feed that is stacked and reclaimed from the leach pads and moved onto the metals plant – but the improvement in performance has been achieved through several tweaks, according to Lukkaroinen.

He told IM that the company has, among other things, put much more emphasis on improving the agglomeration of the ore, ensured the material on the leachpad is effectively aerated during both leaching stages and monitored the temperature of the exothermic process much more closely. The latter, in particular, is very important in judging success of the leaching.

This is really now starting to pay dividends during the 50 months, combined, the ore sits on the primary and secondary leach pads.

It has also given the company confidence to invest in a hydrogen sulphide plant that could see the company increase its exposure to the EV battery market.

As it stands, the company already sells around 50% of its nickel concentrate to this market, but the production of nickel and cobalt sulphates is likely to see the company retain more value for its product and provide further sales opportunities.

The fully-financed sulphide plant build will take some two years to construct, with start up, subject to regulatory approvals, planned for the second half of 2020. The company is just months away from awarding the major contracts for the construction.

The process, already proven on a commercial scale, will see nickel-cobalt sulphide from the existing production plant processed in an autoclave, before nickel cobalt and impurities are extracted. It will finally move on to a crystallisation phase where two separate sulphate products are produced.

The 170,000 t/y nickel capacity would make the company one of the biggest sulphate producers in the world.

Geological Survey of Finland talks up “unique” exploration database

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Finland may have only 10 metal mines to its name, but there are plenty more on the horizon, according to Pekka Nurmi, Director of Science and Innovation for the Geological Survey of Finland (GTK).

Speaking on the first day of the inaugural Finland Mine Safari tour for analysts and investors in Helsinki on Monday, Nurmi said there had been some €3 billion ($3.5 billion) of investments in mine development in the last 10 years and there was another €3-5 billion due between 2016 and 2025.

Some of these investments will come at existing mines looking to expand like Agnico Eagle Mines’ Kittila gold mine, Outokumpu’s Kemi chromium asset and Boliden’s Kevitsa nickel-copper operation, but Nurmi sees plenty of new discoveries moving into the development phase too.

He reserved particular praise for Anglo American’s Sakatti copper-nickel-platinum group elements project, some 150 km north of the Arctic Circle, which hosts indicated and inferred resources of 44.4 Mt at 1.9% Cu, 0.96% Ni, 0.04% Co, 0.64 g/t Pt, 0.49 g/t Pd and 0.33 g/t Au.

“It appears to be the best discovery in Finland,” he told analysts, investors and journalists, explaining it was already around one-and-a-half-times the size of the historic Outokumpu copper mine. Outokumpu operated from 1913-1989, producing some 28.5 Mt of ore grading 3.8% Cu during that time.

In addition to development capital, Nurmi said some €60 million had been spent on exploration in Finland in 2017, up from €40 million in 2016.

Explorers have leveraged off the GTK’s exploration database, which includes a complete airborne survey package for the whole country at 200 m line spacing.

“It’s a unique data set,” Nurmi said.

And, surprisingly for a well-known exploration destination, many of the country’s new discoveries continue to come close to surface.

Nurmi said the country has some 4 m of cover on average, with parts of southern Finland already having exposed mineralisation.

The country has traditionally been a hotbed for gold, PGM and base metal exploration, but there are a number of interesting battery mineral prospects being lined up, including lithium, cobalt and graphite.

This include’s Keliber Oy’s lithium project (pictured), Savannah Resources’ Somero and Eräjärvi lithium assets, FinnCobalt’s Hautalampi cobalt-nickel-copper project in the historic town of Outokumpu and Beowulf Mining’s Pitkäjärvi and Aitolampi graphite properties, among others.

ERG’s Metalkol DRC copper-cobalt project to make use of Zambia power

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Eurasian Resources Group’s (ERG) cobalt and copper developer Metalkol SA has secured electricity supply for its operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for up to 10 years after signing a pact that will see some power transported from Zambia.

The Copperbelt Energy Corp (CEC), a Zambian incorporated power transmission, generation and distribution company that is a major developer of energy infrastructure in Africa, will supply up to 78 MW per year of power to the operation as part of an agreement signed between ERG, Société National d’Electricité (SNEL), the national electricity company of the DRC, and Rawbank, a commercial bank in the DRC.

The agreement to supply electricity is comprised of two phases: the first will run until the June quarter of 2019 with a total of 62 MW delivered. Following this, the power supply will ramp up to 78 MW per year during the second phase and for the remainder of the contract.

Metalkol’s RTR project, located near Kolwezi, involves the use of a low-cost hydro-metallurgical facility to reprocess the old tailings dumped into the environment from mining activities in the 1950s. It is expected to produce 77,000 tonnes per year of copper and 14,000 t/y of cobalt in the first stage, with stage two increasing this to 105,000 t/y and 20,000 t/y of copper and cobalt, respectively.

Benedikt Sobotka, CEO of ERG, said: “This is an important milestone in the progress of the Metalkol project, a unique development for the global battery industry. It is an example of sustainable and environmentally conscious treatment of the local environment, and of our wider strategic ambitions in Africa.”

Miners in southern DRC have had worries about sustainable power supply in the past few years, with these concerns often holding back expansion plans.

Owen Silavwe, Managing Director of CEC, said: “Supplying base-load power requirements to mining houses is CEC’s principal business. With many years’ experience successfully supplying reliable power for mining operations in both Zambia and the DRC, this agreement demonstrates CEC’s commitment and agility to meet the specific requirements of customers in the DRC market. It also reaffirms CEC’s partnership with SNEL and the mining community in the DRC.”

CEC has invested in transmission networks in Zambia, including the only interconnection of DRC’s SNEL network to the regional interconnected network.

Jean-Bosco Kayombo Kayan, SNEL Director General, said: “The trilateral agreement signed by Metalkol, CEC and SNEL demonstrates SNEL’s willingness to serve its customers by offering its expertise in the Southern African energy market.”