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The upside of Idaho Copper’s advanced exploration project

Idaho Copper uses ore sorting, reducing costs. PEA and PFS updates for US market financing. Strong copper demand for the green economy.

In 2020 SRK completed a PEA for Idaho Copper (formerly known as CuMo). At the time the Engineering Consulting firm’s base case (at an 8% discount rate) valued the project at $356 million with an estimated payback period of 8 years. 

Idaho Copper is now gearing up for a revised PEA and Pre-feasibility Study that takes into account the Company’s potential to use ore-sorting which will make its project even more economically robust.  

Ore sorting is a common technique used in mining to sort the waste from the ore prior to processing. It generally results in lower capital and operating costs, often significantly improving project economics. 

Although Idaho Copper’s project is referred to as a copper porphyry, it is really a thin-vein system, referred to by miners as a stock-work system, and therefore the deposit lends itself to ore sorting. 

In a thin-vein system, the metals are dispersed in a regular fashion throughout the rock in a network of veins, which is clearly visible in the core samples. These veins are extremely thin and contain up to 90% of all the metals in the deposits. This makes it much easier for the mining team to separate the waste from the ore.

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Ore sorting enables selective decisions

With the ore sorting methodology, the mine will be able to use bucket-level sorting at the face. The system has sensors fixed in the bucket of the shovel or front-end loader that is used to load the haul trucks with material from the pit after a blast.  

These bucket sensors distinguish between waste and actual ore. The mining company can enter its own parameters which allow the mining team to make more selective decisions about the material they want to process and send to the concentrator, and which material will be dumped on the waste pile.

Sorting the blasted material at the face of the pit will improve ore processing and reduce operational costs significantly. It will also cut upfront capital expenditure by a large percentage as less material needs to be put through the mill and the concentrator as it allows the mine to separate the non-valuable waste.                 

Ultimately this allows the mine to reduce the size of the mill and the concentrator and as a result, spend much less capital. At the same time, the grade of the material is improved dramatically by a factor of about 9 to 10. 

At Idaho Copper, the material will be reduced to ore before it goes into the processing circuit and once it’s in the circuit the typical concentrate is produced at between 28% and 32% copper. 

The ore processing method is used in about 100 or more copper mines around the world although it is not as common in the US, where typical copper porphyries mostly dominate.  

Teck Resource’s Highland Valley project in British Columbia and Copper Mountain Mining, also in British Columbia, employ similar methodologies in their operations. Ore sorting is not a new concept, it has been around in some form for more than 30 years. However, modern technology has refined the entire process, and it is used successfully around the globe.

With a resource of close to four billion tonnes of ore, the company could mine Idaho for the next 60 years depending on the production rate used in the design.

A work in progress

Idaho Copper is currently working on updating the Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) to reduce the estimated capital costs. To upgrade or revise the PEA will cost in the region of USD750 000. The Company is currently in the process of raising that money. Their management team is confident that the PEA will be updated within the next year or so before they move into the next phase, which is compiling the Preliminary Feasibility Study (PFS). 

The PFS will tie up Idaho’s costs, up the level of current resources to a comfortable degree, and enable them to have measured, indicated, and inferred resources of a similar size. The PFS is expected to take another year and a half. After the PEA and PFS are done, the project will go into the Bankable Feasibility Study (BFS) stage. 

After consulting more than 100 investors in the mining space, Idaho Copper decided that the best way to finance this project going forward was in US public capital markets.  With the PFS in hand, options to finance the rest of the project will expand.

With a potential supply deficit on the horizon, the outlook for copper remains positive. Copper is critical in the green economy and is a major component of Electric Vehicles (EVs) and in sources of renewable energy such as wind turbines. As such, the only way to a decarbonized future is to fast-track the development of large-scale copper projects like Idaho Copper while ensuring robust economics.

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Leon Louw, PR | Re:public

This is a paid for advertorial by the company and written independently by Core Consultants PTY LTD. This is not considered to be investment advice.

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