Canada’s Ivanplats has discovered a significant platinum deposit near Mokopane, in South Africa, reports CEO Robert Friedland, adding that it was considering setting up smelting and refining operations in the country.
Speaking at the Investing in African Mining Indaba, in Cape Town, Friedland would not be drawn on the size of the Plat-reef project, but said the orebody was “very large” and had a “very high grade”.
The ultimate scale of the project was still unknown and the company planned to develop it in stages.
According to Friedland, the discovery of an underground flat reef at a depth of about 750 m completely changed the company’s perception of this project. The flat reef discovered had a mineral-isation profile that included disseminated nickel/copper sulphides and a variety of platinum-group metals. Friedland said, in comparison with aworking principle unbalanced motor vibro feeder typical Merensky reef, the Platreef project was 25 to 50 times thicker with higher-grade mineralisation.
“Typically, we are seeing a 25 m to 35 m true thickness in this flat-lying body. As a consequence it can be mined by room and pillar. It will be highly mechanised and the labour component per unit of the platinum produced will be very low compared with traditional underground mining.”
The intention was that all mining would be underground and “have no material deleterious impact on local populations”.
Ivanplats also intendmini grinding mill machineed to add value to the minerals downstream and was planning to include smelting and possible refining components in the project.
“It is our intention to build this project into the lowest-cost, longest-life new source of platinum in the world. It’s my personal belief it will be a negative cost producer of platinum-group metals and that the base metal endowment is strong enough to cover more than 100% of the cash operating costs to produce platinum, palladium, gold and rhodium,” said Friedland.
Ivanplats has reached an agreement with a Japanese consortium for the development ofmining application process in chile the Platreef project. The consortium is led by the Itochu Corporation and includes the Japanese Gas Corporation and the Japanese Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation, or Jogmec.
DRC Copper Project Africa’s Largest
Friedland said his company was also developing Africa’s largest copper project in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
“This is the project that we think will set the mark for the rebirth of the mining indus-try in the Congo,” he told delegates at the mining indaba.
Friedland said the high-grade orebody discovery at crusher mobile price in turkeyKamoa was 22 km long and up to 12 km wide, with the flat-lying body coming to within 30 m of the surface. The size could increase further as drilling was still taking place. Friedland noted that the geology of the discovery was similar to the Polish Kupferschiefer mine.
He said while some people believed that the African Copperbelt in the DRC had reached its exploration maturity, Ivanplats chose in 1996 to stake an area west of the copper-rich Kolwazi district that had not previously been fully investigated, which led to the Kamoa discovery.
With the application for a mining licence fmaterial handling equipment for sandiled with the DRC government in November, Friedland said the intention was to start mining the area in a series of openpits but that ultimately an underground mine would be developed and include a smelter.
He said he believed that the discovery was significant and that it was “a mine whose life will be measured in gener-ations as opposed to decades”.
In addition, Friedland confirmed that Ivanhoe had further increased its interests in the DRC as it had reached an agreement to acquire and redevelop the Kipushi mine, of which it would have a 68% interest.
“The in situ resources that remain at Kipushi are some 28-million tons of over 20% zinc and close to 2% copper, lead, silver and germanium. However the existing resources are not very important to us. The reason we became fascinated with this deposit is the ‘big zinc’ and the existing mining infrastructure.”
Friedland said $4-million to $5-mil-lion of capital investment would allow the company to mine the large untapped zinc discovery that had been identified at Kipushi.
While the size of the deposit was still being determined Friedland believed it was the world’s highest-grade zinc body.